Todd Biske: Outside the Box

Wow, I was very surprised to come into work to find out that Oracle had agreed to acquire BEA and that Sun had agreed to acquire MySQL. Based on the reaction of many in the blogosophere, like Miko Matsumura whose Facebook status said he was “amazed by sun buying MySQL and yawning at Oracle buying BEA” not many people were surprised by the Oracle/BEA deal. I actually was a little bit surprised, simply because it felt like BEA would stick it out as an independent, and it didn’t appear that Oracle was taking its “we will get what we want no matter how long it takes” approach as it did with PeopleSoft. That’s about all the comment I’ll make on this as I try to avoid too much speculation in the vendor space in this blog, but this was too big of an event to not mention. While I chose not to do 2008 predictions this year, all of those people who picked the no-brainer of more vendor acquisitions in the SOA space can check this one off your list only 16 days into the year.

The other acquisition was one that was very surprising in so much as not many people probably saw it coming. While not in the SOA space, it certainly shows that open source is becoming more and more ingrained in Sun. This is one that’s going to take some time to digest in the blogosphere to see what people will think about it. I think being associated with a bigger name can only help MySQL. As for the benefits to Sun, we’ll see. I’ll be interested to see what others have to say about it.

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