Oracle + Sun roundup

First is the news that the merger may be running afoul of the European regulators. It would be a (terminal) disaster for Sun if it did. Their revenues continue to crater quarter after quarter. Customers do not like uncertainty. The rationale for this is reduction in competition in the DB market. Because of MySQL. Which, if you read other technical blogs and news sources for MySQL, Sun seems to have managed to piss off their community of users and contributers. Which has resulted in a number of forks. That is, Sun owns something called MySQL, but MySQL is not on the trajectory it once was, due to forking over bad decisions and disagreements with … Sun.

Second, as John West pointed out yesterday, Oracle realizes that they have to say something … anything at this point … about the hardware business, so that its value doesn’t go to zero before the acquisition closes. If it does go to zero before it closes, the Oracle shareholders will expect to pay much less for Sun, so it would be hard for Oracle management to remain committed to the price it offered. The issue is that IBM (and HP) have been massacring Sun over the uncertainty. They are acquiring their customers by old fashioned sales and marketing. You don’t need to generate FUD, the whole acquisition is self-FUDding. But John points out what we (and many others) have been worrying about. The day job has customers who depend critically upon technology Sun owns in the HPC space, such as GridEngine, Lustre, etc. What precisely is going to happen to these technologies, and more importantly, to HPC at Oracle after the acquisition?

Lots of people aren’t. Since we haven’t heard directions from Oracle on this, one has to assume it isn’t a priority. Which itself, speaks volumes. John also points out (about HP)

Hmmm… the storage cluster we have won is being attached to a nice shiny new HP system at the customer site. HP has had quite a number of wins, just possibly not making as much hay per win as some others. And yes, we will talk about this storage cluster soon. You will see some benchmarks in this space.