WIRED: Sometimes businesses do not need innovation: just a helping hand from a dependable partner

I’VE BEEN puzzling a little over the relatively small sound the collision of Sun and Oracle has made in the media these past few weeks; or, indeed, here in the home of both of those companies, Silicon Valley. Of course, there has been much pawing over the consequences in the technical press, and the occasional nostalgic look backward at the companies’ histories, but it has been nothing like the cacophony of analysis that follows every move of, say, Apple and Microsoft.

Why is that? Both Sun and Oracle are newsworthy enough for business section or frontpage headlines. They are multibillion- dollar businesses. They both have charismatic founders: flamboyant playboy chief executive Larry Ellison at Oracle, and Sun’s outspoken libertarian chairman, Scott McNealy. Plus Oracle’s databases and Sun’s hardware have been as vital a part of the computer revolution as Apple’s Mac or Microsoft’s Windows.

But for all publicity-seeking of their founders, Sun and Oracle’s triumphs have been in the backrooms, not in the shop windows, of the digital revolution.

Sun built the hardware that served most of the first websites – but no one who visits those sites would know it. Oracle’s databases could store your personal information a thousand times over (and probably do) without you hearing its name.

Does it affect you that these companies have merged? Only as a sign of the times.

Both Sun and Oracle’s profits have been eaten away by commoditisation.

In Sun’s case, the company suffered the double-whammy of having its high-quality server hardware market devoured by Intel/Windows machines, and its high-quality server software market killed by the rise of Linux.

Oracle has fared better, but is still finding the lower end of the database market under attack by both Microsoft’s SQL Server and open-source alternatives like MySQL and PostgreSQL.

The irony of the merger is that Sun and Oracle have each used the commodified enemies of the other as a weapon in their own marketing. To beat Sun’s operating system, Solaris, Oracle has promoted its own version of Linux. Sun bought out the company that created MySQL, and promoted it as a free competitor to Oracle’s expensive databases.

Some have worried that the merger will create a company that will walk away from these projects and deliberately starve MySQL and Linux of the resources they need. But neither MySQL nor Linux need Oracle or Sun to survive. Both are well-provided for by hundreds of other companies. The question is: can Oracle and Sun, even pooling their resources, survive these free alternatives?

For once, I think the chances are good. Both Oracle and Sun have learned, it seems, the lesson of IBM. When Microsoft and Intel together commodified IBM’s primary markets, that monolithic company learned to take advantage of its core remaining skill: integration. As its former dependable monopoly collapsed and millions of companies sprung up to take its place in the Windows environment, IBM was able to present itself as the calm selector and organiser of alternatives (rather than just the only kid on the block).

Oracle has the opportunity to do the same now. From a history of being the hardest sell in the computer industry, forcing companies to swallow its expensive database package even when they could have done perfectly well without it, Oracle-Sun now has to repackage itself, as IBM has, as the impartial arbiter, providing complete but flexible solutions.

Oracle’s recent history of acquisitions, from integrators such as BEA to niche companies such as insurance house Skywire and health services company mValent, shows a determination to be a one-stop shop.

But what it needs to do now is to background its own capabilities and start emphasising its ability to pluck solutions from a number of alternatives; and shift from Sun and Oracle’s software and hardware vendor roots into becoming a systems consultancy that can be trusted to pick the universally best combination of vendors.

Will they manage it? Perhaps the bellwether of whether Oracle can manage that transition is how it treats Java, MySQL and Sun’s other technologies. If the new combined company picks, chooses and trashes them based on how well they fit in with Oracle’s existing product range, the company is still seeing itself as a single vendor. If Oracle magically starts “recommending” MySQL to smaller companies, or continues to push Java development as an opportunity to improve the integration of software in general (as IBM did with Sun’s Java), the merged corporation may be in with a chance.

Part of that transition, sadly, is to become not just as respectable but as boring as IBM. Perhaps the lack of headlines over this merger is a good sign. Oracle, like IBM before it, and increasingly Microsoft along with it, are settling into the middle age of computer companies. They may not be as brash as they were, nor as innovative. But sometimes businesses do not need innovation: they just need a helping hand from a dependable partner to provide them with the tools they need to innovate for themselves.