Larry Ellison Adds to His Collection

khess 0 264 Views

Well, well, well...Larry Ellison, Oracle CEO added Virtual Iron to his collection today. Congratulations, Larry. When is Oracle going bankrupt? Every time that I've seen a company acquire too many other companies in a short time period, they always end up in the dustbin.

Oracle just acquired Sun just one short month ago. I'm not sure what Larry's thinking on this one--Virtual Iron is Xen which is an open source, Linux-based virtualization product that Oracle could have produced themselves.

I'm also not sure exactly what they're buying--Virtual Iron's vast client base? That's a laugh. Virtual Iron sparks such little interest for me, a Linux technology writer who also writes about virtualization, that I have actually never written about it except for this post. I don't hate Virtual Iron--I just don't see any reason to write about it since it is Xen and Citrix does a much better job with their version of it.

I think perhaps Larry needs a vacation.

Hey, Larry, why didn't you buy Citrix instead? Citrix is worth something. They have a huge client base. They own XenServer. And, they own some of the best remote application technology ever made. It would have made more sense (cents?) to buy Citrix instead of Virtual Iron. Just think of the power of combining Citrix, Oracle, Xen and Sun all into one awesome product.

I'd call it The Oracle Cloud Machine. Oracle-powered applications delivered at the speed of light with Citrix Metaframe technology all running on XenServer.

Hey, Larry, you owe me for that one too.

Good luck with Virtual Iron. I guess your yacht can use a good anchor.

Oracle has acquired about 50 companies since 1999 with most of those since 2005. Its acquisitions include Sun, PeopleSoft, Innobase, Siebel, Hyperion and BEA.

Dani AI

Generated

This thread captures two very common reactions to vendor M&A: skepticism about frequent buying (as expressed) and trust in management’s choice (as noted). For anyone running production systems, the useful question isn’t who was right, it’s: what concrete steps turn uncertainty into manageable risk? The short checklist below is designed to be practical, non-partisan and useful years after the announcement.

Immediate checklist (first 30 days):

  1. Inventory everything that depends on the acquired product: versions, integrations, automation hooks and downstream consumers.
  2. Pull contracts and support terms; note transferability, renewal dates and termination clauses.
  3. Ask the vendor for a written product roadmap and a documented support/window-of-service commitment.
  4. Triage risk: label components as Critical / Important / Nice-to-have based on business impact.
  5. Stand up a small lab and capture representative configs and backups for rapid testing.

How to test and decide:

  • In the lab, run representative workloads, measure baseline performance and perform failure/recovery drills.
  • Evaluate ecosystem: third-party tooling, community activity, and patch cadence.
  • Use a simple weighted score (for example score = sum(weight * rating) across factors like maturity, integration, cost, security). Keep high scorers short-term; plan migration for low scorers.

90-day action plan and cautions:

  • 0–30 days: inventory, contracts and risk triage. 30–60 days: lab testing and vendor commitments. 60–90 days: finalize keep/replace decision and build the migration/rollback plan.
  • Don’t assume continuity; get guarantees in writing, budget for training and automation changes, and prefer portable architectures to reduce future lock-in.
Member Avatar for carlyse_09
carlyse_09 -4 Light Poster

I respect what Larry chose.I'm sure he has a lot of reasons behind that decision.Goodluck and i'm hoping for the business progress.

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