Larry Ellison's Oracle has spent $7.4bn buying Sun Microsystems.  It's no secret that Sun has been up for sale for a while with IBM the initial suitor.  Now Oracle has done the deed and the world has changed.

How will this affect those of us in direct marketing?

Firstly, Sun Solaris is the preferred operating system for Oracle - so no surprise that there was interest on that front.  Oracle now have the ability to produce "appliances" that combine ideal software and hardware combinations and that could be a major push for against Microsoft for scalable solutions. 

Ellison quoted Solaris and the programming language Java as the primary drivers for the deal.

Java is the programming language behind many developments, and importantly for marketers behind many web sites.  Currently Java is open-source and that means free - Oracle aren't well known for selling free software so it is an open questions as to whether they may start charging for it in future - that would certainly change the dynamics a bit. 

The other common technology for web site creation is ASP.NET from Microsoft - if you want to run that software you are forced down the Microsoft track, needing their operating system and Internet Information Server to produce web sites.  Java's big selling point has always been that you can run software written using it on many different operating systems including those produced by Microsoft, if Oracle were to change this it might forced many people off Microsoft and onto an Oracle owned platform - there would certainly be commercial drivers for this, but perhaps a little far fetched in the near term.

Sun have been the bastion of the open source community - they were keen to sell their hardware and provide powerful software effectively for free.

Oracle are now the proud owners of Star Office, the only real open source competitor to Microsoft's Office range - not something mentioned in dispatches, but surely a platform for further encroaching into Microsoft's domination of the desktop.

For me the most important "unmentioned" part of the acquisition is MySQL - bought by Sun a little over a year ago for $1bn, but previously a target of Oracle who at one point offered $850m for the open source database that has 11m installations worldwide.  Oracle have a problem getting into the mid market with their highly performant and complex database offering - MySQL could be the foundation of a new push from Oracle. 

Currently SQL Server from Microsoft is the commercial database that most easily fits the mid market space and Microsoft have been successsful in finding in roads into the back office using it. 

MySQL gives Oracle the chance of competing in this coveted space and may perhaps create a commercial product from the source code.  Currently MySQL only generates about $60m in support revenues,

A commercial Oracle driven database in the mid market space would open up lots of possibilities for direct marketers wanting to build robust, scalable marketing databases and would really open the market to competition.  Currently many organisations cannot afford the high costs of Oracle licenses and are forced to choose other routes.

When the MySQL purchase completed there were rumours that Oracle money was behind the financing - so perhaps this downplayed part of the deal is actually more important that it looks.

There's plenty of comment out there, so if you want to read more try out this article on the tech fall out or this analysis on mycustomer.com