Sun's MySQL Will Continue Oracle Relationship

Despite a new owner and the potential for more competition in the future, MySQL and Oracle will continue to work together.

When MySQL AB was bought by Sun Microsystems (NSDQ: JAVA), some knowledgeable observers said the first thing Sun would do is make MySQL free of its dependence on Oracle (NSDQ: ORCL).

MySQL incorporated the InnoDB transaction storage system as part of its database system, then Oracle acquired its Finnish parent company, Innobase Oy, in October 2005. "Look for Sun to do more and more to make MySQL free of any third parties," said Raven Zachary, open source analyst with the 451 Group, in an interview at the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco.

But Zack Urlocker, the executive VP of products, who supervises both engineering and marketing at MySQL, says such independence is still viewed as unnecessary inside Sun. Urlocker appeared on a panel on the state of the open source database market. Seated nearby was Ken Jacobs, VP of product strategy at Oracle.

MySQL's strength has been in its ability to serve Web pages, and many Web applications are built with MySQL as the database of choice in the background. Oracle aspires to be the database of future applications as well, including Web applications, and it's conceivable the two eventually will come into more direct competition.

But Urlocker says that doesn't mean MySQL can't keep using InnoDB. "We've always had a very good relationship with Oracle," he said after the panel concluded.

"It's absolutely a fact. We've always had a very good relationship," affirmed Jacobs, one of the original employees of Oracle, who helped establish Oracle with the federal government from its new Washington office in 1981.

MySQL isn't ready to announce anything yet, but the way Urlocker and Jacobs exchanged meaningful glances, it was as if to say they're ready to sign a multiyear continuation of their agreement.

Meanwhile, another third-party piece of software on which MySQL used to depend, the SolidDB for MySQL that was under the sponsorship of IBM (NYSE: IBM), has been pushed off to SourceForge. Dhiren Patel, IBM's community relations manager for the overall SolidDB project, announced that IBM had acquired SolidDB in December for its in-memory database, technology that will help it compete with Oracle TimesTen.

"This in-memory technology, and not Solid's open source offering, was the key driver behind IBM's acquisition. As a result, I regret to inform you that, effectively immediately, we will not be continuing further development on SolidDB for MySQL," he wrote March 3, six days after Sun completed the MySQL deal.

The open source community around SolidDB for MySQL will be free to continue work on the project, and the developer forums and bug tracking have been migrated to SourceForge as well, Patel noted.

Urlocker said both Jacobs and Charles Phillips, Oracle's president, have assured him of continued, unfettered access to InnoDB. MySQL, initially developed as a read-only database, gets its key transaction handling characteristics from InnoDB and SolidDB for MySQL.

Author: Charles Babcock @ www.informationweek.com

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Will Oracle Cut Deals to Boost Earnings?

A head of a consulting firm that helps Oracle customers cut licensing deals with the enterprise software giant said Friday that fallout around Oracle's recent earnings announcement could help clients out at the bargaining table.

"If Oracle is posting fantastic numbers and growth, they tend to play hardball," said Ed Ramirez, president of Software Licensing Consultants, a San Ramon, California, firm. "If earnings are weak, perception is weak, that's good for end users and customers."

Oracle said Wednesday that its third-quarter revenues were up 21 percent to US$5.3 billion compared to the same quarter last year. On the surface, the numbers looked strong, especially in light of the widespread malaise in the U.S. economy, but Oracle still fell slightly short of analysts' estimates and its stock dropped in subsequent days this week.

But Eliot Arlo Colon, president and chief operating officer of Miro Consulting, an Oracle license consulting firm in Fords, New Jersey, didn't go quite as far as Ramirez. "It provides notice to clients that there's a weakness with Oracle," he said. "It gets them excited that maybe there's a possibility for a bigger discount. I don't know if that will play to getting huge concessions from them. It's still a case-by-case basis."

For its part, Oracle downplayed the results and said investors could expect a stronger fourth quarter. During a conference call Wednesday, the company president, Charles Phillips, said "a lot of people have annual buying cycles around our Q4. Customers think they're going to get a better deal if they wait until Q4."

But will they? The answer isn't clear-cut, according to Ramirez and Colon.
For example, while there might be a rush of discounting at the end of the fiscal year, it's difficult to predict how much, Ramirez said: "Everything is triggered by sales people not hitting their quota. In turn, their management doesn't hit their number. That is what triggers it -- it's not necessarily that Oracle as a corporation says, 'We need to do this.' It's a trickle-up effect."

Ramirez, who worked as an area sales manager at Oracle, added that the company can make concessions to customers beyond discounts, such as on various terms and conditions.

Colon offered a different caution, saying that there's far more competition for discounts during such rush periods.

"It's becoming more public that Oracle only has so much bandwidth to process larger deals at the end of the year. The message coming from Oracle field reps now is, 'Don't wait until the end of May, because I won't be able to get you the aggressive discounts.'"

"Once one big deal closes, a sales team may have hit their number and [other customers] get kicked to the second tier," he added. It might be wiser, he said, to "be the first in line, have a good story and play to the weakness of Oracle, which is that they have so many people waiting until the end of the year."

Nailing down a huge influx of complicated licensing deals can be overwhelming, even for a company the size of Oracle, Colon said. "For the first time this year, I was seeing six-figure deals missing the quarter because there wasn't enough time. That never happened in the past."

However, Oracle's sales representatives on the whole have been hard bargainers recently, Ramirez said.

"With all the acquisitions [Oracle has made] a lot of times they realize, 'Where is the customer going to go? What are their options? Before, there was a lot more competition. That's the attitude. 'Where are you going to go? We've got you.'"

Colon agreed that Oracle's buying spree has changed the landscape, but from a different perspective. His firm is now seeing clients order nothing for several months, but then buying up a slew of products at once.

"I've never seen that take off as much as it has in the last six months," Colon said. "The positioning from Oracle from all these acquisitions is, 'Now is the time to bundle and get all these things together.'"

On the flip side, customers are being emboldened, he said. "I'm seeing people asking for higher discounts and an overall lower price because they're dealing with one vendor."

Author: Chris Kanaracus @ IDG News Service

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Oracle Acquires Web Application Testing Tools

Oracle plans to integrate the Empirix Web application testing suite with its existing Enterprise Manager and Real Application Testing packages.

One day after it reported a 21 percent increase in its fiscal third quarter 2008 software revenues to $4.2 billion, Oracle announced yet another acquisition, albeit a small one.

The company announced March 27 that it has entered into an agreement to acquire the e-TEST product suite from Empirix, a company that provides voice and Web application testing and monitoring software.

Oracle plans to integrate the software with its Enterprise Manager and Real Application Testing portfolios. The combination, company officials said, is "expected to result in a comprehensive solution for testing packaged and custom built applications."

Oracle is also in the process of acquiring BEA Systems, which has substantial application development tools. The e-TEST suite will likely augment any application development capabilities in BEA.

"Customers are looking for automated application testing solutions that help prevent costly application performance problems, avoid unplanned outages of business-critical applications, and automate the manual steps involved in application testing," said Leng Leng Tan, vice president of applications and systems management at Oracle, in a statement.

"We expect that the combination of Empirix's e-TEST suite and Oracle's Enterprise Manger will create a best-of-breed systems management portfolio spanning the full application life cycle, from development and testing to production deployment and management."

Oracle did not disclose the financial terms of the deal with Empirix.

Oracle has been on a buying spree since 2005, when it acquired PeopleSoft along with JD Edwards, which PeopleSoft had acquired. Since then the company has bought more than forty companies that span database, middleware and applications development.

Ovum analyst David Mitchell said in a March 27 research note that, while Oracle's earnings call Wednesday showed some elements of the company's continued success, there are signs that the global fiscal problems are beginning to have an impact on the industry. "This makes Q4 more interesting than ever in the Oracle economy and with more at stake than ever."

Author: Renee Boucher Ferguson @ www.eweek.com

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