Personally I think this is a good deal for Sun. Before the talks with IBM, Sun stock was trading around $3-4 and now they are being sold at $9.50 per share. That is a very good deal for the investors and Sun employees. IBM and Sun had many similar products and would certainly have resulted in job losses. Oracle is flush with money and will surely continue to invest in Sun products since there is little overlap.
Some of my interesting thoughts about this deal:
- Oracle must be loving the thought of owning Java since its the crucial glue in their software offerings.
- Contrary to popular perception, Oracle won't kill MySQL - instead they will continue investing in it so that they get an entry in the low-end database market. Customers can then be upgraded to Oracle as they grow - a win-win situation for Oracle. Note that since MySQL is open-source if Oracle won't develop it, someone else surely will.
- Oracle now has access to the entire storage stack - Oracle database running on Java, ZFS, Sun hardware, Oracle backed Linux. That is a pretty strong offering.
- Every M&A deal brings with it some amount of layoffs, resignations, cultural changes but its this very churn that Sun has needed since a long time. Majority of the people will come of smiling eventually.
