Sun and Oracle… Hope for Solaris?

The news of Oracle’s acquisition of Sun brings new questions, and possibilities, to the table this morning. While some early indications and views are skeptical, this deal has the potential to bring an increased marriage between Oracle’s database and ERP products and the future of the Sun Solaris platform. While Sun Solaris was always a popular supporting OS for a wide variety of Oracle products, the news of the Oracle-Sun deal brings hope for the slowly-declining share of Solaris users. While mainstream distributions of Linux took away much of Solaris’ thunder in the early 2000’s, Solaris is still regarded has a highly stable and scalable platform for critical enterprise applications, such as ERP. Was Oracle smart to make such an acquisition? Absolutely. By immersing themselves into the server OS and hardware markets, Oracle now has complete control over a viable platform, hardware and software, to launch their database, ERP, and collaboration products. The potential for turnkey solutions (hardware, OS, and application) is unlimited now for Oracle… although time will ultimately dictate the success and popularity of such a solution.