Oracle Finally Taking Linux Plunge?

Posted on October 23, 2006
Filed Under Companies, Open Source |

This rumor has been floating around for months, indeed, I kicked off the last cycle just a few months ago (for the record, my sources on that last rumor were some Novell executives and I triangulated it against a separate inquiry made by 2 people in the trade media - in case you wondering where rumors come from). I think that what you will find when you dig into it and talk with people who have strong Oracle sources is that this is legitimate and it’s not a matter of “if” but “when”. Ellison wants this badly to cover the one area of layer in the stack that he doesn’t have and Microsoft does, and SAP would not. The idea of a pre-configured hardware/software appliance is smart, one that these large vendors have been minting a lot of coin with.

The one question mark about timing I have was raised by Brent Thill at Citigroup when he told me to look at the agenda for OpenWorld to see how many sessions were devoted to anything at the operating system; the result is something like 23 out of the entire agenda versus over 90 for business intelligence alone, as a comparison. You would think that if they were going to introduce this at the conference there would certainly be more attention paid to it in the sessions. BTW, that’s why Brent leads research at Citi, he thinks about looking at stuff like this when almost everyone else would never have thought to.

Lastly, maybe the most compelling reason why Oracle will team up with Ubuntu is that they will get control of that billboard on 101 next to their exit on the freeway. For those of you not familiar with the area, this billboard literally has Oracle’s headquarters buildings framing the background and IBM used this billboard to poke Larry and Co. with a sharp stick for almost a decade, now Ubuntu has it.

CIO India - Oracle Finally Taking Linux Plunge?: Rumors are swirling yet again that Oracle wants to get cozier with Linux and at least one financial analyst says customers can expect a tighter Ubuntu Linux-based appliance from the database and application vendor by the end of the month. Neither Oracle nor Ubuntu could be reached for comment for this story.

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