The End of An Era

Well folks, as you've no doubt already read in the press (Oracle's office news), Sun Microsystems ceased to exist as a separate legal entity yesterday. Sun Microsystems is now a wholly-owned subsidiary of Oracle.

And to mark the end of the era, I took a snapshot of the stock price and graph over Sun's history...

Hmmm, I wonder when the Dot Com boom was :-)

It's such a shame to see such an innovative company being swallowed up, but as Larry Ellison (I think, but I could be wrong) pointed out: Sun was brilliant at innovating, just not so good at selling. If Oracle's commitments to investing in R&D continue over the long term, I think we may finally see Sun innovations becoming noticed by the world at large as-and-when they happen and actually making someone (Oracle) a shed load of money, and who knows, maybe Oracle WILL become the new IBM.

What is quite impressive is the speed at which Oracle is working to integrate Sun into their business. The sun.com home page already redirects to oracle.com and the old Sun product pages have taken on an Oracle look in as much as logos and some colours have all be updated to those used by Oracle. My mailbox is also slowly filling up with emails from Oracle :-) I suppose this isn't really too surprising given the number of acquisitions Oracle has performed and their reputation for wrapping things up quickly and efficiently.

From my initial investigations, and this is purely speculatory based on the Oracle/Sun sites, it looks like Oracle will be keeping the Sun brand name for all hardware, but all software will become known as "Oracle <whatever>", for example Solaris is now "Oracle Solaris".

Anyway, as a Sun employee (I can't call myself an Oracle employee just yet), I'm looking forward to the integration and the ride ahead. Provided Oracle keeps it's promises, cuts the ineffectual people and products from Sun and succeeds in making this acquisition a profitable one, I think we (the Oracle we) will have a rosy and very prosperous future. Watch out IBM.