HP to Acquire Info Management Software Firm Autonomy

I've been a little perplexed by some of the recent HP moves, but this one makes a lot of sense to me. Any large IT vendor has to provide a complete set of integrated IT management, automation and security software to its customers. The datasets generated by enterprise applications are growing so large that software built by companies like Autonomy, Vertica (acquired earlier this year by HP as well), Greenplum (acquired by EMC) is becoming mission critical.The market for unstructured data is getting bigger, and Oracle is the only one that hasn't made a move yet.

HP to Acquire 3Com

HP is buying its way into the edge by acquiring 3Com. The acquisition makes sense in order to offer a complete edge-to-the-data-center solution. HP and Cisco have been on a collision course for some time now and this purchase is accelerating things. Read this blog entry from Cisco.
What it means for the other network equipment providers? Nokia Siemens, Juniper, Alcatel-Lucent. Is there room for independent network equipment providers to the enterprise market. Let's watch IBM and Oracle's next move.

It seems to me that the network and the applications will meet somewhere in the cloud and IT giants are positioning themselves accordingly. I need to draw another triangle that would show the infrastructure supporting my first triangle. The developer community should be the focus for all these IT companies to develop a vibrant, interoperable ecosystem. Google and Apple are doing exactly see with their platforms. Equipment providers

Oracle To Acquire Sun Microsystems For $7.4 Billion

It's sad to see an independent company like Sun Microsystems being acquired but Oracle is probably a better acquirer than IBM and this acquisition has a high probability of success.

First, there is no hardware overlap. The OS and hardware from Sun will create a lot of synergies for Oracle as they will be able to offer completely integrated (hardware and software) solutions to their customers. The goal here is to reduce the costs of integration. I'm still amazed that IT teams have to spend money (directly or through integrators) to install and configure operating systems, middleware and enterprise software packages. I've heard that Oracle is only acquiring Sun for Java. I don't think it's the case. IBM and HP are Oracle's competitors and Oracle needs hardware to fight them in the marketplace.

Second, these are two bay area companies with similar cultures, much easier to integrate. They have been partners for over 20 years. They have developed joint call centers, and engineers and marketers on each side are very familiar with the other company's portfolio. It's probably not a good example to bring back to the table but Sun and Oracle were viewed as two of the four horsemen of the new economy back in 2000.

There is a risk that software vendors who competing against Oracle in the enterprise software area, stop supporting the Sun HW platform. Interesting challenge for the market development teams!

Evolution of the Data Center

As I am looking at the triangle to explain the transformations happening around content, networks, and devices I can't help thinking about the other changes happening in the IT industry. Is one driving or enabling the other?

In the past, I talked about utility or cloud computing and it seems that cloud computing is becoming the new buzz word. It is true that content providers, service providers and network infrastructure manufacturers believe in the same shared network service architecture. Cloud computing meets all the scalability, reliability, flexibility and performance (one could argue with this last one :-) required to deliver these services over the web.

Big players like Sun, Microsoft, IBM, HP, Oracle and Amazon are already offering cloud computing services to other companies to run their software. Like email and web hosting in the past, this is not for everyone. Large companies still see their data centers as a competitive weapon and won't let anyone running it outside their four walls. They are using the same convergent infrastructure (server, storage, software) to make their own data centers much more flexible but it will be a while before they transition. This explains the success of VMware ($700M of revenue can't lie).

In the meantime, more cash-sensitive companies will buy computing resources on the web to run some of their software (or buy the service outright from salesforce.com). The data center is evolving to better server the business model outlined in the triangle.