Top ten predictions from the Oracle-Sun merger

Prediction 6: Solaris and Java are safe

On announcing Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison mentioned that he is specifically interested in Sun's Solaris Unix operating system, on which a large portion of Oracle databases run, and Java software, the underlying technology running Oracle's 'Fusion' products.

The acquisitions of BEA and now Sun effectively puts Oracle in control of Java.

"This may make companies such as IBM increasingly nervous," said Warrilow, but it may also "ultimately make Java less attractive to end user organisations."

Either way, Solaris is safe, said Sargeant.

"There has often been an assumption that Oracle database is predominantly deployed on Linux," he said, "when in fact it is most often deployed on Unix and more specifically, Solaris."

"Solaris could well become a jewel in Oracle's crown," he said.

Prediction 7: MySQL will be supported, but for how long?

News of the acquisition will be considered a substantial risk for those application developers that embed the Sun-owned open source database MySQL into their applications.

Sun has allowed MySQL to flourish under its ownership, with a high rate of downloads and use, but it had no competing product with MySQL as Oracle does.

While in the short term Sargeant says MySQL users should "not be too concerned", about the acquisition, there is a considerable risk Oracle will make changes to the product in the future.

"There is no indication as to what Oracle's commitment to MySQL might be," he said. "One should also consider that for all of Sun's success with MySQL, the company never managed to monetise it."

But Matt Oostveen, research manager of data centre and enterprise servers at IDC expects Oracle to put MySQL to good use - as somewhat of a "training wheels" database before organisations scale up to use Oracle's enterprise grade database.

"Instead of competing with MySQL, Oracle will be able to offer its customer base a popular, well-recognised entry-level database and an upgrade path to Oracle's enterprise products as customers' needs scale," he said.

Prediction 8: Oracle will review Sun's open source models

Warrilow expects the Oracle/Sun merger will "herald the end of Sun's romance with open source software."

"While both Sun and Oracle were probably the most 'vocal' organisations espousing the 'new economy' and the benefits of open source software during the late 1990's, Oracle in particular failed to translate this 'new age thinking' into revenue, and instead, decided to focus more on traditional software licensing markets," he said.

The open source model advocated by Sun may find some friction within Oracle, agreed Oostveen, particularly among Oracle's channel partners, conditioned to selling enterprise software at high margins.

"The challenge for Oracle with its focus on commercial software will be evaluating the future revenue potential of Sun's software offerings after Sun began open sourcing many of its innovations," he said.

Prediction 9: OpenOffice has a future at Oracle

Sargeant believes OpenOffice has a future under Oracle's direction, if only to be a "thorn in the side" of that other software megalith, Microsoft.

"OpenOffice might perhaps be embedded with Fusion Apps, or it might be used to compete directly with Microsoft," he said. "Open Office 3 is pretty damn good - good enough for a lot of people."

Prediction 10: More consolidation to come

Today's economic climate being what it is, Sergeant concludes, there is almost certainly more consolidation on the near horizon.

"But perhaps," he notes, "not much of this scale."