Oracle should acquire Red Hat: Extremely contractionary market consolidation is inevitable!

Cisco’s announcement and the latest IBM’s plan to grab Sun made me think that the time is ripe for Oracle to acquire Red Hat. I know many will disagree but let me tell you why its important:

• IBM/Sun move is enough (gossip is enough as well actually) : Look at what it means, IBM, if it does indeed buy Sun, will have access to the most popular database on the planet for the consumers and since it is the consumer market everyone is actually heading for, this might be a good move to go after the inexpensive (read: free) middleware stuff (JBoss) which Oracle shunned sometime back. They did too realize the importance of that move by Red Hat and when ahead and moved over to go full blown with the OEL and later all packaged deals to ship pre-packaged Oracle ELs. Time to take heed and get on with it.
• Contractionary market consolidation in the offing: We’ve had a great 2008, sans the last quarter  prepare for a rough 2009/2010: Best is to merge and make things better, expand your customer base, do reorg and re-shuffle with the figures and eventually keep delivering the share-holder value (which in a way is worthless as managers/execs should make moves with the strategic intent - exactly like Cisco did and which Jack Welch endorses, rather than intended strategy where you first paint some crappy hockey stick lines and end up dead). Go ahead and do it.
• Virtualization market - mega grab opportunity: So Oracle has to be a player that has almost all versions at home. Oracle VM running on Sen, and soon enough the more popular KVM as well. Red Hat has KVM, Red Hat got Qumranet/SolidIce, a really cool Desktop option and soon it will/can go for the massive landgrab. Oracle VM was a great start, go for gold now! And do ensure that you are also making our presence felt! Go after the virtualization market as a whole, you have the weight and don’t just limit yourself to the Oracle VM scale.
• Get promiscuous, go to virtualization events: Oracle has the greatest databases on the planet (BTW: I come from Oracle RDBMS background myself) but that may not be enough, go for the events, stand at VMworld, make friends where necessary, co-operate where ou can and fight everywhere!
• Time is ripe, figures are good: The time now is ripe and the figures are still good, get above and jump up on the uptrend while you are at it and just avoid that downtrend. No need to wait for weaker firms or firms that have weaken. Go talk to them and get the facts across. There is a lot of open source complementary business, where Red Hat has learned to build business on top of open source, a place where Sun failed to deliver in time or lets put it this way: “The economy screwed up Sun’s open source plans”.

Conclusion: Market consolidation will not be hard but also painful; competition will not be hard, it will be killing; fight and search for new business will not be hard, it might seem impossible and finally waiting and turning around a company in crisis (a place where Oracle isn’t there yet) will not only be impossible, it could mean death for many big names in the tech sector. Oracle is sound and has a sound business, but the ideation-age will be an acid test for many and not every one will come out of it alive.

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