Oracle Agrees to Acquire Sun Microsystems - WSJ.com

Oracle Agrees to Acquire Sun Microsystems - WSJ.com: "

TECHNOLOGY APRIL 20, 2009, 4:45 P.M. ET
Oracle Agrees to Acquire Sun Microsystems
 
By DON CLARK and BEN WORTHEN

Oracle Corp. announced a deal to buy Sun Microsystems Inc. for $7.4 billion, a surprise union of software and hardware companies that emerged following failed talks for International Business Machines Corp. to buy Sun.

Oracle, which has been snapping up smaller software companies for several years, agreed to pay $9.50 a share for Sun."

(Via .)

As a CIO, I have a hard time seeing much customer benefit from this transaction unless you were committed to Oracle DB/Apps on Solaris. If I was in that camp, I'd immediately begin looking for a negotiated reduction in my maintenance expenses based on the combined spend. I'd expect a visit from my CFO as well, asking where I was in that negotiation. Particularly in this part of the economic cycle renegotiating maintenance deals is par for the course. The bigger the customer, the bigger the discount that I'd be pushing for especially if I had a significant Solaris footprint. Tough to switch databases, less so for the hardware/OS underneath. Given that, I don't see how the deal adds profit to Oracle absent significant and fast cost take-outs from Sun.

If I'm not committed to Oracle on Solaris, and in the shops I've run as CIO I never was in that group, I am worried about a variety of things. Not the least of these is the commitment to MySQL. With any kind of installed base of this open source DBMS, I'd be looking very carefully at options. Oracle pricing, particularly maintenance pricing and the (perceived, at least) de-bundling of products over time, has been a significant annoyance at best.

Will be interesting to see how this plays out. What's your take on things?

SNS "Open Letter to the Board of Directors"

SNS: A Bright Fire: ""

Mark Anderson's open letter is an excellent and thought provoking read. In my experience as a corporate officer for multiple companies over the years, the best Boards performed largely as Mark suggests. They did their homework, challenged management's assumptions and kept asking questions until they either understood or knew you didn't.

As I wrote here getting the Board relationship right is vitally important. Done well, they can be a significant ally to the CIO's efforts.

CIO Blog: 10 Steps to Successful IT

I really like Peter Birley's list for practicing successful IT. He brings up a couple of key points which are quite often missed by CIO's. No particular order but marketing your successes and working with suppliers should be no-brainers but inexplicably seem to get lost.

In my mind you have two kinds or classes of IT suppliers- partners and vendors. Partners should be a) severely limited in number and b) not only behave as a partner, never abusing the relationship but be critical to your success. The rest, sorry to say, need to be relegated to the vendor status. To me, this means they have much more limited access to you and your teams and will, by design, not be nearly as influential. A good partnership can be invaluable.

Marketing (Peter's point 10. Shout about it) is absolutely spot on. My saying here is "Bad news travels fast, good news doesn't travel at all." Just like any business you need to be letting customers and business partners know about your successes. This has the added benefit of banking political capital for use later.

Great advice from Peter!

CIO Blog: 10 Steps to Successful IT: ""

(Via .)

Latest Happenings

Can't believe it's been 2 months since the last post. I've had a number of inquiries and rather than email replies I figured it's time to post an update.

The Webinar I did for CIO.com back in January was very well received including some "best yet" comments. Much appreciated and it was fun for me as well. The gist of my message was that, particularly in tough times, there really are only a couple of key executive relationships which CIO's have to get right. You can see the presentation here. Comments and feedback, as always, are incredibly valuable!

Beyond that, I took some time off including some great skiing (though never enough) at Mt. Bachelor. I checked out some cool technology at Twinverse. I even did a bit of flying (again, not enough) in my airplane.

Started working again focusing on better defining our service offerings and building a partner network. Given our background it's no surprise that we're lining up some first rate partners in the Supply Chain space including Symbius. Others in work.

Certainly the economy is dominating most discussions though I'm finding some patches of sunlight breaking through. Finally! In general, CEO's seem willing to invest a) for a near-term return and b) with much more focus than previously, i.e. fewer investments done "right". The latter suits our mantra of "doing fewer things but doing them extraordinarily well".

Finally, we've got a CIO Forum in Seattle later this month on April 30th for breakfast. I'm excited to get the group back together and given the pressure on costs, think the speaker, John Krpan of Sierra Systems, is a great fit. Let me know if you haven't received your invitation.

How's things where you are?

By the way, you can follow me now on Twitter: pfflynn.