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?

Because not everyone wants to be locked into Oracle's ecosystem play. For those who want best-of-breed, they're already looking at JBoss. This will only accelerate adoption. In fact, take a look at JBoss downloads today:

(Credit: Sourceforge)

JBoss downloads for today - remember, I'm typing this at 9:30 AM PST - are nearing the number they normally hit in a single day, and that's within the first few hours of the day.

Is this good for Oracle? Absolutely. Is it a great boon for open source? Emphatically so.

[aperepel]

Matt, I wouldn't be so sure. PST is 'closing' the day wrt timezones. While much of the IT today originates in the valley, those consuming it are outside. Sure, there's an increased interest in JBoss with the news, but I wouldn't call it a spike.

[Matt Asay]

True enough that a few hours does not a trend make. Let's watch it over the next few days. I'm betting that BEA customers that have been on the fence about leaving just got their eviction notice.

[Savio.Rodrigues]

Interesting,

JBoss is getting an average of ~5k downloads per day....not much different from the ~5k downloads that Apache Geronimo is getting. Switch to the monthly download view and you'll see the huge spike in the summer around the same time that [1] Geronimo was JEE 5 certified (which JBoss has yet to do) and [2] JBoss announced their move to the Fedora model....some customers/developers are willing to move to save cash, while others stay put to save time.

http://people.apache.org/~vgritsenko/stats/projects/geronimo.html#Downloads

Re. BEA customers on the fence...I'm sure they'll be getting a call from IBM WebSphere :-) More on this after we announce results tomorrow.

[slaboure]

C'mon Savio...

We announced the change of model in April 2007, your spike starts from October-06 to February-07 with the Mx release cycle and resumes in June... Furthermore, given we haven't released EE5 yet, our minor releases are very stable, which in turns mean many people don't have a great incentive to download new versions (unlike with your Mx cycle). So you should try to put all of this in perspective as this is something you have shown very much able to do when you speak about FOSS.

Note: the 2 minutes I spent on this reply exhaust the monthly quota I've decided to allocate to the competitive threat that Geronogo represents :) Need to go now.

Onward,


Sacha

[Matt Asay]

True enough, the downloads and project activity are up. Not as high as I would have expected, but I do believe (at least in the short term) that this is a win for JBoss/Red Hat (and for WebSphere, to Savio's point). There will be FUD of BEA's own doing that will drive customers away in the near term. Long term, however, Oracle may have a compelling story to keep BEA customers with them.