February 17th, 2006
Redmonkers dissect Oracle's open source plans
The Redmonks–Stephen O’Grady and James Governor–speculate on Oracle’s ambitious plans to gooble up open source companies–playmates for Siebel, J.D. Edwards, PeopleSoft, Innodb, etc. Here’s an excerpt from Stephen’s post:
The Best Defense is a Good Offense:
The interesting thing about the acquistions, with the possible exception of Sleepycat - although I could make the case there too as well - is that besides opening new doors to Oracle’s business, they’d have destablizing effects on its competitors businesses. The Peoplesoft and Siebel acquisitions are good examples here; besides giving Oracle immediate and major presence in the packaged applications market, they simultaneously weakened - at least in terms of perception - competitors such as IBM and SAP. These acqusitions are similar, as we’ll explore later.Developer/Community Relations:
I don’t know if Oracle would cite this as an acquisition driver, but I think this one is potentially big. If you’ve read this space previously, you’re aware that I’m quite convinced that we’re in the midst of a fundamental shift in how enterprises buy technology. It’s not that the days of the high priced software salesmen are gone, though I’ve heard that argument made more than a few times in the past couple of weeks, but that the importance of developers is finally being recognized. Where the CIO was once the product kingmaker, these days its the grunts in the field. Witness the success of Linux, MySQL, etc. Oracle, like many of its enterprise software brethren, has not enjoyed the best relationship with developers given the traditionally high price and complexity of its products - the barriers to entry. There’s a certain amount of cultural disconnect as well. All three of the firms being discussed enjoy solid if unspectacular reputations [2] with the developers that I speak with, potentially giving Oracle an entrypoint to a variety of communities of highly important technologists, communities that are currently closed to the vendor.
My general take here. Nick Carr also comments and Martin Lamonica blogs about why IBM passed on a JBoss acquisiton.
Dan Farber, editor-in-chief of CNET News.com, has more than 20 years of experience as an editor and journalist covering technology. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
