Oracle buys Sun – What it means for customers

Many were surprised when Oracle announced their acquisition of Sun Microsystems two weeks ago. As usual I’ve been talking to customers about their take on the change. To put things in perspective, let me start with a quote from the Oracle announcement:

Customers benefit as their system integration costs go down while system performance, reliability and security go up.

With the family increase, Oracle today covers a very wide variety of software and hardware solutions, many of which are not at all present in the working lives of online professionals.

Here’s what the news means to customers interested in enterprise portals or web content management:

• Oracle has still not fully digested the BEA acquisition and now has yet another enterprise portal to integrate or discontinue. Glassfish Web Space Server is a very new portal product based on Liferay, an open source portal project released by Sun earlier this year. Oracle now has 5 enterprise portals that overlap to a large extent and the future does not look promising for all of them. Existing BEA customers and the very few Web Space Server users has a new reason to consider potential alternatives
• There is a risk of further delay to the already much-delayed Release 11g . As the next major version for WebCenter, this was originally expected out in late 2007 and later promised for Q1 2009. So-called Technology Preview releases are available, but a final release is still not out.
• Oracle WebCenter is likely to remain the strategic portal platform that Oracle will invest in for the future. Unfortunately for prospective buyers, the current release of WebCenter has numerous shortcomings and many are waiting for Release 11g to become both available and widely adopted.
• Sun did not have their own web content management system, so there is no news when it comes to CMS consolidation in 2009
• Oracle OpenWorld, the annual Oracle love-parade in San Francisco with 43,000 delegates, will now be more open, with the addition of many open source projects from Sun. I attended in 2007 and 2008 and heard interesting things about Release 11g both years, but in 2008 it was delayed due to the BEA acquisition
• If you are a customer of Sun, this seems like good news as Sun was in trouble financially. At least in the short term, Oracle has stated their commitment to the Sun products. On a more practical note, if you use both Sun and Oracle solutions today, in the future you only get invoices from 1 vendor.
• Expect funny stories from the competitors. Usually some use an opportunity like this to spread some good old FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt).

I’m not sure how any of the above drive system integration cost down or help performance, reliability and security. Oracle was a huge vendor already and is now even bigger. The fact that I don’t get it might simply be a sign that online professionals do not fly high on Oracle’s radar. If you are in doubt too, I suggest you talk to Oracle.

More detailed and interesting coverage of the deal:

• CMS Watch: Oracle buys Sun
• Forrester: Oracle Acquires Sun, Enters Open Source and High End Computing Markets
• Jed Cawthorne: Oracle buys Sun, but what does it mean for CM?

Do you think the acquisition will lower your cost and increase performance, reliability and security?

UPDATE May 21: Oracle has released some interesting customer quotes commenting on the acquisition.