Why hasn't Oracle bought anyone (or everyone) yet?
Come on! We're a few months into this market meltdown, and Oracle still hasn't bought anyone. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison was happy to buy the planet when priced at a premium, but now that there are Blue Light specials on every aisle...? Nothing.
Red Hat just dipped below $2 billion. Novell is under $1.5 billion. And that's just the Linux companies.
How about applications? Oracle has failed to make much of a dent on the Enterprise Content Management market, so why not buy Open Text? It can be had for $1.5 billion. Or why not pick up a winning storage (and ECM) business like EMC for a mere $20 billion?
Yes, Oracle's stock price has been hit by the market downturn, but Oracle is at the top of its game, and it has billions of dollars in cash. I'm surprised it hasn't sunk its teeth into a range of companies by now. Perhaps it's just waiting for good deals to become outrageously good deals?
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
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If you've ever been an Oracle customer, you'd recognize that their core relational database is a solid product. It's bloated, and can be fragile in some configurations, but once it's properly configured it scales predictably and a predictably reliable. Beyond that, however, Oracle has features that go above and beyond a simple RDBMS and *nobody* -- save for the person that actually coded it -- has any idea how it works; it's not documented, and their professional services probably know less than the customer about those features (which somehow bubble up to marketing and sales before it reaches professional services).
Many of the features, once you understand they are there, elicit a reasonable "why did you do that?". And, if you've ever been subjected to their applications... well, for the world's largest database company to absorb and regurgitate such atrocious software is clearly a point of embarrassment for them. Those of you that use their time-tracking or purchasing software will know what I'm talking about.
The fact of the matter is that Oracle is strictly a one-trick pony. When Larry Ellison and his crew take a step out of the rarified air of the corporate RDBMS, they are corporately clueless and inept.
Oracle bought Stellent as its ECM offering. It may consider it more prudent to invest in this product rather than buying something similar.
- by ShaunRConnolly November 18, 2008 11:07 AM PST
- Oracle recently acquired Primavera; project and portfolio management. Not open source, but a significant acquisition nonetheless. I worked at Primavera from 1988 - 2000 and still play poker with some of the team. It should be a good fit for them at Oracle.
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