Oracle and Sun

I think this deal makes a lot of sense.

The race is on to provide a unified platform in enterprise computing, from the user interface to the metal. Even Cisco has made an entry in that arena. Oracle will now be able to "engineer and deliver an integrated system—applications to disk—where all the pieces fit and work together so customers do not have to do it themselves." While I'm usually pretty cynical towards press releases, that particular line seems quite compelling.

Additionally, Sun provides Oracle access to a critical segment it was lacking before: young companies. No startup in their right mind rushes out to spend tens of thousands of dollars on an Oracle license. Rather, they build their infrastructure on open source technologies like MySQL. And then when they grow up, they stay on those competitor-to-Oracle technologies (look at Facebook). With the addition of Sun, Oracle now has access to those customers, and the opportunity to develop a compelling migration plan for them. "An Oracle solution for every stage of life", if you will.

And to think distributed computing used to seem like such a good idea.