Oracle Buys VirtualBox; Battle for Virtualization Market Heats Up

On Jan. 27 Oracle announced it had finalized its acquisition of Sun. In doing so it adds a number of open source darlings to its portfolio, MySQL, Java and VirtualBox to mention just a few.

Now that Oracle has acquired VirtualBox, what does this mean for the virtualization market?
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No time has been wasted in rebranding the Sun websites and products that now come under the Oracle umbrella.

Most notably the MySQL website totally separates the MySQL's commercial arm from the community site. And unsurprisingly, the Sun website redirects entirely to Oracle's home page.

The reworking of the VirtualBox logo to include the Oracle brand is much more subtle and unobtrusive. This may be telling of Oracle's future plans for VirtualBox. Unlike many of Sun's products (ahem, MySQL), VirtualBox clearly stands out as a foothold into a new market for Oracle, the same as Sun's hardware division.

Oracle's move into the virtualization market will undoutedly stir things up. We can expect VirtualBox to be driven hard to assert Oracle's new position in this maturing marketplace.

For sure, Oracle will certainly be a more agressive competitor than Sun.
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