Chuck Hollis just posted on the growing schism between Oracle and VMware.
Any body interested in the politics of how the IT industry is changing right now and how companies are vying for dollar-share should read it.
Here's a quote from Chuck's post that summarizes the main point:
Put differently, if you're Oracle, you don't want a really big and important strategic control point in your stack being owned by someone else.
I suspect Oracle wants to sell all the elements of a software stack as Chuck suggests, and they would like to find a product that can compete against VMware for the virtualization layer in the stack. It's not clear if Oracle will attempt to replace VMware with their Oracle VM product, but its interesting that they have avoided discussing the virtualization layer of the stack in their discussions about the Sun acquisition.
While people seem to be most interested in watching how Oracle deals with Sun's hardware business, I think their decisions surrounding virtualization software are going to have much heavier implications for Oracle and the rest of the industry. If Oracle tries to force customers to use Oracle VM by witholding support for VMWare, many customers will reject Oracle's stack - which would defintely hurt sales of Solaris, Java and their core DB products. However, if Oracle does not get their own virtualization layer product, they will lose the ability to create strong synergies between that product and Solaris/Java, which would be detrimental to their software margins.
Expect changing directions and signals out of Oracle about virtualization for the next couple years while they sort it out.
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