Oracle Phase III Consolidation : Across The Stack Offer Services On Demand

As an extension of oracle’s consolidation strategy (may be this should be called phase III, given that recently we heard of a Phase II that has sprung up recently ) in the FT interview, Larry shares his aspiration to build and sell an end-to-end software stack – starting from OS to verticalised apps. The idea is that even in a SOA centric loosely coupled world, unified databases, messaging , workflow would be amore desired compared to bringing together point solutions – typically best-in-the-breed. This essentially means that in the stack space where Oracle is not present, namely at the OS level, we can see it moving –One attractive way is to buy Novell and adopt SuSe Linux. In a way Larry could deliver a punch to Jboss & Redhat – a day before the Jboss acquisition happened, I heard rumors that Novell could be considering buying it. Larry says quite perceptively, "Now that Red Hat competes with us in middleware, we have to re-look at the relationship – so does IBM. I don’t think Oracle and IBM want another Microsoft in Red Hat". (It is not IBM's or Oracle's birthright to dominate the middleware space!!) He adds that he was pushing Oracle further into hosting software on behalf of customers, relying on regular subscription payments rather than upfront revenue.Lets look at this further – this means that if and when Oracle Fusion is rolled out, there can be an offering for hosting solutions that covers the entire stack, in a manner precanned, frozen and certified, so to say. Then what happens to all the mouthwatering annual maintenance revenue stream – many acquisition were justified based on this stream of revenue and would customers be comfortable in locking their entire IT infrastructure & applications with ONE VENDOR AND HAVE IT HOSTED. License model goes, in comes service model and transaction based pricing.. This way what happens to the existing customers and the new customers/prospects who could be considering oracle solutons between now and the day when this grandiose vision becomes reality. Well in an ideal world anything can happen and in a real world everybody can dream and call it a vision.

Category :Oracle, Emerging Trends, Emerging Technologies