Oracle

Ellison on a short leash in BEA merger announcement

For anyone who's ever listened to Oracle founder Larry Ellison talk about his company, or on any topic for that matter, it can be entertaining. The dude is humorous, has great punch-line timing, and at times will make outlandish comments that send his public relations team into major damage control.

So, it was painful to listen in on the company's audio Webcast (registration required) announcing its $8.5 billion acquisition of BEA Systems.

The tightly scripted press conference, which had Ellison reading off a piece a paper, conjured up images of a tiger in a tight cage. His … Read more

Oracle's acquisition of BEA is a big win for JBoss/Red Hat - the downloads don't lie

Credit Suisse is citing Oracle's acquisition of BEA Systems as a "win win across the board" in research sent out to its clients. Writes Jason Maynard:

It further diversifies Oracle's business and strengthens its competitive position....We continue to think Oracle is the best positioned enterprise software company and the most capable of handling a potential slowdown in IT spending.

Rebecca Wettemann, VP of Nucleus Research, piles on to the lovefest, arguing:

Acquiring BEA technology cements Oracle's position of leadership in the application and application integration space. While Oracle's integration story with Fusion middleware and AIA was already much stronger and "realer" than SAP's, this adds more integration expertise and technology to the portfolio.

So, good for Oracle. But it's also probably a huge boon for Red Hat and the JBoss team. Why?… Read more

Oracle acquires BEA for $8.5 billion

Apparently, Larry Ellison didn't like the idea of anyone getting more than a few minutes of press for an acquisition. Following on the heels of Sun's acquisition of MySQL, Oracle is announcing that it is buying everyone else on the planet to prevent this from happening again.

No, actually, Oracle has announced that it is buying BEA Systems for $8.5 billion. The proprietary world just got even more consolidated with less choice and higher costs for buyers.… Read more

Oracle buys BEA after all (what the heck is going on today?)

Marketwatch is reporting that Oracle finally got its hands on BEA after raising their price. Oracle agreed to lift its offer to $19.375 a share in cash, compared to the company's original bid last October of $17 a share. BEA had been holding out for $21 a share. The new proposal reflects a premium of 24% over BEA's closing price on Tuesday of $15.58. The deal also values BEA at $7.2 billion, up from Oracle's initial bid of $6.7 billion What the hell is going on out there? (Oh, and while cash prizes … Read more

SAP deadline for TomorrowNow buyers to weigh in draws near

Ever want to own a third-party enterprise applications software maintenance and support company?

Better hurry. Tuesday's the deadline to declare your interest to its owner SAP, as the deadline draws near, according to sources.

SAP, back in November, said it was considering putting TomorrowNow on the auction block, and apparently it's headed in that direction. But whether the software applications vendor ultimately selects a buyer from among TomorrowNow's competitors and new parties interested in entering the market has yet to be seen, sources said.

SAP could also just wind down the operations and let it go at … Read more

Survey finds that 66% of Oracle users never install critical patches

If security is a process, Oracle's users have checked out of the process completely. As CNET's Dawn Kawamoto reports, two-thirds of Oracle users report that they have never installed an Oracle Critical Patch Update (CPU). That's "never" as in "not ever."

The data comes from a survey of Oracle database administrators, consultants, and developers by Sentrigo. It's shocking.

Perhaps it's also a testament to the robust security of Oracle's products. Let's assume that the respondents to this survey are representative of Oracle users generally. With 66% of Oracle's databases essentially unprotected and yet rarely compromised, that says something about their quality.

Or maybe it just means that database hackers are lazy. :-)… Read more

Survey: Two-thirds users don't deploy Oracle quarterly critical patches

If you build it, will they come?

Apparently not when it comes to Oracle's quarterly Critical Patch Updates (CPUs).

Database security firm Sentrigo released some surprising numbers Monday, culled from a survey of 305 database administrators, consultants, and developers in attendance at Oracle Users Group meetings last year.

The survey found that a staggering two-thirds of respondents had never applied an Oracle quarterly CPU. Not one, nada, a big fat zero.

And of the remaining 33 percent of survey respondents who did, only 10 percent noted they had gotten around to applying Oracle's more recent CPU, or the … Read more

Event: OpSource SaaS Summit February 27-29, 2008

At the OpSource SaaS Summit last year I managed to insult some dude from Oracle repeatedly while making the point that the BigCos have yet to figure out on-demand. So far, I am still right, but the only way to tell for sure is to come to the Summit in SF and find out for yourself.

I'll be performing my antics during the Integration Behind the Fire Wall - Take II session on the 28th.

Link: OpSource SaaS Summit 2008

MySQL's Marten Mickos ushers in the New Year by looking back on the old one

Marten Mickos sent me an update on MySQL's exceptional 2007. It makes interesting points about open source, generally, while relaying important information about MySQL. Here are excerpts from the message, with his permission:

In 2007 we continued to make free and open source software available and affordable to all. MySQL version 5 was our top download hit, expanding the universe of MySQL users further into the Web2.0 and Enterprise2.0 markets. MySQL Proxy, experimentally released in 2007, garnered the attention of scale-out experts worldwide.

Our commercial offering MySQL Enterprise was significantly upgraded with improved monitoring and other services, and we launched MySQL Cluster Carrier-Grade Edition for the most demanding telecom uses. To expand our global reach, we opened a strong APAC office in Tokyo in early 2007.

What did we learn in 2007?… Read more

MySQL under siege and the likely need to "roll your own" open source

First it was Oracle buying Innobase (though Oracle has so far played fair). Now it's IBM buying Solid Information Technology. Given much of the proprietary world's public attitude toward open source ("Open source a threat? What's open source?), it's surprising that IBM would even bother to hedge its bets against MySQL.

After all, who's afraid of little MySQL? I mean, who besides everyone with a database business that depends on lock-in, overpriced licenses, and 20th Century software? Matthew Aslett doesn't think this was targeted at MySQL, and he's likely right. But it impacts MySQL all the same, as the New York Times writes:

The IBM acquisition may be seen as a setback for MySQL, since it marks the loss of independence of another company that makes a high-performance transaction engine for MySQL's database....… Read more