Australian partners have praised Oracle’s decision to purchase Sun Microsystems for $US7.4 billion.
Red Rock Consulting, CEO, Jonathan Rubinsztein, said it was the most interesting acquisition Oracle has made so far and had the potential to change the enterprise market.
“It’s different enough to be a market changing acquisition which is good,” he said. “Oracle has made part of their business working out how they’re going to acquire, and they’ve acquired well.”
He claimed it would be beneficial for both vendors’ customers.
“There’s a lot in Sun, the Java technology, hardware and the open source offering,” he said. “There’s an opportunity for Oracle to influence the Java technology stack, which is quite exciting.”
However, Gartner servers and storage vice-president, Phil Sargeant, said there were positive and negative aspects to the acquisition.
“We don’t know what Oracle will do with all the bits and pieces. Even through there is a lot of synergy, there’s also a lot of overlap,” he said. "Users will feel a bit more comfortable with Oracle rather than IBM."
According to Sargeant, there was a lot of overlap with respect to database, firmware and some other products.
“There are some jewels in the crown, with Java and Solaris being seen as very important to them too,” he said. “There’s going to be a couple of interesting things happening with the Oracle database and MySQL, which has been a bit of thorn in their side, but, nevertheless, Oracle has supported other open source projects.
“In the meantime it will be business as usual. Over time they will work out what survives and what doesn’t.”
Frontline Systems managing director, Steve Murphy, was enthusiastic about the deal and said it was a good move for the market. He hoped Oracle would let Sun operate in its own right, like EMC with VMware.
“It gives us a strong application partner, a great end-to-end solution and it maintains customer choice,” Murphy said. “It takes a lot of the fear away for Sun customers that they’re going to go belly-up.”
Concern still lingers about how the two organisations were going to integrate. Partners agreed Oracle was a better fit for Sun than IBM.
Express Data managing director, Ross Cochrane, said the process of merging large organisations was complex and it would be interesting to see how it came together and what their strategies were.
“It is good for the speculation to go away around what is going to happen with Sun, Oracle is very strong financially and technology wise, adding Sun into the mix, will no doubt make it a very strong technology player in the market,” Cochrane said. “I think it is good news for the channel, particularly around the cloud computing and an Oracle/Sun merged entity would look to channel to take the offering into the market.”
He said a Sun/Oracle combination would give them the ability to compete against organisations that had been building end-to-end capabilities with hardware and software, such as IBM and HP.
