My OperaOracle, Sun and me
Friday, April 24, 2009 3:25:00 PM
"Oracle to buy Sun", that's one of the most breaking news in IT world. Together with Oracle, IBM, HP, Sun Microsystem is one of the biggest IT firms, especially on Java based platform and server hardware market. i Obviously, that was the big deal of some of big enterprises that marked a significant change in not only in "closed" source software but also open source community.
"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."
Because I invested a lot of time and money on Java based technology stack which is one of the most important core of big integrated system, so this acquisition brings my attention to 2 main questions, "What's the future of Java and its related technology?" and "What will happen to IT market?"
The first question "What's the future of Java and its related technology?", that's one of certain main discussions that I've found on coderach.com, an Java specialist forum. Obviously, Java, with its power,now is heart of many enterprise solutions, especially IBM, Oracle ... With the open platform like Java, many implementation vendor can build their own system on top of without any license restriction, in the other way, Java likes an innovation engine of IT world. Oracle which's famous in making money from acquired product by excellent sale makes people be aware of Java and Java related technology. Indeed, I don't think this acquisition have a negative effect on Java future. But the good news is , with the "open" characteristic, Java now is not depend on any specific vendor Furthermore, along with the "open source" wave, some big enterprise like IBM, or even Microsoft started investing on open source software. One more thing, Java, J2ME and J2EE are still profitable. So it's very unlikely to say that Java and this open architecture would be stop enhancing and developing. However, every story has 2 sides, some of Sun project like NetBeans, JavaFx or acquired project like MySQL or OpenOffice would be suffer from "Oracle to buy Sun" news. Oracle already has some strong products in their field, NetBeans vs JDeveloper, MySQL vs Oracle database or Sun's product is not profitable enough like OpenOffice or JavaFx. My concern is just only MySQL, the cheap and open database solution for many current website, which have thousands of thousand deployment instances, my favorite database. Somehow, MySQL is now "TheirSQL". If it went bad, maybe we have to replace LAMP (Linux + Apache + MySQL + PHP) with LAPP (Linux + Apache + PostgreSQL + PHP),
just kidding. But in fact, I'm afraid of its future, it's not bright enough. Another concern is Sun certification system, because of wide-range of Java application, Sun certificate is some of necessary qualification of a computer engineer, and I'm not an exception. In In fact, I've got 4 Sun certs, SCJP, SCWCD, SCBCD, SCJWSD so it would be affect from this dramatic change. According to BEA Weblogic experienced, i think that these certificates still have certain positive influences on career ladder, even their name would be replace by OCJP, OCWCD, OCBCD, OCJWSD, so it's not pretty much thing to be afraid.
So let's move to next question "What will happen to IT market?". Mostly, Sun is consider as hardware firm and Oracle is software firm. With this acquisition, Oracle would be well served
"In this final scenario, we have enterprise customers running applications written for an Oracle-managed language platform, running on an Oracle-branded application server, which communicates with an Oracle database on Oracle-branded servers that talk to Oracle-branded storage hardware running an Oracle file system on an Oracle OS." -- Neil McAllister, Infoworld.
Obviously, this final scenario is so trivial. Oracle becomes an important competitor in server hardware market. With their excellent sale nature, I think it would make a significant increment of Solaris and SPARC server. It's not easy because of Linux OS and x86 architecture influences, but it's worth trying. Some guys said that now software engineer should take this chance to study .NET framework, and we should understand both bank of the river. However with the billion lines of code of ERP system written in Java, I think it would rather an April fool joke than a realistic trend. About, the open source community, i think this merge has some effect but not much. Oracle, beside their commercial software, still provide some open source implementation like TopLink .... Moreover, open source is not a trend anymore, now it becomes the innovation wave, and profitable also. So that,it's so hard to believe that this engine can be stopped by this acquisition, just certain slightly effect, i think
Finally, I'm just a little bit upset about Sun's closing. In fact, Sun with their vision "The network is the computer" made the significant change in IT world. Their vision is the incentive of Dotcom era. Even though fine grained technology is not always the key of success, what Sun has done is respectable. Hope that with Sun's assets, Oracle can improve and support Java community to reach the brighter future
Btw, about this acquisition, hope this won't happen:
Sun = Great products, Poor marketing
Oracle = Mediocre products, Excellent Marketing
Oracle + Sun = Great Mediocre products with excellent poor marketing
"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."
Because I invested a lot of time and money on Java based technology stack which is one of the most important core of big integrated system, so this acquisition brings my attention to 2 main questions, "What's the future of Java and its related technology?" and "What will happen to IT market?"
The first question "What's the future of Java and its related technology?", that's one of certain main discussions that I've found on coderach.com, an Java specialist forum. Obviously, Java, with its power,now is heart of many enterprise solutions, especially IBM, Oracle ... With the open platform like Java, many implementation vendor can build their own system on top of without any license restriction, in the other way, Java likes an innovation engine of IT world. Oracle which's famous in making money from acquired product by excellent sale makes people be aware of Java and Java related technology. Indeed, I don't think this acquisition have a negative effect on Java future. But the good news is , with the "open" characteristic, Java now is not depend on any specific vendor Furthermore, along with the "open source" wave, some big enterprise like IBM, or even Microsoft started investing on open source software. One more thing, Java, J2ME and J2EE are still profitable. So it's very unlikely to say that Java and this open architecture would be stop enhancing and developing. However, every story has 2 sides, some of Sun project like NetBeans, JavaFx or acquired project like MySQL or OpenOffice would be suffer from "Oracle to buy Sun" news. Oracle already has some strong products in their field, NetBeans vs JDeveloper, MySQL vs Oracle database or Sun's product is not profitable enough like OpenOffice or JavaFx. My concern is just only MySQL, the cheap and open database solution for many current website, which have thousands of thousand deployment instances, my favorite database. Somehow, MySQL is now "TheirSQL". If it went bad, maybe we have to replace LAMP (Linux + Apache + MySQL + PHP) with LAPP (Linux + Apache + PostgreSQL + PHP),
just kidding. But in fact, I'm afraid of its future, it's not bright enough. Another concern is Sun certification system, because of wide-range of Java application, Sun certificate is some of necessary qualification of a computer engineer, and I'm not an exception. In In fact, I've got 4 Sun certs, SCJP, SCWCD, SCBCD, SCJWSD so it would be affect from this dramatic change. According to BEA Weblogic experienced, i think that these certificates still have certain positive influences on career ladder, even their name would be replace by OCJP, OCWCD, OCBCD, OCJWSD, so it's not pretty much thing to be afraid.So let's move to next question "What will happen to IT market?". Mostly, Sun is consider as hardware firm and Oracle is software firm. With this acquisition, Oracle would be well served
"In this final scenario, we have enterprise customers running applications written for an Oracle-managed language platform, running on an Oracle-branded application server, which communicates with an Oracle database on Oracle-branded servers that talk to Oracle-branded storage hardware running an Oracle file system on an Oracle OS." -- Neil McAllister, Infoworld.
Obviously, this final scenario is so trivial. Oracle becomes an important competitor in server hardware market. With their excellent sale nature, I think it would make a significant increment of Solaris and SPARC server. It's not easy because of Linux OS and x86 architecture influences, but it's worth trying. Some guys said that now software engineer should take this chance to study .NET framework, and we should understand both bank of the river. However with the billion lines of code of ERP system written in Java, I think it would rather an April fool joke than a realistic trend. About, the open source community, i think this merge has some effect but not much. Oracle, beside their commercial software, still provide some open source implementation like TopLink .... Moreover, open source is not a trend anymore, now it becomes the innovation wave, and profitable also. So that,it's so hard to believe that this engine can be stopped by this acquisition, just certain slightly effect, i think
Finally, I'm just a little bit upset about Sun's closing. In fact, Sun with their vision "The network is the computer" made the significant change in IT world. Their vision is the incentive of Dotcom era. Even though fine grained technology is not always the key of success, what Sun has done is respectable. Hope that with Sun's assets, Oracle can improve and support Java community to reach the brighter future
Btw, about this acquisition, hope this won't happen:
Sun = Great products, Poor marketing
Oracle = Mediocre products, Excellent Marketing
Oracle + Sun = Great Mediocre products with excellent poor marketing
