Sun Taken by Oracle

Sun Microsystems, creator of the highly popular and successful internet technology, Java has been taken in merger by the database giant, Oracle. This acquisition, announced in April of 99 (Roe, 2010) has gone through all the channels, and is official as of January 27, 2010 (Oracle, 2010). It is somewhat hard to believe that the company responsible for Java is gone, leaving nothing but its technological fingerprints for another company to capitalize on, but Sun is no more. Oracle holds Java now. What will they do with it?

It was in 1995 that Java was first released as Java. Since then, Java has exploded into many areas of online and industrial uses (Oracle, n.d.). The trick that Java had, that other languages did not, is a little something called a Virtual Machine. Java language programs where not designed to run on hardware, but on software that was written for any targeted platform. Write the virtual machine for a platform, and any Java program would run on that platform, without porting or recompiling the Java program. This made Java a great web language, and new platform for games, business software, and mobile phones.

Oracle is probably best known for database solution software, although they are in a variety of markets. They have a professional collaboration software suite called ‘Beehive’, beside E-business solutions and a wide range of other technologies that they have acquired in the past few years by other mergers and intellectual property deals (Brown , 2009) (Brodkin, 2007). Their software has a large customer base in the telecommunications, financial, and health care industries (Oracle, 2010). Now with the acquisition of Sun, they have a new slogan, “Software. Hardware. Complete. (Oracle, 2010)”

With more than a dozen acquisitions, mergers, and intellectual property deals by Oracle in the past few years (Brown , 2009) (Brodkin, 2007), why is the new slogan ‘Complete’ with this acquisition of Sun Microsystems? The answer is Java. “[Java] is the most important software Oracle has ever acquired (Guseva, 2010) “. Several of Oracle’s software products are rooted in Java technology (Oracle, 2010). They have vowed in press releases to continue developing Java, with a large sum devoted to research and development for the next incarnations of the technology (Guseva, 2010). I have no doubt that Oracle will try to curve Java in a direction that makes their other solutions easier to develop, and implement.

The Java buzz has died down in the past half decade, with other technologies landing on the internet. Could this new spark of development funds push Java abilities back into the spotlight? What new abilities will Java have when Oracle is finished with this next Java push? Whatever Oracle comes up with, Java will be back in the spotlight. Only time will tell if they destroy, or enhance it.

Resources:

Brodkin, J. (2007, October 12). Oracle's 12 acquisitions since january 2007 . Retrieved from http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/101207-oracle-acquisitions.html

Brown , B. (2009, April 20). Before Sun: oracle's recent acquisitions. Retrieved from http://www.cio.com/article/491362/Before_Sun_Oracle_s_Recent_Acquisitions?page=1 &taxonomyId=3112

Guseva, I. (2010, February 18). Oracle + sun: what it means for content management. Retrieved from http://www.cmswire.com/cms/enterprise-cms/oracle-sun-what-it-means-for- content-management-006561.php

Oracle. (2010, February). Oracle website. Retrieved from http://www.oracle.com/us/

Oracle, . (n.d.). The Java history timeline. Retrieved from http://www.java.com/en/javahistory/timeline.jsp

Roe, D. (2010, January 22). Oracle gets eu thumbs-up for sun acquisition. Retrieved from http://www.cmswire.com/cms/enterprise-cms/oracle-gets-eu-thumbsup-for-sun- acquisition-006483.php