Is Oracle buying JBoss? Or Zend PHP? Or SleepyCat? Or all of them?

Lucas Jellema 1
0 0
Read Time:2 Minute, 19 Second

This article Oracle’s Open-Source Shopping Spree in Business Week Online suggests that Oracle is involved in serious discussions with JBoss, Zend and SleepyCat about a take over – for a total of $600 Million. I find it hard to believe this is serious – one would think that Larry has enough to chew on at them moment (although probably once you have swallowed something you do not need to chew it unless you are a cow). JBoss with its Application Server and Hibernate framework for ORM is a very serious player on the open source front in the J(2)EE arena. However, would taking that player out bring a lot of business to Oracle? Or would Oracle have the products continued as open source products, getting revenue from services? That is a business model that does not suit Oracle at all, given the profit margins expected by its shareholders. Or would Oracle expect customers that "buy in" into the (Oracle) Open Source products from the JBoss stable to also spend money on commercial Oracle products, like its database or AppServer add-ons? Or would it pull the plug on the JBoss products after some time? Or is it all just a hoax? The article seems serious enough though. It states: "The JBoss purchase, even at a premium, is a way to build market share in middleware at a much lower price [than buying BEA would cost]."

 The article concludes by saying: "Oracle is the only company selling databases, a full line of applications, and middleware for large corporations. Microsoft (MSFT)
does the same with midsize companies, while IBM doesn’t do
applications, and SAP doesn’t sell databases. As open-source versions
of all of these technologies gain steam, the last thing Ellison &
Co. want is another major software vendor to cobble together comparable
depth.Still, it’s a gutsy strategy.

Open-source alternatives
can be up to 90% cheaper than other software, and that could feel
threatening to Oracle employees peddling databases and middleware in
the traditional manner. Oracle could be setting up a culture clash the
likes of which it has never seen. And as always, a software company’s
biggest assets are typically its engineers. If they head for the door,
Oracle is just buying code and — in the case of JBoss — a customer
base that’s largely getting a free ride.

Another unknown is how
the deals will sit with the vast open-source community. Technologies
like PHP and JBoss are key ingredients in the bulk of open-source
deployments, and if these deals go through they’ll be in the hands of a
large traditional software player. Selling the open-source community on
Ellison’s plan might prove just as hard as selling it to Wall Street.

 

About Post Author

Lucas Jellema

Lucas Jellema, active in IT (and with Oracle) since 1994. Oracle ACE Director and Oracle Developer Champion. Solution architect and developer on diverse areas including SQL, JavaScript, Kubernetes & Docker, Machine Learning, Java, SOA and microservices, events in various shapes and forms and many other things. Author of the Oracle Press book Oracle SOA Suite 12c Handbook. Frequent presenter on user groups and community events and conferences such as JavaOne, Oracle Code, CodeOne, NLJUG JFall and Oracle OpenWorld.
Happy
Happy
0 %
Sad
Sad
0 %
Excited
Excited
0 %
Sleepy
Sleepy
0 %
Angry
Angry
0 %
Surprise
Surprise
0 %

Average Rating

5 Star
0%
4 Star
0%
3 Star
0%
2 Star
0%
1 Star
0%

One thought on “Is Oracle buying JBoss? Or Zend PHP? Or SleepyCat? Or all of them?

Comments are closed.

Next Post

Article about connecting Jakarta Slide to Exchange

Recently I wrote an article about setting up Jakarta Slide and using the Slide client to connect to an Exchange WebDAV store. The article is in Dutch, but if you don’t understand Dutch you still should be able to read the source code in the article and make sense of […]
%d bloggers like this: