It’s acquisition time

The biggest news in ITdom, far and away, was Oracle’s acquisition of Sun. Looking at the deal I believe that Oracle will focus on digesting Sun’s software assets and sell off its hardware line up to a likely buyer (maybe HP). That way it will make back some of the $7.4 billion that it forked over and avoid getting sucked into a business where it has hardly any experience. Sun’s line of servers remains a strong contender and any of the hardware giants would be happy to acquire the same. Moving on the software that Oracle acquired, mySQL will most probably fade away as it’s unlikely that a company whose bread and butter product is its eponymous flagship database would want a free competitor floating around from its own stable. Java is the crown jewel in Sun’s software arsenal but it’s never been monetized and as it is part and parcel of every enterprise software vendor’s products, I don’t see how controlling it is going to make a huge difference to Oracle. This leaves us with Solaris. Oracle has its own brand of Linux (a knock-off of RHEL). So it’s anyone’s guess where Solaris will fit into this picture. All of which leaves me wondering why Oracle bought Sun in the first place. Still, Larry Ellison could have a few tricks up his sleeve and it will be interesting to see how this one plays out over the next few months. Ellison talked about a tightly integrated stack of Solaris and the Oracle database. That is oddly reminiscent of the SQL Server-Windows stack. Ellison didn’t say much about the hardware which underscores the likelihood that he’ll sell it off at the first opportunity.

Moving on, when a product line generates over 700 million dollars in one year, you would think that the company making said product line would be happy. Not so, Intel is finding that the success of its Atom processor which is the mainstay of most netbooks has proved to be a double edged sword. Atom is so inexpensive that its sales eat into those of Intel’s more lucrative Core 2 chips. Which is why the company is now coming out with a line of CULV processors that will stand somewhere in between these two extremes and enable a brave new world of mainstream ultraportables that manage to cost less than $1,000 while still packing a punch, providing six or more hours of life on battery and weighing a few pounds.

Sometime back I had written about how Full Disk Encryption (FDE) on hard drives was here and would supersede software based encryption for the greater part. Until now, SSDs haven’t supported this feature. That’s all changed now with Samsung releasing a slew of SSDs that support FDE. These will be making their appearance on Dell’s Latitude line of laptops.

Law enforcement types are increasingly resorting to technology to entrap malcontents. The FBI is using spyware called CIPAV to get its hands on anti-social persons through this software that sends all kinds of data from the computer that is being spied upon including its IP address, MAC address, last visited Web site etc. CIPAV stands for Computer and Internet Protocol Address Verifier.

prashant.rao@expressindia.com