BI clouds gather over Oracle-Sun merger

Java is being touted as the crown jewel of Oracle's $7.4 billion acquisition of Sun Microsystems, but what are the implications for Oracle's business intelligence (BI) and data warehousing strategy? Java is now likely to play a more predominant role in Oracle's BI tools strategy going forwards. But what will happen to Oracle's BI relationship with Hewlett-Packard? And what does the future hold for the BI providers that have built solutions on the MySQL database that Oracle now owns?
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Oracle finally gets a chance to put its BI appliance strategy into second gear

By acquiring Sun, Oracle's positioning has shifted from being a pure software company to one that packages in operating systems and hardware.

This isn't exactly a new path for Oracle. The company has already met some success with its data warehousing appliance machine called Exadata, which it launched in October 2008 and co-engineered with HP.

It will now be interesting to see what the future holds for that announcement in light of HP's long-standing partnership with Oracle. When Exadata was announced, it more or less rubber-stamped HP's status as Oracle's preferred server (ProLiant), storage (StorageWorks) and operating system (HP-UX - as well as Linux) partner.

Will Sun's hardware and operating system now match or muscle out HP in Oracle's BI strategy? While there's no doubting the raw muscle of Sun's hardware (it can scale just as much as HP's can), what's unclear is how Oracle can manage the real gorilla in its midst - a real hardware business?

Sun also had its own data warehouse appliance initiative in conjunction with Greenplum and PostgreSQL. The writing is probably on the wall for that product offering. Instead we expect Oracle to use its Sun assets to deliver a much bigger end-to-end BI and data warehouse appliance go-to-market push in the near future, using Sun's hardware to create highly tuned, highly optimised appliances for the running of Oracle databases, application servers and Fusion applications - that is, of course, if Oracle doesn't decide to offload Sun's hardware and storage business, perhaps even to HP, as some have speculated.

BI partners will have to consider MySQL's future under Oracle's wing

Another implication to consider is the role of MySQL in Oracle's portfolio. When Sun bought MySQL it was at best a peripheral player in the BI market, lacking the commitment that's recently been shown by HP. Admittedly MySQL has done nothing to change. However, it did give Sun a competitive and popular database to take a first tentative step into the BI space.

MySQL is part of the BI landscape by virtue of the partnerships it maintains with several big-name BI vendors - notably SAP BusinessObjects, which bundles the open source database as a default repository with its BI toolset. MySQL (along with PostgreSQL) also fits into the open source BI plays of vendors such as Pentaho.

However, Oracle has followed a pragmatic, rather than religious, approach to open source. Under Oracle, MySQL might potentially get better support. However, it also has to compete not only against PostgreSQL but also against Oracle's own open source offerings in Berkeley DB and InnoDB.

Therefore, knowing what to do with MySQL might be Oracle's biggest challenge. It can't simply kill it off - the database is too popular among developers and users. Instead it might see MySQL as a springboard to getting community customers onto its own commercial database and BI offerings.

Oracle might also leverage MySQL as part of an 'express' BI play, which might be bundled with some Sun offerings to provide an open source entry-level database/middleware/SOA stack for smaller customers. Therefore, we might see MySQL start to appear in entry-level BI products from Oracle - or even have Oracle BI support MySQL in its low-end focused BI SE One offering for SMBs.

BI and analytics providers (and Sun partners) such as Infobright, Kickfire, ParAccel, Greenplum Calpont and others that have made a living by throwing their hats into MySQL's lot or run on Sun's hardware will now have to rethink their position. While it's possible that Oracle might continue to support MySQL, as it has done with the last two open source projects that it acquired, we believe that these vendors should look to re-align with alternatives such as Percona or Maria DB, or even other large hardware vendors.

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BY Madan Sheina
Source：ovum

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