The Village View

Tuesday, April 18, 2006

Oracle chief opens door to buying Novell

''We're missing an operating system," Ellison said. ''You could argue that it makes a lot of sense for us to look at distributing and supporting Linux."


We've been thinking that Larry wants his own LAMP stack; rumors about possible JBoss and Zend acquisitions were right in line with this hypothesis. Now it looks like he's admitting it.
This makes a lot of sense: Oracle has an 80% market share and 155% revenue growth for its db running on Linux. Not to mention 9000 developers doing product development on Linux infrastructure. Oracle Database 10g, Real Application Clusters, and Grid Control are all "optimized" to run on Linux leading to, Oracle claims, lower costs and increased ROI. I could imagine that enterprise customers would also find it beneficial to be able to purchase the entire stack from one vendor.

What I'm still uncertain about is Oracle's next move, if any, in the app/web server space (given JBoss's acquistion). Do they push, and maybe open source a version of, Oracle Application Server 10g ? Do they go after somebody else? If so, whom? Is there another commercial Geronimo project company (other than Gluecode)?

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