Oracle and Sun – Better Microsoft competition ?

I was thinking about this as I drove to work this morning: what is the real business value to Oracle of buying Sun ?

It occurred to me that part of the many benefits to Oracle are the products that help them compete better with the Microsoft offerings. Could this be another in a long line of acquisitions by Larry Ellison in his quest to make Oracle a more successful company than Microsoft ?

Microsoft has owned this market for some time now, and has had some tools that Oracle has tried to compete with over the years. Microsoft had Access, which is at a surface level a database, but has over the years served much better as a front-end tool for database access. Oracle has tried to  address this over the years, first with Oracle Forms, then with JSF and ADF, and now APEX (formerly known as HtmlDb).

These tools, while extremely capable, have never had the low entry to use that has been available in the Microsoft product line, and now with the rapid introduction of Silverlight, Microsoft is threatening to dominate the RIA market.

There is tremendous buzz (hype?) in the market about the RIA competition, with both Adobe and Microsoft claiming a market penetration of over 70%. Sun has similar figures with Java, and has recently entered this market full force with JavaFX.

JFX combined with MySQL looked to have the potential for introduction of new products that would displace both the rich media and rich data driven applications that have been dominated by Flash (Flex).

With the acquisition of Sun by Oracle, it is entirely possible that a solid Flex and Silverlight competitor could emerge due to the capabilities of the Java platform for producing UI, combined with the simplification in coding provided by JavaFX. This could also give rise to an easy to use tool that could replace Access as the easiest way to build an application, by integrating the JavaFX UI capabilities with the Oracle developer tools.

The only missing piece in this puzzle for me is that focus on the end user as being capable. Oracle has great tools for developers, and they help build applications extremely easily, but they haven’t done a great job with figuring out how to bridge the gap between the technical types and the consumers. I don’t think it’s a vast chasm to cross, but they would need to focus on improving the ease of use to compete head to head with Microsoft and Adobe.

Not only does the Sun acquisition continue to strengthen the web tools that Oracle has recently improved with their WebLogic tools, expand their hold in the database market, and solidify their place in the SOA market, but it also allows them to compete better in the hottest area of competition at the moment: Rich Internet Applications.

What will Oracle do with these capabilities ? Only time will tell.