After Oracle Buys Sun, What Happens?
After Oracle Buys Sun, What Happens?
Well for the last week I’ve been attending what is basically THE major technical conference for the IBM System-i users in the world, COMMON. Attending this year’s conference is a large contingency of IBM System-p AIX users. AIX is IBM’s version of UNIX for those in other areas of technology.
One of the subtle buzz concerns being discussed here is: “What is going to happen to IBM’s Unix offering after the Oracle acquisition of Sun is complete”?
For several years now, IBM has allowed what is arguably one of the industry’s best, most cost effective, secure and easy to use and manage to fall into market share decline. For years the rumor has been that former CEO Lou Gerstner told then division manager Tom Jarosh to manage the decline of the then AS/400 versus attempting to develop its market share. And the market realities tend to support that rumor.
Let’s look further, over the last several years IBM has lost several opportunities in what has become their march towards being a services company. They lost the opportunity to control the network when they let Novell get away. They recently lost their share of the laptop world when they sold the Thinkpad to China. Enter Sun and Oracle.
Unless you’ve been under a pile of magnetic tapes and missed all the news, IBM punted a chance to buy Sun Microsystems last week. Smelling blood and an incredible opportunity, Larry Ellison and Oracle swept in and presented a bid which, if current trends hold, will be ratified shortly by shareholders.
So what does this mean? Well, once Oracle completes the merger, takes care of a few technical issues and does some internal merger housekeeping cleanup they’re going to be in one helluva position to be a huge force to be contended with in the IT market space.
Face it, Oracle will be able to provide a total single source information systems solution. They’ll be able to provide hardware, operating systems, a database engine and applications in once total suite of one stop shopping. And there are very few people that understand how to do marketing right like Larry Ellison. Clearly they lead the myriads of companies that leave IBM in the dust in this area.
This acquisition could put a major hurt on IBM. Oracle is IBM’s largest business partner in the AIX/system-p space. It’s believed that 95% of all IBM AIX boxes run the Oracle database engine and software applications. Once Oracle has their own hardware and operating system solution, why will they need IBM? One could also ask, “why would they need HP?” as well. The consensus is that this would put a serious hurt, intermediate term, on IBM and HP’s unix space. Granted that chances are Oracle isn’t going to be cranking out machines the size of “Blue Gene”, but then, how many of those are you really going to be able to sell? Face it, you can’t hide one of those in your garage!
Solaris and Oracle education are about as ubiquitous as English Composition. It’s taught or used by almost every university, college and tech school. AIX education in college is about as hard to find as hen’s teeth and finding anyone that teaches the System-i is almost an exercise in futility. So, in short, there is and most likely would continue to be a very readily available base and continued source of well trained computer types that know Oracle and Solaris. I’m not sure the same can be said for AIX and most definitely not for i/OS.
So, if IBM loses market share to Oracle in the Unix/Oracle space what do they do to replace it? Clearly, as was discussed this week, IBM could easily end up as a company that does services and sells mainframes. And, not many were sure that there was going to be a lot of demand for that.
So, will IBM see the light and errors in their ways and bring back i/OS based systems from their path to doom? It may make for a good viable solution to fill a big void if Ellison and company are successful in bringing the lion share of their Oracle database users to the Solaris platform.
A lot can happen in 3 to 5 years and nobody’s absolutely certain what the future will hold for the AIX or i/OS communities, but with this past week’s merger announcement, it’s sure going to be interesting.
I’m Don Rima and that’s the way I see it, From Where I Stand.
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