This post continues from my last five posts on Oracle Corp (ORCL), Red Hat (RHAT), and Novell (NOVL) : All eyes on Oracle’s next Acquisition, Red Hat hassles Oracle Corp's Boss, Oracle Corp Rethinking Alliance with Red Hat, Oracle Corp's interest in Novell, and Is Oracle Corp. really interested in Novell?
It is quite possible that Ellison's talk of interest in Novell was to fend off encroachment by other players such as Red Hat on Oracle's core business in Databases.
Competitive Posturing may thus have been the real reason of Larry Ellison's talk about Novell.
Economic Times reported on April 18th:
Open-source is growing in popularity because it allows customers to use applications for free and only pay for custom features, maintenance and support, cutting the cost of traditional software....Oracle, which has long used open source to build some of its own software products, has in recent months sought to become more of a broker among various camps within the open-source movement, through acquisitions and partnerships.
Among publicly traded companies, Red Hat Inc. is the leading open source company, followed by Novell Inc Scores of companies from Oracle and IBM to privately held players, such as MySQL and Zend, also play in the market.
Ellison said his company had considered acquiring Novell Inc as a way to build on growing demand for open-source software that allows programmers to quickly build Web applications....Novell, Red Hat and Oracle declined to comment on Ellison's comments.
But analyst Barnacle said buying Novell would present Oracle with a host of organizational challenges. Instead, he believes Ellison's comments were a shot across the bow to companies such as Red Hat that are creeping closer to Oracle's core database business.
Deal-making in the industry has heated up since Oracle purchased open-source database software maker Sleepycat and Red Hat stepped in to buy one-time Oracle target JBoss, whose products compete with those of Oracle.
Ellison said the Red Hat-JBoss deal could shake up existing alliances in the industry and potentially force his own company to become more aggressive in the Linux market.
Google may have done similar competitive posturing when it purchased Writely.
To continue...
