IBM the loser in Oracle-Sun deal

Recently, IBM attempts to buy over Sun Microsystems for US$7 billion end up with nothing. However, this move might have catalysed Oracle to buy over Sun with a slightly higher price of US$7.4 billion or US$9.50 per share, which just materialized yesterday (20 April 2009) and becomes today's big news.

With this acquisition, Oracle is now extended its domains in IT field from a leading database, middleware and business applications player, to include operating system (Solaris), office suite (OpenOffice.org), application platform (Java), virtualization (VirtualBox), thin clients (Sun Ray), servers, processors & chips (SPARC), storage solutions, accessories, etc.

"The acquisition of Sun transforms the IT industry, combining best-in-class enterprise software and mission-critical computing systems," said Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. "Oracle will be the ONLY company that can engineer an integrated system - applications to disk - where all the pieces fit and work together so customers do not have to do it themselves. Our customers benefit as their systems integration costs go down while system performance, reliability and security go up."

Now, Oracle has the well diversified software and hardware capabilities covering almost every angle in the system integration aspect, to rival IBM business as IT giant. IBM is not only a loser in Sun acquisition, but also lost its competitive advantage with the emergence of another full-fledged giant competitor in the IT industry.

Meanwhile, by gaining the control to MySQL, Oracle can also dominate the database world with its enterprise-class Oracle DBMS popular for large scale systems, and MySQL popular for web applications and comparatively smaller scale systems. This will no doubt bringing direct impact to competitors such as Microsoft SQL, Sybase, etc. Again, IBM is a loser as its DB2 will face more fierceful competition.

The world's IT industry has no doubt somewhat shakened by this Oracle-Sun deal. Will there be more mergers and acquisitions, or perhaps alliances formation? Let's wait and see...