Sun’s board has achieved its goal of whoring the company. The odd thing about it is that rather than selling to a hardware business such as IBM or HP or Dell or even Cisco, out of the blue came Oracle to seal the deal. So, if you haven’t yet heard the news: “Sun and Oracle today announced a definitive agreement for Oracle to acquire Sun for $9.50 per share in cash. The Sun Board of Directors has unanimously approved the transaction. It is anticipated to close this summer.”
There is no way for me to take this positively. Many of you, loyal readers, know that I tend to err on the side of idealism; frequently to my peril. Rather than seeing an acquisition as a way to save Sun, I rather see it as the final failure of Sun’s board of directors and the leadership of Jonathan Schwartz.
Jonathan is himself idealistic, which has always drawn me to his banner. I’ve frequently taken exception to criticism against him… because I believe in what he wanted to do. However, I can no longer avoid the inevitable conclusion that his inability to execute has killed my beloved company.
Frankly, I see this as complete cowardice. Sun needed to make radical changes to its business.. but rather than do so they opted to ride it out and wait for someone else to make the tough choices. While this may be the best choice for shareholders, its tough for those close to the business to take. In years time people will be speaking about Sun the same way we currently talk about DEC. Will the Sun brand die? Maybe not. Will Sun’s products be more prominent than ever? Quite possibly…. but it won’t be the same company.
So is this the end? No, I don’t think so… quite the opposite, I see it as a new beginning. I’m simply angry that Oracle is going to do the work that the Sun Board of Directors failed to do; damn the shareholders (of which I am one).
One of the inevitable consequences of this sort of deal is that sales are going to grind to a halt for a season. For instance, I’m super excited about the new Intel X5500 powered Sun Fire X4275… 12 3.5″ drives, Sun SSD, ILOM, Intel Networking… its a killer!
…. but what will become of the Sun X86 line? Do I want to buy a bunch of boxes that may not have a future? I’m not putting my money on that bet.
As for Oracle… this is what scares me. To this very day, Oracle 11g is not available for Solaris/X64! Oracle has completely ignored Solaris/X64 for some time now. Combined with Oracle’s promise to put Sun’s margins in order, suggests a new life for SPARC. While I think the better future is to push Oracle 11g RAC on Sun X64 systems that may not be in the cards.
What will happen? There is a lot of speculating I can do, but I’m going to wait for details. It’s like being a 20 year old kid living away from home and the parents have shown up unexpected, and you know you’re in deep shit but not sure what’ll happen next. Parties over, thats for damned sure.
I’m really interested in seeing what is going to happen with mysql.
Sad day. To soon to say what will happen for sure but for those of us with so much vested interest in Sun’s products this is not easy to take.
As a long term Sun customer/fan, I have just finished transitioning hundreds of systems from old slow SPARC to Sun’s x86/x64 gear. I will be beyond pissed if Oracle kills Solaris x86. Sun did that once in the late nineties and if they do it again, heck with them, it’s on to linuxland. Somewhere I don’t want to go, knowing how good Solaris is,but SPARC is so far behind the price/performance curve there is no way we’d go back to it.
I don’t understand why they don’t come out on the announcement of the merger and state exactly what their intentions are for acquired products. They should know that any lack of information causes skepticism in acquired products, and frightens current clients away.
I was really excited about some things with Opensolaris and ZFS and Glassfish, but since the rumors of a shameless sale of Sun, I’ve looked back to Ubuntu for my production work. I’d like to see all Sun’s products survive, but I don’t want to invest time and money in something I can’t be reasonably sure will still exist in a few months.
Selling off its hardware division, allowing greater contributions from the community, modernizing Opensolaris to drop some legacy habits, all things that could have been done to help Sun survive.
This shows a lack of consideration for business users, as well as the enthusiastic open source community that, if allowed to integrate better, could be a driving force of Sun products.
Who know what they will really do but it sounds like they want to make some bloatware appliances.
http://www.oracle.com/sun/sun-faq.pdf
“It’s like being a 20 year old kid living away from home and the parents have shown up unexpected, and you know you’re in deep shit but not sure what’ll happen next. Parties over, thats for damned sure.”
i like the way you express things =)
i also like the deal
unfortunately mcnealy & swhartz were hell bent on selling out so changing hands was unavoidable.
thankfully, oracle is keen on keeping solaris going and everybody knows x86_64 is where it is at (so I highly doubt oracle will ignore solarisx86) and they still have the balls to go forward with sparc – nice.
Oracle had decided on Solaris/x64 as the reference platform their devs work on, then changed their minds when Sun bought MySQL. They’ll just go back.
The noise about Sparc in the press release is just that. What they mean is “You’d be even worse off if Sun had filed for bankruptcy. We will milk Sparc hardware for every nickel of profit we can, just as we do with the Oracle RDBMS. Now squeal like a pig”. Rock may come out since all the R&D is done and production is outsourced anyway, but all R&D on Sparc will cease or be transferred to Fujitsu.
Solaris is the crown jewel of un and Oracle is only too happy to have an OS it can control as opposed to being dependent on Microsoft or Red Hat.
As for MySQL, well, words fail to describe how thoroughly screwed MySQL users are. Better learn PostgreSQL pronto. Drizzle isn’t going to happen, most of the coders were on the Sun payroll and will be too busy finding jobs ibn the worst recession since 1929.
IBM thought it was being clever by playing hardball with Sun, but they bet pretty much everything on Java and Oracle now has them in a vise.
I think the winner here is Solaris.
I’m actually worried about Opensolaris. Lots of comments about Solaris, but I didn’t see OPENSolaris mentioned even once. Openstorage yes, but not Opensolaris itself.
What? Failure to execute? Give me a break. They were dealt an unimaginable downturn with the financial crisis, and with revenue down more than a BILLION dollars in the first two quarters of the year, I give MLP credit for selling at a huge premium. He did the right thing by shareholders.
I don’t know if anyone on earth could’ve salvaged a decline of that magnitude.
I know most people don’t exactly have strong opinion of Oracle. That being said, of all the potential buyers, I think Sun has the best chance of keeping most of its product lines in tact going the Oracle route. Seems like everyone’ initial knee jerk reaction is around MySQL which to be honest I barely remember its even a sun product. Lets be honest if IBM would have purchased Sun, they would have completely dismantled the company. They probably would have pulled all the interesting code out of solaris and left it to bleed to death (at the very least most development would have stopped, they are already developing two operating systems why a 3rd). I’m sure the hardware business would have slowly died out as well. The overlap between the two companies would have let to far greater changes.
Oracle now steps in with virtually zero overlap in their product lines. Even the overlap between the DB is minimal (in terms of target audience). Solaris was already the preferred platform for Oracle (Larry was even quoted saying that Solaris was the best Unix on the market) so I think they will continue to develop it. I have a feeling some of the hardware and software will be cut. But to be honest this should have been done along time ago
McNealy should have acted after the crash in 2001 but he did not. IBM did. Oracle will get rid of the boxes after awhile. For the talk about MySQL, Sun could not make money of it. Java too. Now maybe Oracle will be able to make some money so hopefully King Larry will keep some folks around.
R.I.P The Purple SUN
If this means we finally get a port of 11g to solaris x86, I’ll be happy.
Well put Ben. I got to see a ROCK based system today. 128 threads running at 1.5GHz each. It was really snappy. All wrapped up in a 2U. I wonder if Oracle will continue the tradition of R&D.
Once Sun’s weakness became so apparent with the public sell-out to IBM, functioning on its own became impossible. Dell, HP, and IBM would’ve torn them apart. Hopefully, some independence will be maintained and we can see Sun operate with some better footing and less uncertainty here on out.
It’s business. You win or you lose.
Well I think IBM would have been a worse fate than Oracle. Clearly IBM has redundant HW lines that would killed off the Sun versions… like how Brocade quietly killed the McData products a year or two after their acquisition. (S’ok, I prefer Brocade anyway).
I think Oracle actually likes x86/x64 better than SPARC now (in 2009) so I think you will see that continue. The SPARC cpus, time will tell if they survive the long run. Oracle gobbles up so many software companies, it’s hard to imagine what will survive of Sun’s software stack in a recognizable form. However one thing for sure, Oracle has no shame in charging outrageous licensing fees. I fear that some things that were “free from Sun” because they were subsided by the hardware… may become charge/license items going forward. But that is only my speculation.
Ben,
i’m an italian Sun reseller and a fan of Solaris. I don’t think so bad… probably Sun will change and Oracle management will be different than Sun but i think Solaris x64/SPARC will be pushed a lot.
Oracle needs Sun, She doesn’t want to loose SPARC customers (a lot of big enterprise customers to IBM with DB2), and needs an alternative to “enterprise” Linux.
We will loose the ideological Sun and we will get a more realistic Sun in the future… i don’t know if we will like this but there is no alternatives…
Yep,
Sun is pretty screwed now ! Man, that company has had some dumb CEO’s !
Oh well, bye bye OpenSolaris long live AuroraUX !
Best Regards,
The unsure future of Sun’s products (especially the open source ones) is quite troubling – especially MySQL, a rather recent acquisition and not exactly the best friend of Oracle. But this *is* truly a sad day – I’m a senior in college, and fell in love with Sun when I worked as a campus ambassador two years ago. I now have scary visions of myself in 20 years, looking much like that one guy down the hall (we all know him) who still raves about his beloved DEC hardware…
I am not looking forward to this merge at all. Licensing costs will go up, support costs will go up, crappy response times and support answers will come from Oracle (you need to upgrade). MySQL will be buried just like Sleepycat/BerkelyDB because Oracle’s major revenue generator is naturally their database. Will they get rid of the hardware side? You bet, they have no need for hardware guys, Oracle is a software company.
The question here is which side will Oracle choose: Unbreakable Linux or Solaris/x86?
Looks like my onward push to Linux, JBoss and Postgresql will continue.
I’ve refrained from commenting on your blog, but there are things you’ve written now that are incorrect.
Oracle has released 10.2.0.4 for BOTH 32- and 64-bit Solaris on the i86pc platform; in fact, I’ve just completed putting the finishing touches on the packages yesterday!
And 10.2.0.4 is a major release, with two and a half years in the making, and almost 3,000 fixes.
Further, you did not get the book? Get the book!
“Softwar: an intimate portrait of Larry Ellison and Oracle”
by Matthew Symonds
Larry is a genious; not only is he a genious, he’s been a strong proponent of cheap i86pc boxes running Oracle RAC. Do the math buddy.
And “genious” -> genius.
UX-admin: I’m aware of 10gR2 for Solaris/X86… I’ve helped a number of customers at Joyent get it up and running. So why haven’t they released Oracle11g? Oracle Express was released for Linux and Windows but not Solaris/X86…. you can only therefore expect that Oracle wants to keep their Sun customers from deploying on cheaper X86 systems.
Corporate cultures change not only by looking at their leaders. Keep the passion from Sun cause in the end of the day even the biggest dogs come where the best parties are. How about Oracle wanting to incorporate – in time – what’s been so amazing about Sun? Are you going to be part of this development and in all where this can lead – or do you remain just choosy about some technology choices? Opensolaris will live and IS about to be something great.
If I had to guess, I would say that Oracle 11g hasn’t been released for i86pc Solaris because there is not enough interest from the customer base.
Let’s face it: apart from us Solaris on i86pc enthusiasts, a lot of companies are running Linux, and when they aren’t running Linux, they’re running Solaris on sparc; the demand just isn’t there, mostly because everyone resists the idea of running Solaris on the i86pc; I myself have been recently shocked by a statement from a former Sun engineer:
“yeah I know it works, and it’s nice to play on, but it’s not as fast as sparc.”
All I saw was Red after that statement.
I worked for one of the biggest Oracle customers, and you would not believe what kind of pressure we had to go through to get Oracle 11g even on the sparc platform; we were participating in the Oracle 11g beta testing.
It took us six months of sustained pressure to get Oracle to give us 11g on sparc… all they wanted to do was push us on Linux, which we rejected every time.
So if I am to draw conclusions from that, I would write that back then, Oracle wanted to push their customers on Linux.
Times have changed though; Larry now owns a free open source UNIX, a real UNIX, not a shoddy copy.
And Larry being the proponent of killing mainframe with RAC on cheap i86pc servers, I think good things are in store for Solaris on i86pc.
Get the book.
And while I’m at it, the #2 database, Teradata, only has developer editions for Windows and Linux; no UNIX of any kind is available.
I even went so far as to contact them in order to get evaluation copies for Solaris and HP-UX.
No answer, not a peep. So it’s not strange that Oracle only has two of the most popular platforms for Oracle XE.
Is that good or right? No. I too would like to finally have both i386 and amd64 versions of at least 11gR1 for Solaris, but they are not available.
But I think that they will be, in due course. I also think, knowing Larry like I do, that Oracle buying Sun is the best thing that could have happened considering the situation of the ailing company.
Chances are good that Larry will clean up the parasites. And although he’s not good at direct confrontations, he’s had a lot of practice with firing people, which is why Oracle is still in business.
King Larry also invests/owns Pillar Data so it is possible he might keep the hardware stuff going for awhile…..
I hope Solaris/OpenSolaris dies now and Oracle makes ZFS into Linux.
Solaris will live on. Didn’t Oracle specifically state that Java and Solaris were “keepers”? I assume this means that they are both considered strategic acquisitions.
ZFS won’t be going anywhere. Larry and company are too smart to give away a competitive edge to “the community” (ie, IBM and other competitors!), and there is the whole lawsuit with NetApp. Ditto with DTrace.
As for the rest….I can see OpenOffice sticking around, if only because Larry hates Microsoft so badly. But I can’t really think of much else, software-wise, that Oracle would keep. Maybe VirtualBox, if only to have something to compete with EMC/VMware. Many of these things needed to be cut long ago.
But, the only way we’ll know is to wait and find out…
Do I want to buy a bunch of boxes that may not have a future? I’m not putting my money on that bet.
Why not? Buying an x86 server isn’t like buying a car, where you need parts and service for 20 years. Unless you think they’re going to go under within the next five years, those boxes will be long obsolete before anything happens.
“I don’t understand why they don’t come out on the announcement of the merger and state exactly what their intentions are for acquired products.”
Because legally, they’re not allowed to make any such statements, until the deal closes.
many people use the phase in their comments above “cheap i86pc boxes running Oracle RAC”.
The “i86pc box” part of that sentence is cheap, the “Oracle RAC” part of the sentence is NOT.
Folks, do you actually BUY software for your company? The hardware is the SMALLEST component of the total cost. If I buy sparc if if I buy x86, that part really doesn’t matter. Things like Oracle RAC, I encourage you to get a quote for yourselves. I’m a “saavy shopper” so I would love to deploy on MySQL, but it ain’t happening. I’ve had projects torpedo’ed just because of the outrageous software licensing fees. I really feel like I will lose in the long run with less choices in the future with their being a SUN.
I meant “without there being a SUN.”
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