The tech world is still buzzing about announcements by Sun Microsystems that it will acquire MySQL AB and by Oracle that it will acquire BEA Systems. The deals muddle the middleware market, according to some analysts.
Sun’s acquisition is front and center, and Sun believes it has two strategic advantages. First, it accelerates the company’s position in enterprise IT to now include the $15 billion database market. Second, it gives Sun a stake in the popular LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL Perl/Python/PHP) open-source software stack.
“MySQL’s employees and culture, along with its near ubiquity across the Web, make it an ideal fit with Sun’s open approach to network innovation,” said Jonathan Schwartz, Sun CEO and president. “And most importantly, this announcement boosts our investments into the communities at the heart of innovation on the Internet and of enterprises that rely on technology as a competitive weapon.”
With millions of global deployments, including Facebook, Google, Nokia, Baidu and China Mobile, Sun is confident MySQL will bring synergies that will change the software industry by driving new adoptions of MySQL’s open-source database in more traditional applications and enterprises. Sun is betting that integrating MySQL into its offerings will extend the commercial appeal of the open-source database.
MySQL is already widely deployed across all major computer operating systems, hardware vendors, geographies, industries and applications. More than 100 million copies of MySQL’s high-performance database have been downloaded, and an additional 50,000 copies are downloaded daily.
According to Oracle, the addition of BEA’s products and technology will significantly enhance Oracle’s Fusion middleware software suite. By acquiring BEA assets, including its WebLogic application server products, Oracle looks to enhance its position as a provider of unified middleware solutions for enterprise data centers.
Anyone who thought 2007 was the high-water mark in IT acquisitions and industry consolidation may…