What Oracle Would Get With Sun Acquisition

The acquisition of Sun Microsystems (NSDQ:JAVA) by Oracle (NSDQ:ORCL), if it is closed as expected, would give Oracle a company whose business model has been rocky but would bring it some of the industry's top hardware and software technology and strengthen its open-source offerings.

Oracle on Monday said it plans to acquire Sun in a $7.4 billion deal announced shortly after an earlier bid by IBM (NYSE:IBM) to acquire Sun fell through.

Oracle and Sun have had complementary businesses for years, and a significant if not majority portion of Oracle's installed base has been on Sun hardware and Sun's Solaris operating system.

The proposed acquisition of Sun would force Oracle to decide how much of a hardware vendor it wants to be, as the software side of Sun is very compatible with Oracle's product offerings.

Oracle is one of the IT industry's largest software vendors, with core competencies in databases, middleware and other business applications, and an acquisition of Sun would bring a wide range of complementary technologies with limited overlapping of its existing products.

Sun would bring Oracle the MySQL database, based on open-source technology. Sun currently provides the MySQL database as a free download, with customers paying Sun and/or its solution providers for support.

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Sun software - Does it make diddly?

Give it away, and some day they'll pay. Maybe

Comment With Sun Microsystems on the block - and perhaps on the chopping block - for the past several weeks, it is probably a good time to take a gander at the family jewels: Sun's software business.

Sun likes to count downloads and the size of installed bases because the company's top brass believes this a kind of leading indicator for future revenue streams for commercial support, professional services, and other stuff productized by the company. And with so many key products open sourced - including home grown products like Solaris, Zettabyte File System, and Java and Sun acquisitions like MySQL, VirtualBox, and OpenOffice -the company places equal importance on the size of the communities that help create and debug these programs.

The open source hit parade at Sun's Software Group goes something like this. Number one, of course, is the Java Runtime Environment (JRE). According to sources at Sun, the company tracks it on a monthly basis, and in the 31 days of March, there were 76.6 million updates or installs of the latest JRE, and 11.2 million of those were for completely new installs.

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