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3. Convince The World It Can Be A Steward Of Open-Source Software
True, Oracle does own and sell/give away some open-source products, such as the Berkeley DB database and the Innobase transactional storage engine. But as former Forrester analyst Ray Wong wrote in a report shortly after the acquisition was announced, buying Sun will make Oracle the guardian of some of the open-source industry's crown jewels, including the popular MySQL database, the Solaris operating system and the Java development platform.
It's no secret Oracle is a very competitive company that, from a marketing and sales standpoint, doesn't hesitate to play hardball with competitors such as IBM and SAP. The question is whether Oracle can resist leveraging those open-source technologies for competitive advantage, should the opportunity arise. Can it resist the dark side and use its new powers only for good?
4. Managing the Nuts And Bolts Of Integrating Two Big IT Vendors
Oracle faces the task of integrating Sun and its various hardware and software organizations into its own operations, all while maintaining Oracle's high operating margins. Merging an $11 billion company with a $23 billion company is going to mean lots of territory battles and bruised egos among managers and executives, and uncertainty and morale issues among workers.
It won't be easy. Fortunately for Oracle, whose mega-acquisitions in the last five years have included PeopleSoft, Siebel Systems and BEA Systems, it has developed lots of experience in melding the operations of acquired companies with its own. Many observers expected culture clashes and other tribulations when the PeopleSoft deal went through. And yet somehow Oracle pulled it off. Can the company do it yet again?
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