I was reading Louis Gray's Facebook feed and I happened to see a post from scalability.org. But before I look at that, let's start with a source post from the Inquirer:
IT IS LOOKING increasingly likely that Oracle is going to sell Sun's hardware business to HP.
While Oracle's Larry Ellison has made it no secret that he only wants Sun for its software, he has denied planning to sell off the outfit's hardware business.
However a CNN deep throat apparently has revealed that talks between Oracle and HP are going ahead.
More here. But scalability.org doesn't buy it:
HP could take (and is taking) Sun’s business for effectively free. Why would they pay for something they can get for free?
Something just doesn’t ring true about this, and I’d chalk this rumor up to more wishful thinking on the part of some of the reporters sources.
Never mind the regulatory hurdles HP would have to go through as one of the top hardware vendors. It all goes back to the question of, is it cheaper to take this business the way they are doing it now, or to pay for it to get it all in one fell swoop?
I have other reasons for thinking that Ellison may end up keeping Sun's hardware business. Specifically, three:
- The almighty stack. If you attend any Oracle-sponsored presentation, you know that they are always hammering about the depth of their stack. And you also know that if you've attended Oracle presentations over several years, they've had to revise those presentations a lot as Oracle acquires more businesses and the stack gets bigger.
- Oracle's already in the hardware business. Their latest advance to the stack was the highly-trumpeted joint announcement with HP regarding the Exadata Programmable Storage Server and the HP Oracle Database Machine. The Sun hardware acquisition provides Oracle with the perfect opportunity to solidify this portion of the stack - why blow it?
- Oracle's used to co-opetition. Some people might argue that Oracle wouldn't keep Sun because they wouldn't want to alienate their hardware partners. But you have to remember that Oracle has been "alienating" their software partners for years. While Oracle would obviously prefer that you buy their database, application server, etc., they have committed that they will play well with software products from other vendors. So why not hardware?
The obvious challenge is that Oracle has never been in the hardware business before. But Oracle hasn't been in a lot of businesses before, and they ended up entering them. In my
[WE INTERRUPT THIS BLOG POST FOR AN IMPORTANT DISCLOSURE. ORACLE HAS, IN THE PAST, ENTERTAINED THIS BLOGGER WITH FOOD AND DRINK. (AND BADGEWARE.) GOOGLE HAS NOT. THIS POTENTIAL BLOGGER BIAS SHOULD BE TAKEN INTO ACCOUNT WHEN READING THE NEXT SENTENCE.]
As I was saying, in my (possibly biased) view, Oracle is a lot better at integrating and strengthening their acquired businesses than, say, Google. If any software vendor could pull this off, it would be Oracle.
But then again I might be wrong and Oracle may announce next week that HP will get the Sun hardware business. But I think they could keep it.
