Oracle + Sun = IBM. Wait, what?
The Register is reporting that Larry Ellison has been telling folks that with the pending Sun acquisition, Oracle is positioning itself to become the next, old IBM.
My big takeaway is that Oracle has positioned itself as a soup-to-nuts vendor. That is, they will be able to sell you every part of the system, from the SPARC server running Solaris, to the StorageTek tape backup, to the Oracle database, to the business application, which just happens to be written in Java.
This isn’t too terribly different from what Jonathan Schwartz was saying recently, that Sun provided the technology stack. Except that Sun had no applications to tie into – particularly since so many Oracle customers jumped ship and ran to Linux in the last decade. Obviously, Oracle now has plenty of reason to try to convince everyone to return.
Whether or not the strategy works, I still think Solaris is the best operating system on the block, and would love to see a reinvigorated SPARC platform as a viable option.