Martin Heller
Contributing Writer

Merger Madness or Shrewd Acquisitions?

analysis
Jan 17, 20081 min

Let me see if I have this straight. Oracle is buying BEA for $8.5 billion, and Sun is buying MySQL for $1 billion. How does this make any sense at all? Have we learned nothing from the dot-com boom and bust of the late 1990s? Is either acquisition going to help customers or create value in any way, shape, manner, or form? Will there really be a synergy between Sun and MySQL, or is this just a pipe dream? Will th

Let me see if I have this straight. Oracle is buying BEA for $8.5 billion, and Sun is buying MySQL for $1 billion.

How does this make any sense at all? Have we learned nothing from the dot-com boom and bust of the late 1990s?

Is either acquisition going to help customers or create value in any way, shape, manner, or form?

Will there really be a synergy between Sun and MySQL, or is this just a pipe dream? Will the acquisition of BEA boost Fusion, or is this yet another pipe dream?

I lean towards the pipe dream side myself in both cases. What do you think?

Martin Heller

Martin Heller is a contributing writer at InfoWorld. Formerly a web and Windows programming consultant, he developed databases, software, and websites from his office in Andover, Massachusetts, from 1986 to 2010. From 2010 to August of 2012, Martin was vice president of technology and education at Alpha Software. From March 2013 to January 2014, he was chairman of Tubifi, maker of a cloud-based video editor, having previously served as CEO.

Martin is the author or co-author of nearly a dozen PC software packages and half a dozen Web applications. He is also the author of several books on Windows programming. As a consultant, Martin has worked with companies of all sizes to design, develop, improve, and/or debug Windows, web, and database applications, and has performed strategic business consulting for high-tech corporations ranging from tiny to Fortune 100 and from local to multinational.

Martin’s specialties include programming languages C++, Python, C#, JavaScript, and SQL, and databases PostgreSQL, MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle Database, Google Cloud Spanner, CockroachDB, MongoDB, Cassandra, and Couchbase. He writes about software development, data management, analytics, AI, and machine learning, contributing technology analyses, explainers, how-to articles, and hands-on reviews of software development tools, data platforms, AI models, machine learning libraries, and much more.

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