Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Open Source Comes Under Spotlight As IBM Eyes Sun - WSJ.com

I still think it’d make more sense for HP and Oracle to jointly acquire and split up Sun

"Larger vendors, such as Hewlett-Packard Co. (HPQ) and Oracle Corp. (ORCL), will be shopping around because the cloud and the technologies which support the cloud are what is going to enable them to plan for the future," said Theresa Lanowitz, founder of Voke Research. Lanowitz said open-source support firm Red Hat Inc. (RHT) and open-source server maker Novell Inc. (NOVL) could be acquisition targets.

Already Red Hat shares have begun to move like a potential takeover target.

On Monday, shares of the Raleigh, N.C.-based company soared more than 10% as speculation mounted Redwood City, Calif.-based Oracle might be interested in buying the company, which offers support services for the Linux open-source computer language. Linux has seen rapid growth in corporate computing and Oracle in 2006 issued its own version of Linux, saying it would undercut Red Hat's pricing, in a bid to win more of this market.

"It would make sense for Oracle to own Red Hat ultimately," Katherine Egbert, an analyst at Jefferies & Co., said in a research note. Egbert added that the timing might not be right yet for a deal.

Article - WSJ.com

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