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From BusinessWeek comes a long profile of the Facebook economy. As I discussed on 10 August 2007, Facebook has become very popular as the service opened its APIs to third-party applications last 24 May. Slide recently received a US$50 million round of venture capital funding, based on that company’s suite of Facebook widgets like Top Friends, SuperPoke and FunWall. That seems like crazy money, considering that these f8 applications are little more than features in a social network. Gigaom.com points out that the recent acquisitions of MySQL, BEA and Skype don’t make much sense, either.

Security is another major risk. A cracker named DMaul recent posted a 17 gigabyte file of photos that he downloaded from thousands of private MySpace profiles, according to this report in Wired. The massive file was posted on BitTorrent, and includes photos posted by 14- and 15-year old MySpace members. MySpace makes profiles private by default for that age group.

Yesterday I mentioned Sun’s acquistion of MySQL, a leading open source database company. BusinessWeek published an article about Oracle’s acquistion of middleware vendor BEA Systems. That deal has been in the works for a year, according to IT-Director.com.

Shane Schick’s follow-up on the Oracle deal is a nice overview of why CXOs should care about middleware. Middleware is a translation layer that helps data move between different software packages and computer systems. Without middleware, e-commerce just doesn’t work very well.

Many companies have to link heterogenous information systems within their value chain. Even more companies have to link their value chains with those of their suppliers and customers, which means even more heterogeneity.

Oracle has a healthy chunk of the financial services middleware market. BEA provides access to other sectors, including telecommunications,where Oracle has not been competitive.

However, Oracle will have to spend time pruning and consolidating the combined product lines. Time may not be on their side, given the growing signs of economic recession in North America.

Amidst all of these developments, we should not forget that middleware and database software are important parts of data security. Cory Doctorow has described his radical view that data breaches are as bad as toxic waste and nuclear accidents. He has a good point – the effects might last for decades, and the companies that leaked the data might not bear the true costs.

My IS 7010 students just finished a case about MySQL earlier this week. In that case, MySQL had entered an alliance with SAP and planned to merge SAP DB into MySQL software. That product became MaxDB, and it’s an essential part of SAP NetWeaver.

Today, Oracle sued SAP. Among the charges: employees at TomorrowNow, an SAP subsidiary in Texas, used Oracle customer passwords to copy Oracle software and documents. SAP then offered support services to Oracle customers who were considering switching to SAP NetWeaver.

The TomorrowNow home page doesn’t list SAP at all, notr does it mention Oracle. TomorrowNow does provide third-party support for ERP systems from J.D. Edwards, Siebel and PeopleSoft. Siebel and PeopleSoft were both purchased by Oracle a few years ago. PeopleSoft had previously purchased JD Edwards.

This lawsuit isn’t a big surprise, considering how much the Oracle and SAP sales forces hate each other. According to this article, “Oracle has spent US$20billion over the past three years” to buy smaller competitive rivals in the ERP (enterprise resource planning) industry. The lawsuit states that “theft appears to be an esential — and illegal — part of SAP’s competitive strategy against Oracle.”

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