The Biz of Coding

Oracle Corp Rethinking Alliance with Red Hat

by Ujwal Tickoo on May 1st, 2006

This post continues from my 2 previous posts:
All eyes on Oracle’s next Acquisition Move and Red Hat hassles Oracle Corp’s Boss

Red Hat’s acquisition of JBoss has the potential of redrawing the business alliance map in the Enterprise Software and Open Source world.

A report in The Boston Globe by Hiawatha Bray about Oracle Corp’s (ORCL) interest in Novell to thwart Red Hat quoted John Rymer, a Forrestor Research Inc. analyst:

They may no longer view Red Hat as a reliable partner," Rymer said further; Red Hat could continue to build itself into a formidable rival to Oracle, possibly by buying an open source database company like MySQL AB, of Sweden. Such a move would threaten Oracle’s core database software business.

In a news story by Eric Lai in Computer World; Goldman Sach’s analyst Rick Sherlund separtely confirmed Oracle Corp’s concerns about Red Hat (RHAT):

The JBoss acquisition is a catalyst event, signaling a fundamental market repositioning for Red Hat and recent comments from Oracle confirm our concern that Oracle now views Red Hat as a competitor.

The Computer World article goes on:

IBM and Oracle had long supported Linux as a way of combating Solaris Unix vendor Sun Microsystems Inc. and the rising, lower-cost player, Microsoft Corp. But doing so helped launch Red Hat’s logical ambitions to start acquiring related technologies to offer all-in-one packages, which corporate customers prefer, wrote Sherlund. He also predicted that Red Hat will buy an open-source database and/or tools applications to round out its offerings.

To continue…

POSTED IN: JBoss, ORACLE, Red Hat, Strategy