The tech industry has been abuzz the past week now that the Oracle acquisition of Sun has cleared the last hurdle from the European Union and is officially complete.

Oracle and Sun executives have begun addressing a number of questions about how Oracle will integrate Suns various hardware, system and software stacks into the Oracle ecosystem.

Two areas of integration that hold quite a bit of interest to this blog’s readers are Oracle + Sun’s Cloud and Virtualization Strategies. In the following prerecorded videos Richard Sarwal SVP of Product Development and Edward Screven; Chief Corporate Architect, give insight into Oracle’s future strategy.

Amazon Rolls Out Virtual Private Cloud
Amazon today introduced its Virtual Private Cloud Service. This service allows customers to connect resources within the AWS Cloud, to resources within their own your own datacenter using encrypted IPsec VPN connections

Help Shape Enterprise 2.0 San Francisco
The Enterprise 2.0 San Francisco Conference Organizers have set up a survey for the Enterprise 2.0 community to vote for sessions they would like to see at its inaugural west coast conference

VARS To Get a Slice of Cloud Computing Pie
Anthony Ha discusses Salesforce.com’s recently announced program for VARS to build applications on its Force.com platform

Cloud Computing Budgets Approved at Most Large Firms (pdf)
F5 recently released a survey of 250 large enterprises that indicates that funding for Cloud Computing projects and trials is in place at over 85% of the surveyed firms.

Is VMWare Making a Move into SAAS market
Interesting article from Sam Dean that delves into the real reasons behind VMware’s recent acqusition of SpringSource

IBM’s reported interest (still officially a rumor as of 19 March 2009) in acquiring Sun Microsystems for 6.5 billion US is the biggest news in technology so far this year.

My company is both an IBM and Sun ISV partner and I believe that from a partner and customer standpoint an acquisition would be an excellent move on IBM’s part. The synergy of the 2 firms varied hardware and software solutions along with IBM’s Global Services division would be beneficial for customers, partners and shareholders.

Although on the surface, IBM and Sun have dissimilar cultures and many overlaps in their middleware portfolio’s, the firms are more alike than they are different.

The commentary thus far has been evenly split between those who think a IBM-Sun pairing makes sense to those who wonder what the management of both firms are thinking.

PRO

Larry Dignan @ ZDNet
Sean Michael Kerner @ InternetNews
Kristin Shoemaker @ OStatic
James Sugrue @ DZone JAVALOBBY
Nicholas Carlson @ Silcon Valley Insider

CON

Om Malik @ GigaOM
Dana Gardner @ ZDNet
Tiernan Ray @ Barron’s
John Fontana @ Network World

Trampoline Systems; a London Based provider of Enterprise Social Software, recently launched SONAR FlightDeck at the Network Roundtable in Washington DC.

SONAR Flightdeck is the latest product in Trampoline Systems SONAR Suite product line. Flightdeck is a enterprise social networking tool that helps companies focus on knowledge and relationship identification.

Flightdeck works by gathering high value strategic information gathered in everyday corporate communications such as email, wiki’s, blogs and documents and helps managers visualize and identify the top influencers and performers , bottlenecks and even the social networking laggards within a company.

Flightdeck runs on top of the SONAR Server which is an analytical engine that is composed of natural language processing and social network analysis algorithms that identify the information flows, social networks and tasks occurring within a company.

Flightdeck would be most beneficial to companies that are engaging in merger and acquisitions, new product roll-outs or major corporate initiatives. SONAR Flightdeck is designed for managers within an organization whereas Trampoline Systems other product SONAR Dashboard is designed for general employee usage.

Trampoline Systems competitors in this space include Microsoft, (with its recent acquisition of Powerset) Autonomy and Semantra.

Microsoft makes 44 billion USD offer for Yahoo
To underscore how market dynamics and perception of companies has changed drastically over the past few years; this acquisition would actually be welcomed by many.

Meanwhile Google misses earning estimates for first time
This is no surprise given the current economic downturn and resultant decrease in online advertising; the key driver in Google’s revenue model. This makes Microsoft’s probable purchase of Yahoo even more important as Google will finally have a competitor who will match it dollar for dollar in R&D spending etc.

Web 2.0 security risks still being ignored
Julian Goldsmith opines in ZDNet Asia that basic security risks are still being ignored by most Web 2.0 companies and users.

Wall Street Journal predicts widespread Web 2.0 adoption in 2008
Despite the lagging economy and security risks, Ben Worthen thinks that 2008 will be a breakout year in terms of Web 2.0 adoption in corporations.