A good Oracle for Sun

He said 10 years ago, the vendor was considered to be one of the cornerstones of enterprise computing.

Within that time period, the market has shifted to ever more open computing solutions, and Sun, as with many vendors, had to move with it.

Sun presently has a range of important open source applications and platforms, including OpenSolaris, Java, OpenOffice.org, MySQL and NetBeans.

Of these, OpenSolaris, and Java were already considered 'enterprise grade' and while it's possible for Oracle to continue to push these technologies further into the enterprise, the jump want be a dramatic one.

"It would not be in Oracle's interests to have MySQL scale the enterprise barrier, as it would then compete more directly with one of its cash-cows - Oracle RDBMS 11 database platform," said Zymaris.

"It would be in Oracle's interests to use MySQL to wipe the floor with Microsoft's SQL, undercutting the Microsoft product on flexibility and price, thus weakening it as a possible competitor to Oracle's RDBMS product."

Zymaris said it might be of importance to Oracle to push OpenOffice.org into corporate accounts, as a serious competitive wedge against Microsoft.

"It's got nothing to lose and a lot to gain by taking the monetary wind out of Microsoft's Office sales," he said.

He said the key point to note about all deal is that any technologies which have real industry momentum, for example, MySQL, OpenOffice.org  and Java, cannot be seriously damaged though Oracle's acquisition.

"Even if Oracle attempts to smother them," he said.

"As these are all open source, many other vendors, along with the open source community, can continue to develop and extend these products, irrespective of Oracle's actions.

"The community can in effect 'fork' the codebases for each former Sun open source technology, bypassing any 'damage' that Oracle may try and inflict.

"In the end, all Oracle's is buying is the brand-name, not the source code."

Oracle's decision to strike a deal for Sun was timely as the vendor has been dealt with a few blows recently.