Oracle buys Sun Microsystems

Well, the news hit the two company sites at around 12:30 BST by my reckoning. Sun.com and Oracle.com both revealed the news at around the same time here are some screen grabs of the sites on the day:

I think this is a much better acquisition than what IBM offered, personally, I think IBM were looking to buy up competition, Oracle have a number of reasons to buy Sun as I see it:

• Expanding the business into new markets means more fingers in more pies, hopefully those pies have got meat in them otherwise you’ve wasted your time.
• Fishworks, the ability to create appliances.
• A large base of customers running Oracle on Solaris and Sun kit.
• Solaris technologies such as ZFS and DTrace The Oracle site has an amount of information for existing customers etc. It can be found here. There is a discussion over at opensolaris.org which echo’s some of my thoughts, found here.

We’ll have to wait and see what happens, but it’s going to be an odd couple of months these last two working for Sun/Oracle. I’m glad this has happened while I was on an industrial year, I’ve gained the experience of a potential take-over and that of a take-over with little risks attached for me, far more than I can say if it happens in a couple of years time when I potentially have mouths to feed and a mortgage to pay!

My weekly blog will continue, due Friday, I will expand on the other events of today and probably link to this article…