[Info-vax] Should Oracle buy OpenVMS?

[Alan Winston - SSRL Central Computing]

In article <49ee73b7$0$90266$14726298 at news.sunsite.dk>, =?ISO-8859-15?Q?Arne_Vajh=F8j?= <arne at vajhoej.dk> writes:
>Tom Linden wrote:
>> On Tue, 21 Apr 2009 04:20:31 -0700, Neil Rieck <n.rieck at sympatico.ca> 
>> wrote:
>>> After Oracle's purchase of Sun, it seems apparant that Oracle is
>>> serious about getting into the enterprise business. (added bonus: many
>>> academic institutions only use Sun; carefully watch the next video
>>> tour of JPL)
>>>
>>> Oracle bought RDB from DEC in the 1990s but if OpenVMS is de-
>>> emhpasized by HP then RDB is toast. Maybe HP would let OpenVMS go for
>>> something lower than the often estimated value of $4 billion -IF-
>>> Oracle agreed to buy Itanium hardware from HP for the next 3-5 years.
>>> (hey, who thought Hpq could have been enticed to kill off Alpha?)
>>>
>>> Now if I haven't convinced you so far then here is a quote from
>>> Oracle's own web site "Oracle Is the # 1 Business Software Company"
>>> http://www.oracle.com/features/hp/business-software-company.html
>>> Since OpenVMS has always been considered a business OS then having
>>> Oracle acquire the OpenVMS division of HP makes total sense.
>> 
>> I don't think Oraclew bought sun to get into the server business, and I 
>> expect they
>> may sell that off.  They were onlyt interested in seeing that MySQL 
>> didn't get into the
>> wrong hands.
>
>http://money.cnn.com/2009/04/20/markets/thebuzz/index.htm?postversion=2009042014
>
>has some numbers: SW sale is 600 M$ out of 12.4 B$ total sale.
>
>You do not pay 7.4 B$ to acquire 600 M$ in annual sale. They
>want the server business.

Although they talk about Java being their most important software acquisition
ever.  (Of course, anything they do to get proprietary advantage with it will
just slow Java adoption.)

>
>And besides MySQL does not compete that much with Oracle DB.
>Different segments.

I'd heard it was pushing up into the high-end web space, although presumably
more for things like high-speed display of data (news aggregation, etc) than
for transaction-dependent things directly involving money.

-- Alan