With the Sun deal, Oracle now has a hardware business, a cloud computing/data center business and a firmer hold on the DBMS market due to Sun’s ownership of MySQL.
The Oracle portal strategy gets a little murkier with the acquisition. Oracle now has it's own legacy portal, the Aqualogic portal acquired from BEA and the Sun web portal. It's anyone's guess which one get the R&D buck from Oracle.
In the deal Oracle acquires all of Sun’s JAVA intellectual property and that has to have IBM a bit scrambling to assess the impact; not because of Oracle controlling the Java standard, but because Oracle will have a stronger hold on the evolution of the Java application server market. This ought to enable Oracle to compete more aggressively with IBM and MQ everything.
Sun/Oracle may consider bundling hardware & software. For example selling massively scalable database appliances that could compete with IBM, Netezza and other DBMS appliance vendors.
Oracle might decide to leverage the Sun Data Center / Cloud Computing solutions to create appliance bundles delivering Oracle Financials, PeopleSoft or Seibel on a software as service or as a rack based all-in-one solution.
Lastly, the acquisition lays the foundation for an Oracle cloud computing infrastructure that positions it to compete with Microsoft, not only on the .Net versus Java front, but with Microsoft, Google, Amazon EC2, Salesforce.com et al.
Moreover, it leaves IBM struggling to figure our how they'll play in the cloud; perhaps forcing them to acquire EMC and it's child company VMware.
It's no surprise that Microsoft has its eye on the cloud. Cloud computing, that is.