Larry Ellison said it: “The acquisition of Sun transforms the IT industry, combining best-in-class enterprise software and mission-critical computing systems,” said Oracle CEO Larry Ellison in a statement. “Oracle will be the only company that can engineer an integrated system – applications to disk – where all the pieces fit and work together so customers do not have to do it themselves.”
This could have been an IBM or even Apple spokesperson. Instead, Oracle now can claim much of the IP behind Unix, Java, and a incredible portfolio of Sun hardware holdings. Oracle becomes strengthened in ways it could have been, but at the additional peril of re-becoming a hardware systems protagonist. Oracle’s history as a hardware vendor has been spotty at best.
Oracle’s acquisition of Sun adds the additional onus of becoming a platform-controlling vendor, in the older monolithic model of the 1970′s and 1980′s. The one-stop-shop model is great at controlling the multiple vendor problem factor at the cost of proprietary solutions, and this acquisition portends single-vendor and at least superficially open standards– as open as Oracle is willing to allow.
This, however, is the same sort of not-invented-here mentality that nearly killed IBM, and with certainty killed DEC, and a raft of Unix-based platform vendors, all of whom were eager to march in the grave rather than promote industrial interoperability. I can’t call this the day that Oracle jumped the shark, but it’s a most decidedly strange turn of events.