Sun Breakup By Oracle Quick And Inevitable, Say Wall Street Watchers. But Is It?

Financial bloggers and analysts have been predicting the swift and sure dismantling of Sun Microsystems by Oracle. From John Dvorak, MarketWatch:

We are going to see a dismantling operation until Oracle can recover some of what it spent.

Dvorak focuses on the motives of Oracle -- likening its situation to the strategy of "keep your enemies close": Instead of standing around dumbfounded and grouchy the way Microsoft is handling the threat of Linux to its core business, Oracle has perhaps done the right thing by capturing the enemy.

From John Boudreau, MercuryNews.com:

Oracle [...] is sure to shed thousands of Sun workers

Boudreau's sources believe that Oracle will shrink, sell or shut down completely Sun's high-end server products and storage business.

Yet, is it realistic to think that Oracle felt so paranoid and threatened by Sun Microsystems that it had to take over the open-source giant? Oracle and Sun have been in a collaborative relationship for years. Is it in Oracle's best interests to kill off hardware that it has worked on so long with Sun, hardware that optimally runs Oracle software? Doesn't make sense.

Dvorak does not see a complete end to the MySQL database. Instead, he states that Oracle "can control its development and limit the threat by not allowing it to get any better than it is."

Threat? MySQL and Oracle have two different segments of the database market. Oracle cannot ignore the potentially huge customer base of those looking for a solid, midmarket and affordable database product. Oracle has long been the darling of huge enterprises that have powerhouse database needs. Why would Oracle do away with what it could use to become a leader in the SMB market? Sure, MySQL would not be available for free, but the Enterprise version, which many businesses use anyway, isn't either.

Another interesting remark by Mr. Dvorak:

Other analysts have claimed that this deal is all about Java, which I am not seeing at all.

Huh? Oracle needs Java. If anything, that may be the main reason behind this whole thing and not notions of Sun as a direct threat to Oracle's place in the database space.

Yes, jobs at Sun will probably be lost, made all the more unfortunate by these financially tough times. Yet, many in the technology industry are optimistic that the Sun-Oracle merger will give birth to more opportunities for channel partners in database offerings, storage systems and servers. The combination of Sun's innovation with Oracle's leadership may end up enhancing existing Sun products, rather than completely obliterating them.