The AppsLab

Acquisition Wednesday

By Jake • January 16th, 2008 • 14 Comments

I woke this morning to news that Oracle had agreed to acquire BEA (press release by friend of the ‘Lab Karen Tillman), Sun had agreed to acquire MySQL AB, and that Wednesday, after a struggle to remain relevant despite its “Happy Humpday” campaign had agreed to a merger of equals with Tuesday.

Oh and Twitter’s API was still flakey thanks to Steve Jobs.

Quite an eventful day for boring old enterprise software. Here are my random thoughts on each, chip in your own thoughts in comments:

Oracle+BEA
After Eddie, Topper and others broke this for me over Twitter, I got to break it to Rich over IM. Sadly, he’s been heads down tweaking Mix, but he was suitably geekd about the acquisition. Last summer, it was Rich who opened my eyes to the cool factor at BEA, which was an afterthought company for me. He pointed me to two videos Scoble did at BEA Participate in Atlanta with Jay Simons and Adrian McDermott that showcased the Enterprise 2.0 capabilities of AquaLogic suite, Pages, Ensemble and Pathways.

So, now we have another set of tools to use, and I’m looking forward to using the software and hearing ideas from BEA. I’ve talked about acquiring innovation before, and this acquisition represents another chance to embrace new ideas from a fresh perspective.

At OpenWorld, Rich, Paul and I ran into an ex-PeopleSoft and Oracle guy who had gone to BEA. We had all worked with him in various capacities, and we joked about the premium Oracle had offered in October to bring him back into the fold. The key takeaway was that we all hoped to join forces again to share our combined experience, leveraging the software set of both companies to do cool stuff.

I hope this will be a reality.

Sun+My SQL
This was a shocker for me, since last I heard, MySQL was talking about an IPO. And who knew that Sun had $800 million in cash on hand? And who calculated the $1 billion valuation for MySQL?

The positioning given by Jonathan Schwartz, i.e. “putting a billion dollars behind the M in LAMP” was interesting, but even more so was the rundown of Open Source products that Sun now has. Tim O’Reilly has a summary here. Sun can now deploy a full stack of Open Source software to an enterprise, Solaris as the O/S, MySQL as the database, and OpenOffice for productivity apps. Tack on Java and/or JRuby as development environments, and this starts to looks pretty compelling, especially for the low, low price of free. If I were Microsoft, I’d be nervous.

Do you think LAMP can be replaced by SAMJ, i.e. Solaris, Apache, MySQL and Java/JRuby? I’m interested to read what friend of the ‘Lab Lou Springer has to say.

What do you think of these announcements? Good, bad, indifferent?

Update: Thanks to Topper, Eddie and the all powerful Ontario Emperor (over Twitter, natch), I should add that Oracle also agreed to acquire a company called Captovation.  Sounds like a solid addition to the Stellent ECM capabilities, but I’m sure Billy will have a more in depth analysis. Also, Captovation will probably end up into Apps somehow, to attach paper docs to their transactions. This is speculation; I know nothing.

qed

Possibly Related Posts

• The Importance of January 27, 2010
• Google’s Backup Plan
• Friday Ramblings
• Raimonds Updates ActiveRecord Oracle Adapter
• The OpenLab