The other day I offered up my opinion on the Red Hat pending acquisition of JBoss. One of the things I discussed was the "what if" scenario if Oracle had acquired JBoss instead.
"If Oracle had acquired JBoss, it could have been an opportunity for Oracle to have grown its core business and revenue streams by making an inexpensive app server available as part of the mix, creating a better overall solution for their customers that need a database, apps and app serving infrastructure. This is similar to what SAP did a number of years ago with SAPDB (now MaxDB from MySQL). Oracle could have also used such an acquisition to begin the long and necessary cultural evolution to learn about open source as a supporting development, marketing, and delivery strategy, similar to Novell's long road with the Ximian and SuSE acquisitions. Or they could have made a complete mess of it, ...."
The Red Hat acquisition is actually the best of both worlds for Oracle:
- Oracle and Red Hat have a long standing relationship.
- The only open source messaging Oracle delivers well is around Linux. They always fall down when they get caught between praising open source in a Linux context, then denigrating open source when asked about the myriad open source database engines.
- Oracle needs to reduce the complement costs in their overall solution pitch to their customers to better serve those customers against the competition from BEA, IBM, and Microsoft. (Maintaining the engineering development expense of delivering your own app server with its own support and maintenance burden when you're a database company isn't a great way to do this.)
Oracle can now deliver the same less expensive overall app serving solution to their customers on a JBoss Red Hat bundle for their Oracle Java app world, through the existing relationship, and consistent with their open source messaging, without having eaten the financial and cultural pain of a US$350M+ acquisition, and its attendant business risks.
Hopefully Oracle is not simply ecstatic — but aggressively ecstatic and hammering down the door at Red Hat to expand the relationship with all the money they saved.
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