Vivek Ranadive, CEO of Tibco Software (Tibco is a sponsor of SVW) has been in Silicon Valley for more than 25 years and is one of its top entrepreneurs and very well connected. Here are some notes from our conversation:

- I'm a little saddened to see Sun go. Scott McNealy (Sun co-founder) helped me when I was starting my business by giving me a Sun workstation.

- Sun should have kept innovating. It was when it stopped that its problems began and top people such as Eric Schmidt started leaving.

- Larry Ellison seems to be putting all his energies into building an ever larger dinosaur. He just seems to be interested in the maintenance revenues that a business can bring in. Oracle doesn't invest in innovation.

- The new entrants such as Cisco Systems benefit from this deal because customers will be looking for alternative suppliers, they won't want to give Oracle all of their business. The same is true for Tibco, this deal is fantastic for us, we will benefit because customers don't want all their eggs in one basket.

- Java is a big a loser. SAP put a lot of work behind Java, this will hurt them.

- Oracle may have to sell MySQL because of anti-trust concerns.

- Open source is a big loser. 'Oracle and open source' has always been an oxymoron.

- Larry Ellison needs to show that he can reinvent Oracle for this new era of virtualization, and cloud computing. It's not clear that he can, he seems just to be interested in the maintenance revenues. He's said before that he doesn't believe in cloud computing.

- Larry Ellison has transformed Oracle into a private equity firm, and he's doing better than any of the private equity firms.

- Oracle might buy Accenture next, it needs a strong services company if it is going to go up against IBM. But there is just one IBM.

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Please see: Mastermind Strategist Larry Ellison: Oracle Snaps Up Sun And Throws Down Gauntlet To IBM

From Wikipedia:

"Vivek Ranadive (b. 1957, Mumbai, India) is the Chairman, CEO and Founder of TIBCO Software, the computer software technology company he founded in 1985. The Palo Alto company employs 1,600 and has annual revenue of more than $500 million. Ranadive's New York Times business bestseller, "The Power of Now: How Winning Companies Sense and Respond to Change Using Real-time Technology" has been widely used in academia.

Ranadive grew up in Juhu area of Mumbai and was the youngest of three children. One of Ranadive's earliest dreams was to study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which he learned of through a documentary film on the institution. Described as "a true visionary in a valley full of seers," by the August 10, 2004 issue of Information Age, left Bombay at age 17 with enough money to last two months. In 1975 Ranadive entered MIT and in four years, he completed a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering and a master's in mechanical engineering. He received an MBA from Harvard Business School in 1983."