Oracle Has Tough Decisions, Good Options
Posted by Adrian Rodriguez on Fri, Apr 24, 2009
I promised myself that I wouldn't write about the acquisition of SUN by Oracle but after reading all of the different blog posts that I read including Matt Pollicove's IdM Thoughtplace and Jackson Shaw's blogs...amongst others and what I read is that it could take months before this even affects the identity management product but here's my take on Oracle and where things could end up.
1.The best companies become even greater by the decisions that they make. Kind of reminds me of teams like the Raiders and Lions on NFL Draft Day...they draft pretty high every year but they just can't make those amazing picks turn into anything substantial and teams like New England give up early picks and just make good decisions. Talk about getting a deal...oops...I mean a steal. For the average person $7.4 Billion sounds like a ton of money but thinking that Larry Ellison feels he will squeeze $1.5 Billion in profit out of that acquisition this year and $2 Billion out of it next year shows that this was not just a knee jerk reaction to IBM wanting to make this same purchase.
2. 2008 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Provisioning
Gartner's 2008 Magic Quadrant showed that SUN and Oracle were tops in the provisioning space. This acquisition would leave Oracle firmly placed at the top with IBM Tivoli.
3. According the 2008 Gartner Magic Quadrant Report, Oracle had 11.9% of the market share and SUN had 11.8%. The closest competitor, CA, had 14.6% market share which was also down 6.3% from 2006. Viewing this simplistically, we can say that Oracle now has almost 24% of the Provisioning market.
4. Can the many new advancements in the SUN product such as tying their identity software to Google Apps Premier and Amazon's Cloud platform save them? Actually I feel that Oracle instantly becomes a leader in the cloud computing space. It may take the need to make SUN/Oracle's Cloud Computing Platform less open source and back it up with Oracle's Database versus MySQL to take it to the Enterprise level.
There are many more reasons that this acquisition could make Oracle a winner such as OID/LDAP, JAVA and others.
Whats your take?