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Enterprise Storage Forum

Today’s surprising news that Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) will acquire Sun Microsystems (NASDAQ: JAVA) means that the data storage industry suddenly has a new — and formidable — player.

“Our customers have been asking us to step up to a broader role to reduce complexity, risk and cost by delivering a highly-optimized standards-based product stack,” Oracle president Charles Phillips wrote in a letter to partners and customers. “Oracle plans to deliver these benefits by offering a broad range of products, including servers and storage, with all the integrated pieces: hardware operating system, database, middleware and applications.”

The deal is much more likely to clear antitrust hurdles than Sun’s proposed merger with IBM (NYSE: IBM), which fell apart two weeks ago.

But Wedbush Morgan analyst Kaushik Roy doesn’t necessarily think that’s a good thing.

“IBM was a better strategic fit for Sun,” he said. “Now Oracle is getting into totally new markets in which they have no expertise or history. I am skeptical.

We’ll have to see how the deal goes forward, until any specific announcements are made, that innovation of the product and platform continues is key, as is the ability to meet customers expectations. We need not worry about hot the organizations fit organizationally, at the moment the key things are:

1. Understanding how the new organization will operate going forward
2. What products/platforms continue to be innovated or are retired
3. How open source projects fit within the new organization
4. Focus on the business as usual – maintaining revenue, maintaining customer focus and avoiding uncertainty. This is key.

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