Oracle Bid for Redhat

Tech Sector shopaholic Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle, seems to be looking for his next fix. This in itself is not unusual, but the fact that he is taking Oracle ‘beyond the brochure’ by considering the purchase of an operating system vendor is cause for reflection. Oracle actually already has a majority stake in a little operation called Miracle Linux. However the database vendor may seek revenge on Linux distributor (distro – in Silicon Valley parlance) Red Hat for winning their battle to acquire open source middleware vendor JBoss. By launching a hostile bid for Red Hat, Oracle would fill the missing pieces needed for the software giant to offer a complete software solution. This will put rivals such as Sap and Microsoft on the back foot. A natural extension of this strategy would be to add hardware to the portfolio. So Sun (for servers) and Dell (for PCs) might consider beefing up their defences.