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April 21, 2009
During a conference call yesterday after his $7.4 billion acquisition deal was announced, Oracle
CEO Larry Ellison said one of the primary reasons Oracle is interested in Sun is because of its Solaris operating
system, a widely distributed version of Unix that has a large installed base and has long been the dependable
platform for Oracle's popular database.
Now the big question on most people minds is, will Oracle merge or somehow integrate Solaris with the Linux
operating system?
Oracle acquiring Sun Microsystems could have a larger impact on the IT industry than some observers think. It
could also have a huge impact in the Linux community and in the open source segment as well.
Oracle is a big proponent of Linux and always has been, but the deal with Sun raises questions about
how Oracle might reconcile the two operating systems. On April 7, Edward Screven, Oracle's corporate chief
architect and top Linux engineer, said that the company would like to see Linux become the default operating
system for the data center, so that customers don't even have to think about choosing an operating system.
IT analyst David Mitchell said yesterday it's highly unlikely that Oracle would get rid of the commercial
version of Solaris in favor of Linux, mainly because of the steady stream of maintenance revenue that Sun
derives from its OS.
Additionally, let's not forget that both Sun and Oracle receive substantial professional services revenue
from Solaris, Mitchell added.
"Overall, it's a 92 percent margin business. Oracle is unlikely to do anything to damage that extremely
profitable maintenance and support revenue stream," said Mitchell.
"As we just said, we want to make Linux the default operating system in the data center," Screven said in
a speech at the Linux Foundation's Collaboration Summit in San Francisco.
"What I can see them doing is seeing which elements of Solaris could find their way into Linux. Sun has
already committed to doing things like that. This coming together of Linux and Solaris has already been in
the cards for quite some time, whether you like it or not," said Mitchell.
He also predicted that Oracle will continue to invest heavily in Solaris and continue to update it, which
is widely used in mission-critical markets such as Wall Street, telecommunications, insurance, banking and
financial services.
However, Mitchell added that bringing some features of OpenSolaris, the open-source version of the
operating system, into Linux is an option and something that has already been in the works among developers.
There's no question that this is a major acquisition that could have a large impact in the IT industry,
and the Linux community as a whole. It will be interesting to see how Oracle will use its newly acquired
jewel to further grow its revenue stream and boost its rapidly expanding services portfolio.
Source: Oracle.
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