Summary
The match of Sun and Oracle is not surprising; for years they had a close relationship. The Sun deal is the latest iteration of Oracle's acquisition-oriented growth strategy to become an IT Master Brand. But while Sun is primarily a hardware vendor the key for Oracle is Sun's software business. Ellison stated on Sunday that Sun's Java programming langauge and Solaris operating systems were the main attractions. In addition to Java being a defacto industry development standard, this is also key to Oracle's own software development from database to applications to middleware. This places Oracle in a core role when it comes to setting future industry direction. Sun's Solaris OS has presence in several key vertical industries - financial services, public and high-performance computing. Besides providing significant revenue and market presence well beyond Sun's core software business this also provides Oracle with a broad powerful set of technologies for Cloud computing.
Analysis
For Oracle and Oracle customers: This acquisition has altered many of Oracle's prior strategic relationships and, I believe, a much more formidable competitor to HP and IBM (both in hardware and services), Microsoft and Cisco. After years of friendly competition / cooperation, Oracle now becomes a full-fledged direct competitor.
Should Oracle retain and be able to successfully integrate their new Software, OS and Hardware lines into a coordinated portfolio, Oracle will become a dominant player in Cloud Computing into becoming the 'arms merchant' of not only backbone / platform technologies but also cloud-based Services.
For Sun customers: Sun hardware customers can expect some challenges as Oracle digests and integrates the Sun hardware lineup.
For Users: Users need to ensure that any projects and expected investments in Sun hardware, Java or Solaris receive specific information and guidance from Oracle as to the future of these hardware, software and OS products.
In the meantime, other Cloud computing vendors will try to attractively market themselves to this customer base.
For users, then, the next 18 months will see uncertainly as has never been seen before. Hopefuly this will not slow adoptkion of Cloud Computing initiatives by end-users but time will tell.
