The Sun Shines on Oracle

What a way to start the day as the Sun is shining bright on Oracle! Ellison has guts, vision, a good management team, and the cash to swoop in and throw the DB, Virtualization, storage, and server market on its head.

Oracle and Solaris are like bread and butter. Oracle gets to defend their high-end database deployments by ensuring that Solaris has a future. They also pick up MySQL and overnight they go form open source wannabe to an open source powerhouse. They also get access to Sun’s investment in Greenplum (petabyte data warehousing). Additionally, Oracle has opened a front against HP, IBM, and Cisco by combining not only selling applications, but also hardware.

However the real gems are Sun’s virtualizaton and datacenter solutions. Oracle now has the ability to compete head-to-head with VMware, Citrix, Red Hat, and Microsoft for virtualizaton supremacy. They now own Sun’s xVM products and solutions that are cutting-edge. Finally, Oracle has the ability to compete with Cisco’s datacenter vision by not only packaging routing/switching/storage but also applications into a virtualized system.

Mark your calendars, April 20th 2009 may become the day IBM regrets for years to come. If Cisco can’t get their hands on VMware, they may be stuck in the what-could-have-been blues. HP must adjust to new competition and Dell has got to be thinking what-about-us? Netezza, HP, and Teradata have awoke to a significant change in the industry and stronger competitor. Finally, this industry may never be the same as a software giant has entered the hardware business.

Sun needs three things to be successful; the right management team (check), the right strategy (check), and market reach and power (check). Who would have ever thought Oracle would break the software only paradigm? More M&A to come, but hats-off to Oracle.