Published at LXer:

When Oracle Corp. agreed to buy Sun Microsystems Inc. today, it took a leap into the hardware realm. And so the obvious question is: Can the software-centric database and applications vendor succeed with Sun's hardware business? "I'll hand it to Larry Ellison: That man can shop," said Laura DiDio, an analyst at Information Technology Intelligence Corp., a research and consulting firm in Boston. "This deal is very, very complementary for Oracle. It gives them instant credibility with hardware, virtualization, open source, storage and cloud computing."

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Hardware has pretty much become a commodity and Oracle would be wise to dump Sun's hardware divisions, or at least set them up to sink or swim on their own.