Ian Abramson, president of the Independent Oracle Users Group, traveled to Brussels last week in order to present the IOUG position on the pending acquisition of Sun by Oracle to the European Union's Competition Committee. Abramson was asked by Oracle, on behalf of the IOUG, to be a part of the company's presentation to the EU. Upon arriving in Brussels, it was determined that since the IOUG and the UKOUG (represented by chairman Ronin Miles), were both there that they should combine statements, according to Abramson.
The IOUG's leadership believes the purchase will not affect competition in the database market, notes Abramson in a recent blog post. He adds that the technology community is comprised of innovators, and they will respond to the needs and desires of the marketplace.
Last month, the IOUG released a letter sent by Abramson on behalf of the IOUG to the European Commission. The letter was sent in response to the European Commission's objection to the Oracle acquisition of Sun Microsystems. In that letter, Abramson writes that IOUG organizations support complex, multi-vendor database environments. Its members run Microsoft, IBM and Oracle platforms; similarly many members are Sun customers. Because of this, Abramson says, the IOUG has a unique perspective on the state of the database industry, including how Oracle approaches and supports the community. According to Abramson, the recent objections from the EU inferring that competition and innovation will be reduced in the database industry through this acquisition does not translate to those in the IOUG community who support the profession. In fact, they believe competition will increase, according to Abramson.
By not approving this acquisition, the EU's decisions are actually diminishing competition by making a significant impact on Sun and its ability to remain competitive, Abramson contends.
In preparing for the EU presentation, Abramson states in another blog post, he tapped information about the types of databases that people are running. The IOUG along with Unisphere Research have been conducting a survey on virtualization, he writes, "and we have some results already that are interesting. Turns out that of the people who took the survey close to 90% run Oracle as their enterprise database and of that almost 90% of those companies also run MS SQL Server and then 44% use MySQL. The results are interesting and deeper than this but some of it will form the basis of some of our existing arguments."
Read Abramson's recent blog posts on the subject here.
To read Abramson's letter to the European Commission, go here.