Oracle buys Sun...

I used to work at Sun, and while it has many of the qualities of a large company, a soft spot for that company remains in my heart. When I was growing up, Sun, DEC & Cray were the 3 companies I wanted to work for, since they all built products that put technology into the hands of the people who could use them, rather than the approach taken by IBM. And of the 3, Sun is the last to go.

The Oracle/Sun merger is probably the best fit available, although Oracle is a lot more like IBM, culturally, than people would like to admit. Still, over the last 10 years, Oracle has managed to survive the onslaught of open source and Microsoft with it's profits and pricing model intact, which is an amazing feat.

What the merger means is this: Oracle, like IBM, has over the last few years been moving more and more towards a model of selling turnkey Database systems, that includes the hardware and software, specifically using Linux clusters.

What the Sun acquisition does for them is give them a much broader and stronger systems base upon which to build that strategy. People forget that Sun used to be Oracle's main business partner before and during the dot-com boom, and Sun made billions of dollars selling large Sunfire boxes running Solaris/Oracle as back-ends to websites like Amazon. Moreover, having direct control of Solaris, ZFS and Java can only benefit Oracle.

For the Sun people, knowing that you're building systems primarily for Oracle will help bring a focus and purpose to systems design that I think has been lacking. If Sun innovates, and implements new features on their systems specifically designed to make Oracle installations easier to build, that in turn could spur external demand for their products.

There are a few questions that remain:

1. Will Sun operate as a semi autonomous entity outside of databases ?
2. Will Oracle/Sun continue to service the general IT market
3. Will Oracle/Sun continue their presence in HPC ?
4. How much of the staff, specifically engineering, will Oracle retain ?
5. Will the engineering direction at Sun change dramatically ?