Archive for the 'Oracle' Category

Oracle Sun Merger Closes

Published on February 3, 2010 in MySQL, Open Source, Oracle and Sun. 0 Comments Tags: , .

As I’m sure you’ve heard by now, the Oracle acquisition of Sun has closed. From MySQL and Java to OpenSolaris, OpenOffice.org and more; it’s difficult to understate the potential impact this will have on the Open Source community. Many people are skeptical of Oracle. This perception, correct or incorrect, may have the ability to negatively impact some of the communities that this acquisition affects. One point that is difficult to argue with is that Oracle is maniacally focused on profitability. That wasn’t always the case with Sun and I’d expect there to be some immediate changes as a result of this. Shortly after the deal closed, Oracle had a five hour webcast discussing Oracle’s plans. As Stephen O’Grady notes, “Between Ellison, Kurian, Phillips and the rest, we got our share of answers yesterday. But as is almost always the case in such situations, there was as much left unsaid as said”. A few tidbits from his very good Q&A:

Q: What’s the big picture of this transaction?
A: What was old is new again? A couple of years back, some of the best and brightest Solaris engineers began blurring the lines between what was hardware and what was software. This skunkworks project was called Fishworks, for Fully Integrated Software and Hardware…works. Basically the project was a storage device that blended features of Solaris (DTrace, ZFS, etc) with some impressive analytics, and an interesting storage hybrid incorporating both disk and flash storage elements. It’s hardware like this, I think, that is the future for Oracle.

Q: How do you figure?
A: As Cote covered in his excellent quick take, Ellison, in planning for the future, is looking to the past. Specifically, IBM’s past. “Our vision for the year of 2010 is the same as IBM’s for 1960,” as he says, meaning that you buy a single machine that has everything you want on it, preintegrated.

Will Oracle still sell you their database if you’re running on, say, Dell servers? Certainly. But will they also be telling you how much faster it runs on their integrated appliance, and how that appliance – through the magic of ZFS and storage pooling – will give you better performance at a lower cost, and real time performance analytics via DTrace? You bet.

Q: Which stated plans are those?
A: In talking to the Journal, Ellison said the following:

“We are not cutting Sun to profitability,” Mr. Ellison said. “We think that this business will be profitable immediately.”

He went on to say, however, that he would be leaving certain non-profitable lines of business:

Mr. Ellison said that Sun will add $1.5 billion to Oracle’s bottom line in the first year, largely because he will get out of “businesses that don’t make money.”

Q: Which businesses are those?
A: Exactly.

Q: Meaning we don’t know?
A: It’s certainly less than obvious. Likely candidates like NetBeans or OpenOffice.org were explicitly mentioned on yesterday’s call, which presumably wouldn’t be the case if the plan was to immediately retire them. No, the Sun Cloud and OpenSolaris were but a few of the obvious product lines that were MIA on Wednesday.

Q: What is Oracle going to do with OpenOffice?
A: Apparently continue to invest in it, and marry it to that which Ellison hates most in a product referred to as “Cloud Office.”

Q: MySQL is getting its own salesforce, though, right?
A: MySQL will maintain an independent sales and development staff, yes, though organizationally it will be grouped with Oracle’s open source GBU. You could argue that this is because MySQL’s more of a competitive threat, that it’s natural given the differing markets served by the products, or that it’s at the behest of the EU. Or all of the above. Either way, it means that MySQL – at least for now – has some room to move.

Q: Back to the operating system question for a second. When the acqusition was announced, you said the following:

The betting here is that Solaris will continue to be supported, but not as a frontline option, with the possible exception of cloud offerings where the quirks of the operating system are rendered invisible by the platform. Think IBM with AIX, HP with HP-UX, and so on: there is ample precedent for the (successful) continuation of two competing product lines, and as Oracle itself acknowledges above, there’s an awful lot of Oracle running on top of Solaris.

You further speculated that some of the Solaris assets might be candidates for relicensing. What do you think now?
A: That that view is wrong. We’ll see, of course, how things play out, but it would certainly appear that Oracle is committed to the Solaris platform indefinitely. Personally, I think that will be difficult to manage over time, but it’s pretty clear that the above guess was off. As some Sun folks were kind of enough to tell me when it was published.

If anything, Oracle advantaged Solaris vs Linux during yesterday’s presentation. When discussing them both, Solaris came first and had bullet points like Secure, Scale, and so on. Linux? It was described as the most “widely used” operating system.

I remain convinced that Oracle will have a tough time maintaining and messaging two competitive products, but given the depth of their appliance ambitions they may see that as a short term problem only.

As you can tell, in the short term there are probably going to be more questions than answers. While it seems MySQL is safe for now, how the developer community reacts to the Oracle ownership of the product remains to be seen. Will people stick with MySQL? Will Percona or MariaDB be the ones to benefit? Or will it be a completely different DB such as PostgreSQL that gains as a result.

While it’s clear that Oracle is going to kill some products, there doesn’t seem to be a consensus on exactly what will survive. That uncertainty could be extremely detrimental to some projects. One of the biggest questions for me is what will become of OpenSolaris/Solaris and how that decision will impact Linux support within the company. Sun had a mixed history with Linux, but Oracle has been a big proponent recently. Will they switch gears and go with a product they have more ownership over, or will they stick with Linux which is doing much better in the marketplace.

I have quite a bit of other commentary on this topic, but I’ll attempt to break that into separate posts in the near future as more information becomes available.

Additional Reading:
* Sun & Oracle’s impact on open source acquisitions
* Best of luck to Jonathan, who is stepping down.

–jeremy

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Red Hat: Bad economy is good for Open Source

Published on June 25, 2009 in Linux, Open Source, Oracle and Red Hat. 0 Comments

From a post by Matt Asay:

Well, on Wednesday Red Hat announced fiscal first-quarter revenue of $174 million, up 11 percent from the prior year. Subscription revenue was up 14 percent year over year to $148.8 million. The company’s total deferred revenue balance is now $567.3 million, an increase of 15 percent on a year-over-year basis. Net income for the quarter was $18.5 million.

Both Oracle and Red Hat are doing well, and Oracle is obviously dealing with much bigger wads of money, but it seems clear that Red Hat’s open-source model is the big winner in the recession.

In fact, on Red Hat’s earnings call, Chief Executive Jim Whitehurst indicated: “Budgets remain tight and we don’t see an end in sight for this. In relative terms, this is pretty good for us.” He went on to call out the big differentiator for Red Hat’s business: certified ecosystem.

The key differentiator for us in Linux is our certified ecosystem. Even those that are clones of RHEL [Red Hat Enterprise Linux] lack this certified ecosystem. The second differentiator is value: great service and support at a compelling price.

We have a very disciplined business model which is based on commoditizing key parts of core infrastructure. We’ve been laser-focused on this. Open source is particularly good at that. We’d certainly like to work with other open-source companies but they have fundamentally different business models than we have.

Repeatedly asked on the earnings call about competition from Oracle, Red Hat executives took turns dismissing Oracle’s Solaris (“When customers decide to jump from Solaris they go straight to Linux, skipping OpenSolaris”) and Oracle’s Linux strategy (“We’ve yet to lose a major customer over the last year to Oracle’s Linux offering. The only one to leave Red Hat in the past couple of years is Oracle itself.”).

You can view the full RHT quarterly report here. Red Hat continues to do well and I think it’s become clear that the continuing recession can benefit certain Open Source business models. Matt makes a very good point in his post though. At some point, the UNIX-replacement business is going to slow. Currently that business is a huge chunk of Red Hat sales. When that slowing finally happens, Red Hat is going to have to look to others places for growth and competing more directly with Microsoft seems like one clear place to look for that growth. Today, less of Red Hat’s sales come at Microsoft’s expense than many people realize. It may very well take an acquisition or two for that to change. With JBoss now fully consumed, some additional acquisitions seem inevitable, but they may not come for a little while for a couple reasons. First, most companies are trying to conserve cash right now, and Red Hat is no exception there. Secondly though, Red Hat really has to be careful whose toes it steps on with its acquisitions. They learned that lesson the hard way with JBoss. That being said, at some point they may end up being too conservative in this regard. Competing with much larger companies means you have to use your small size to your advantage and take risks. I think Red Hat is up to the task, it may just take a little time to find the value and situation they’re looking for.

Disclosure: Earlier this year I held a moderate position in NYSE:RHT. I no longer hold that position.

–jeremy

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Oracle Sun Acquisition Musings

Published on May 21, 2009 in Linux, Open Source, Oracle and Sun. 0 Comments

A little time has past since the announcement that Oracle would acquire Sun. While there are still many unanswered questions, I thought I’d post a quick update on the topic.

The first topic I’ll cover is the Sun hardware business. From a recent interview with Larry (via Ostatic):

“No, we are definitely not going to exit the hardware business. While most hardware businesses are low-margin, companies like Apple and Cisco enjoy very high-margins because they do a good job of designing their hardware and software to work together. If a company designs both hardware and software, it can build much better systems than if they only design the software. That’s why Apple’s iPhone is so much better than Microsoft phones.”

Ellison also confirms in the interview that far from discontinuing the SPARC chip, he intends to increase investment in it. “We think designing our own chips is very, very important,” he said. He also notes that Sun outsources almost all of its manufacturing to companies such as Fujitsu.

So it looks like Oracle will indeed be pursuing the “entire stack” path that many predicted. One major benefit to Oracle here is that if a customer is getting both their hardware and software (including both the OS and applications) from the same company, it makes switching away from that company extremely costly and complicated.

That brings us to the OS. It’s still not clear to me which way Oracle is going to go here. Long term I can’t see Solaris and Linux being first class citizens within Oracle. Which one they choose remains to be seen. They “own” Solaris in a way they could never “own” Linux, which may be the deciding factor for a company like Oracle. That being said, I’d imagine more of their customers want Linux so it’s certainly not going to be an easy decision. Some are speculating (via Matt) that if Oracle does go with Solaris that a company like IBM may acquire Red Hat. I’m not so sure about that, but it is a possibility. While IBM does really like Linux, Jboss would be a major duplication for IBM (and it represents a lot of the growth potential within Red Hat).

Finally, here’s a recent announcement regarding MySQL:

The following was in the just released monthly bug report for the Falcon storage engine:

“With the news that Sun has aggreed to be purchaced by Oracle, Some inevitable changes will occur. Once the acquisition is made, the need for Falcon as a MySQL storage engine will be re-evaluated. Until then, Falcon will continue to improve stability and performance. The team will also evaluate other technical niches that may be unique to Falcon.”

I for one would be very disappointed to see Falcon not supported by Oracle. I know they have worked very hard to create a next-generation storage engine. While it could be argued that InnoDB can fill all use cases, I believe that choices are a good thing and having one less choice is not a good thing.

Good luck all on the team. You have been nothing but kind and generous when answering my dumb questions via email and in person. You can count my vote for “keep it!!”.

I think it’s clear that this acquisition will mean some significant changes for the future path of MySQL. The fact that a lot of upcoming MySQL-related innovation may come from outside the company, and from places like the Open Database Alliance should at least ensure that MySQL remains viable from a technology standpoint.

–jeremy

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Oracle Agrees to Acquire Sun Microsystems

Published on April 20, 2009 in Linux, Oracle and Sun. 0 Comments

With rumors of an IBM acquisition still swirling, early this morning Oracle announced that it is acquiring Sun for roughly $7.4 billion. From a CNET article:

Oracle and Sun announced Monday that they have entered into a definitive agreement under which Oracle will acquire Sun common stock for $9.50 per share in cash. That puts the value of the transaction at about $7.4 billion, or $5.6 billion net of Sun’s cash and debt.

Oracle President Safra Catz said in a statement:

We expect this acquisition to be accretive to Oracle’s earnings by at least 15 cents on a non-GAAP basis in the first full year after closing. We estimate that the acquired business will contribute over $1.5 billion to Oracle’s non-GAAP operating profit in the first year, increasing to over $2 billion in the second year. This would make the Sun acquisition more profitable in per share contribution in the first year than we had planned for the acquisitions of BEA, PeopleSoft and Siebel combined.

To me, IBM seems like a better fit for Sun and this acquisition leaves as many questions as answers. While Oracle recently announced a hardware product line in a partnership with HP, do they really want to be in the hardware business themselves? A few years ago Larry Ellison definitively said they did not want to be in that business. With much of Sun’s revenue coming from hardware, will they spin that division off or use it to focus more on a complete Oracle stack, that includes everything from hardware to database. Moving to the individual parts of that stack, will Oracle continue with the Sparc CPU line or be interested in the more commodity x86 lines. At the OS level, will Oracle continue to focus on Linux and their Unbreakable implementation or will they attempt to keep Solaris alive. Oracle has been contributing to Linux in a significant way recently, and it would be a huge loss for that to go away IMHO. At the recent Linux Foundation summit Oracle touted that it views it’s upcoming btrfs filesystem as superior to ZFS. What does the future hold for projects such as that?

That brings us to MySQL. I’d contend that MySQL is “worth” more to Oracle than it is to any other company (including IBM) and here’s why. To most other companies, MySQL is roughly worth the net present value of future projected MySQL revenue. The thing most people don’t understand about the MySQL/Oracle relationship is that for many small to medium commercial projects, MySQL is “good enough” and has a much lower TCO than Oracle. Even so, many companies didn’t actually want to go with MySQL for a variety of reasons (many political and procurement related). This created a situation where the *option* of MySQL effectively capped the price people would spend on low end Oracle projects. It wasn’t just the number of people actually leaving Oracle for MySQL, it was the number threatening to and getting additional (and sometimes steep) discounts on Oracle as a result. This creates a premium to Oracle that no other company would have been able to extract. What this acquisition means for the long term future of MySQL within Sun is unclear to me. Oracle has owned InnoDB for a long time. This could either be a long overdue reunion of Inno and MySQL, or the beginning of a slow death for MySQL. One where Oracle doesn’t overtly kill the project, but deprecates any features it sees as threating to its main cash cow and relegates MySQL to a web-only type product. On a related note, the acquisition almost certainly means the end of Postgres support within Sun.

It seems one piece that will certainly benefit from the acquisition is Java, although I’d imagine that IBM is not too happy that Oracle now “owns” Java. Eclipse might have to change it’s name now ;) Also, the rivalry between Larry and Bill Gates is well known. Does this mean that Oracle will be interested in funding addition OpenOffice.org development even thought it’s *way* outside their normal target market?

In the end, Oracle is one of the best acquisition machines on the plant. They have been purchasing and integrating companies for a long time. They’ve become very good at it. However, most of the companies they have acquired have been very specific targets in niche markets that aimed to fill a perceived gap in Oracle’s offerings. Sun is not that. They are a huge company with a massive product line that spans hardware and software. This is not the average Oracle acquisition and the decisions Oracle makes will have massive implications not just for Open Source but for the entire IT industry.

–jeremy

(Note: Interestingly, the Oracle press site has been down with a “Server is too busy to handle request” for the last 30 minutes. I’ll update the first link in this post as soon as it’s back up. Until then, here’s a NYT article.)

[Updated] Additional links:

Glyn Moody
Matt Asay
Larry Augustin

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Linux in the Enterprise: The Journey, Milestones and What’s Ahead (Liveblog)

Published on April 8, 2009 in Linux, Linux Foundation and Oracle. 0 Comments

Edward Screven – Chief Corporate Architect at Oracle.

* In the late 90’s they were looking for an OS to recommend to their clients. They immediately ruled out Windows for a variety of reasons, both technical and political/personal. It came down to BSD and Linux. They went with Linux. “While it looks like an obvious choice now, at the time it was not”.
* 1998 was the first commercial database port for Linux. 2001 was the first 64-bit port for Linux.
* “We will run our whole business on Linux” – Larry Ellison in 2002. They now do.
* They spend about $3B a year on R&D. Most of it is done on Linux.
* “In retrospect, we are VERY happy with our choice to use Linux”.
* Oracle has 42,000 Linux servers and 10’s of Petabytes on Linux.
* Side note: LQ uses OCFS2 and I have been quite happy with it.
* Big on Virtualization. Oracle VM is based on Xen. It’s main goal is manageability.
* They would like to help make Linux the “default data center operating system” with “NO questions asked”. They see this manifesting itself in a fungible “Linux Grid Infrastructure”.
* Oracle likes btrfs better than zfs.
* “We make more money with Linux than ANY pure ‘Linux’ company”.

–jeremy

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New LQ Infrastructure – First snag hit

Published on February 4, 2008 in LinuxQuestions.org and Oracle. 2 Comments

As I previously mentioned, I’ve been working on moving LQ to an entirely new and updated infrastructure. Everything was going smooth and the project was actually ahead of schedule. The LQ Wiki, LQ ISO and LQ Radio are already being served by the new machines. I decided to implement Munin for performance monitoring. Like many related tools, it uses rrdtool for graphing. After a bit of debugging, it turns out that OCFS2 doesn’t support mmap yet, so all RRD writes are failing. In this particular case I can get around the problem easy enough, but I know applications (BDB comes to mind, but I am sure there are plenty of others) use mmap, so I’m wondering what else is going to fail. A post from an Oracle engineer on ocfs2-users from June 2007 said mmap support was coming soon, but I can’t find an ETA anywhere and am running the latest version. Aside from this snag, I’ve been really happy with OCFS2.

–jeremy

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Oracle mulls vote on open source at upcoming shareholders meeting II

Published on November 10, 2007 in Open Source and Oracle. 0 Comments

As a follow up to this post, Jonas just informed me that 127,717,018 shares voted in favor of the proposal. From his email:

In the end, we received the support of 127,717,018 shares. That is 3.58% of the vote and approximately $2.8 billion in assets. As I’ve mentioned before, taking into account Larry Ellison’s ownership that percentage can be viewed a bit differently. That number goes up to 4.99% if you remove his approximately 1 billion shares from the calculation.

While 3.58% may not seem like a significant number, it is a very respectable vote for a first year issue that nobody ever heard of and with no advocacy budget. These are the kinds of votes climate change proposals received years ago and now they pull in up to 30%. That is not to say that FLOSS is the same kind of issue as global warming, but it gives you an idea of how support often starts off in the single digits. It is also significant that we broke the 3% threshold, because under SEC rules we are now entitled to bring the proposal forward to the 2008 AGM if we wish.

3.58% may not sound like a big number, but as Jonas points out, since Ellison and institutional investors voted against the proposal it is a significant number. One hundred million votes is more than I’d have anticipated (although being new to this kind of thing my expectations don’t mean much), but it’s great to see the issue getting this kind of support right out of the gate.

Matt is also blogging about this here.

–jeremy

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Oracle mulls vote on open source at upcoming shareholders meeting

Published on October 8, 2007 in Open Source and Oracle. 0 Comments

I’ve been chatting with Jonas Kron recently about an issue that Matt just pointed out:

On Friday, November 2, Oracle will convene its shareholder meeting. As part of that meeting, this year it’s supposed to consider an open-source friendly proposal which, for a variety of reasons, it is asking its shareholders to reject. (See page 55 of its proxy statement here.)

What is the proposal? That Oracle adopt a resolution that the company consider the social and environmental impact of using open source. The underlying intention, I believe, is to nudge Oracle to take on a more protective approach to open source. Oracle wants the resolution axed.

The language of the shareholder proposal is fairly vague, which may be one reason it’s not getting much love from Oracle. However, as Jonas Kron, the attorney representing Lawrence Fahn (Oracle shareholder), told me, SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) rules significantly restrict what they can ask for in the proposal, forcing them to file a proposal that focused on social and environmental impacts – a very safe area within the SEC rules.

So, the proposal actually calls for this resolution:

RESOLVED: the shareholders request that the Board issue, at reasonable expense, an Open Source Social Responsibility Report to shareholders by April 2008 that discusses the social and environmental impacts of Oracle’s existing and potential open source policies and practices. We request the report be a policy level discussion which excludes proprietary and confidential information (including, for example, information that may interfere with litigation, legal strategies, lobbying or regulatory issues).

To my unstudied eye, this seems to not go far enough. But Kron indicated that the proposal is not meant to be a be-all/end-all for Oracle on open source. Rather, it’s intended to serve as a placeholder and an opportunity for Fahn/Kron to get the issue of open source on the Oracle board’s agenda rather than as a complete reflection of Fahn’s and Kron’s goals or interests. However, Kron noted that even despite this limitation to shareholder proposals this structure still enables him to use this mechanism to solicit real changes in corporate behavior through dialogue.

What could be accomplished with the proposal? It’s a way for Oracle’s shareholders to demonstrate support for Oracle’s open-source efforts (noted in Oracle’s opposition statement on page 55), and to vote to encourage them to go further.

As pointed out to me by Jonas, it’s not that Oracle is doing anything predatory to Open Source now, it’s that his client thinks they can and should do more. Unlike Matt, I’m not a lawyer. Jonas took the time to explain a lot of the procedure to me, and as indicated the request is more of a place holder then a complete request. You should see page 55 of the proxy statement for complete details. I’m not an Oracle shareholder, but if you are this is your chance to be heard. If you have any questions, let me know and I’d be happy to pass them on to Jonas. From what I’m told, a small number of votes here can make a very real difference. Here’s why (from Jonas):

Given the fact that Larry Ellison owns just shy of 25% of Oracle shares and mutual funds and other institutional investors who invariably will vote with management as a matter of practice own around 40%; a vote in favor of just 5% would actually be very meaningful because it means that 15% of shareholders who as a practical matter would actually think about how to vote, voted for the proposal. Put another way, if a single shareholder owning 15% (or even 5%) of the company asked management to pay attention to an issue, they likely would. In fact, under securities laws, 5% ownership is considered significant enough to warrant specific disclosures of information. The point being that this shareholder resolution presents a leverage point that can be used to communicate to management in a powerful way that its investors think Oracle should continue to take positive steps towards open source.

Edit: Here’s a good link if you’d like to learn more about shareholder activism.

–jeremy

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Unbreakable Linux: The untold story

Published on April 5, 2007 in Linux, Open Source, Oracle and Red Hat. 0 Comments

Mike Olson, vice president of Embedded Technologies at Oracle, recently posted an interesting entry on his blog about Unbreakable Linux (via Matt). The article details why RHEL was chosen and how Oracle contributes to Linux. Keep in mind that Mike works for Oracle, but via the Sleepycat aquisition. He knows Open Source. Now, I never found it odd that Oracle chose RHEL. I’d have found it odd if they chose anything else in fact. In the Oracle Linux space, Red Hat dominates. I did wonder why the respun CentOS though. It just doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. They’re directly competing with Red Hat with Red Hat’s own product. Sure the GPL allows that. I just don’t think it makes sense from a business perspective. Not when they could have partnered with Red Hat and gotten 95% the same thing. The 5% will make a real difference in the long run. As a major partner, they would have been providing real value to Red Hat. This in turn would encourage Red Hat to provide value to them. Early access to code, development road maps, etc. Enterprise customers would have gotten the proverbial one neck to choke (which the really do like) and Oracle would have been the single point of contact for Linux support on the RHEL product for their customers. The way they have it now, they will be in a perpetual state of playing catchup with new RHEL releases, with no help from Red Hat. In the end, what they wanted to do made a ton of sense… I just don’t think they went about it the best way. How it will play out long term remains to be seen.

–jeremy

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Oracle Linux adopters labelled ‘idiots’

Published on April 2, 2007 in Linux, Open Source, Oracle and Red Hat. 0 Comments

Just ran across this odd story over at ZNNet AU. From the article:

One of the first converts to Oracle’s support for Linux has revealed the public backlash it has endured since their decision to drop Red Hat.

Melbourne company Opes Prime Stockbroking told ZDNet Australia that in the weeks following its announcement to adopt Oracle Linux, upset Linux enthusiasts phoned, e-mailed and wrote about the company online to complain at the decision.

“People called us out of the blue to tell us we were idiots,” said Opes executive director Anthony Blumberg.

He also fielded a call from an unhappy Red Hat Australia and New Zealand managing director Max McLaren.

I’m not familiar with Opes Prime Stockbroking and hadn’t seen any bashing going on, but I have trouble imaging why any Linux enthusiast would take the time to do something like that. If they did, it’s surely not indicative of the attitude of the larger Linux community. Looking at the history, the company seems like a prime target for the Oracle product anyway. First, they weren’t even a Red Hat customer. They had acquired the licenses through Dell, which means Dell provides the first level of support…not RHT. Second, the company has a very small number of servers, but is a heavy Oracle user (both database and application server). If this story is true, and isn’t the result of some misguided astroturfing, I hope it doesn’t end up reflecting poorly on the greater ecosystem. The level of professionalism I have seen recently in the Open Source realm is second to none. It’s a shame when a disingenuous few tarnish the hard earned reputation of most.

–jeremy

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