Stan Muse_

Oracle CEO to IBM, HP: Don't Get Your Hopes Up, We're Keeping Sun's Hardware

The reason that Oracle bought SUN was because they had to in order to in order to bring to market their own complete data warehouse and data archiving platforms. IBM, Teradata, Netizza, and even HP are delivering DW 'appliances'. Most of the future growth in data management will be in data warehousing and data archiving. Oracle knows this.

By buying SUN, Oracle not only acquired a major computing hardware platform and acquired their primary competitor in the small computer space (MySQL), they also acquired a major storage vendor in STK. Put SUN hardware and STK storage (disk, tape, and storage software) together with Oracle DB and Oracle applications and they will have an unstoppable data warehouse and data archiving platform in a couple of years, if not sooner. Data Warehouses, with business intelligence applications like campaign management and risk management, and data archiving is where most of the growth in the IT industry will be for the forseeable future. That was the main point of the Oracle acquisition of SUN, and it was brilliant.