Meg Whitman to Step Down as HPE CEO

I would expect HPE to get bought by Oracle or IBM at some point in the next few years.

I don’t know why oracle would want it. Since buying sun the share and recognition of sun hardware is even less than the lowest point since sun owned sun. I haven’t seen a sun box in over a decade. Except eBay. I guess oracle has the cash to just buy it to lessen competition? IBM I thought was focused on power like they always are but never do anything with it. It’s still damn near impossible to find a power 8 vendor.

So I guess I just don’t see any reason for oracle or ibm to buy them.

> I guess oracle has the cash to just buy it to lessen competition?

> So I guess I just don’t see any reason for oracle or ibm to buy them.

These two statements are at complete odds with one another. The only reason Oracle buys anyone is to kill competition against themselves - they are the penultimate 600 pound gorilla in the Enterprise Software space, with eyes on Microsoft's fast approaching taillights.

They bought Sun because it was the easiest way to get to MySQL. They wanted to buy MySQL because they thought that they could kill their single largest market competition in the FOSS database world simply by strangleholding it the same way they do with their other database products - fortunately it was protected by the GPL long before they got their hands on it. But the list goes on for as many companies as you can name that Oracle has acquired - Oracle is where tech goes to die, and where tech laborers go to retire.

And in some ways, that's okay. It's healthy for the market to have trusted, long term minded players - enterprises love companies like Oracle because they know what to expect. Big price tags, but phone support and a deep ecosystem of people skilled to fix and deploy their junk. It's healthy for employees not to be looking over their shoulders and hoping Wall Street's next sneeze doesn't put them on the bread line. It only becomes unhealthy when Oracle uses its multibillion dollar cash reserves to stomp the life out of a market because it can no longer compete against it.

But, all of that said, the argument as to why Oracle might want to pick up HPE is a bit dull, I must admit. Unless they want to go for a complete vertical integration play and make it so you have to also buy their hardware to run their database engines, I can't imagine anything sticking. I also can't imagine that play working without regulators crying Unfair Competition, even with the current state of the DOJ and the constant hum of megamergers being rubberstamped. But HPE is not currently a competitive threat to... anyone? Oracle buying HPE would be a very long winded mercy killing, just like Sun.

(obligatory "my words, not my employers, yadda yadda")