Since Sun's primarily a hardware company and Oracle's primarily software, you'd think there wouldn't be a lot of overlap between them, but you'd be wrong. There's going to be a few hard choices to make for Oracle. Some of them are easy. Sun's Java Systems Web and App (aka SunOne aka iPlanet, aka Netscape) products will be killed. They weren't that heavily used anyway so no one will really miss them. Oracle can offer them an easy transition. The area of Identity management is going to be a sticky one. The fusion stack has an integrated LDAP already, but my limited exposure to it has been unfavorable. Sun's LDAP and IDM products only slightly better in my view. Both have good and bad points. But in the end, you only need one. So it'll be interesting to see what happens there. I suspect that most of the Sun products will loose most of these fights. They just don't have the momentum or market presence to stay.
Then you get into the sore spot for a lot of people. The open source products and projects that Sun supports or owns. Oracle already has Oracle Developer Suite. Sun has Sun Studio and the fairly popular NetBeans. And developers are the most cool-aid drinking crowd you'll ever find. You think Linux and WIndows folks don't like each other, just put a NetBeans user in the same room as an Eclipse user and ask them which is the better IDE. There's no good answer here. You can't keep them all, although because of the open source nature of NetBeans there isn't a lot of expense to keeping it around. Sun Studio is probably already dead, we just don't know it yet. Then there's MySQL... Seems like chicken little just did this dance about a year ago when Sun bought them. Some folks think it's not as bad as it sounds and I think they're right. Oracle could actually bring some real value to MySQL. The open source issue would still be sticky, and they don't want to erode their sales, but there could be a fairly sizable chunk of middle ground for MySQL and Oracle. Other open source projects probably won't be so lucky. Glassfish is probably going to get dumped. Not a lot of upside for Oracle with Glassfish. Then there's Oracle Linux and OpenSolaris. Although there's probably room for both, strategically they should pick one. My wishful-thinking bet is on OpenSolaris. The tie-in's with the hardware line are too strong to ignore. Oracle Linux hasn't exactly lit up the server market anyway. But any way you slice it I'm expecting forks of a lot of Sun sponsored open source projects at the first sign of Oracle playing rough with the Open Source community.
Other interesting areas are going to be in the grid space. Sun and Oracle have competing grid technologies. Not sure who wins out in the merging of those products. I suspect Sun Cluster will be put out to pasture in favor of ClusterWare (which also portends bad things for Symantec's VCS product). Sun's N1 management suite will probably be left with out a chair when the music stops as well. It will be interesting to see where Oracle simply drops a product vs where they merge a product. In some cases the products have different strengths, and merging them makes a lot of sense. But by the same token you don't want to create market confusion in your product portfolio, so they have to walk a fine line.
So my software deal-pool list (dead as in not a Sun product/project anymore., forks/spin-offs not counted):
- Sun Java Systems Web and Portal products
- Suns IDM/SSO suite
- Glassfish
- Sun Cluster
- Sun Studio
- NetBeans (*sniff*)
I'm sure I'll amend this list with a few that I've overlooked later.
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