Oracle buys Sun

Oracle announced it will acquire Sun.

Another big Portal/Content Management vendor is now an infrastructure vendor. Sometimes I wonder if  everything will soon become an appliance – you buy a Solaris box and it will come bundled not only with the OS (obviously) but also with WebCenter (or one of the numerous Oracle Portal type products), Content Server and so on. IBM, EMC and Microsoft can do this already in some sense.

Sun had open sourced its entire JES or Java ES (Java Enterprise System) sometime back and more recently dropped the JES Portal Server in favor of a partnership with Liferay. The result was WebSynergy, Sun’s branded portal based on Liferay’s codebase. It is not clear how Oracle will continue this partnership and frankly  they already have too many portal kind of offerings to continue with this. However, I think Liferay has a strong offering (and recently opened a new office in India) and will continue to be a good open source alternative whether or not Oracle continues this partnership.

The other component of JES that might have some relevant features is probably Sun Java Communications Suite which has features for collaboration  – things like calendar, messaging, Instant messenger as well as support for mobile communications. Some of these could be good additions to Oracle’s Fusion.

On a different note though, Janus had this to say on twitter:

Oracle buys sun – now Oracle has 5 enterprise portals! a new commercial for Larry: 5 out of 12 most significant portals are powered by ORCL

In spite of that, they had to resort to static pages!?