The Role of Customer Data in Oracle, Sun Deals

Remember when Oracle was a database vendor and Sun Microsystems sold workstations? Yes, you can still buy Oracle 11g or a Sun Ultra. However, last week’s big deals — Oracle’s $8.5 billion buyout of BEA Systems and Sun’s $1 billion deal for MySQL — remind us that the days when vendors fit into tidy niches are long gone. They should remind us of something more fundamental, too. On the surface, both deals just look like more IT industry consolidation. In Sun/MySQL, Sun gets the open source database it’s been hunting for since early 2005, plus some 10 million customers.