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.

Designed to help Sun ISV’s and other third parties with developing SaaS applications, a number of Sun partners including AT&T and Endeavors have launched SaaS solution on Solaris since the programs inception.

With the recent development and interest in Ubuntu, Hp Unix and AIX cloud computing platforms, Suns Solaris offering rounds out the major Unix and Linux distributions.

Overview Of File Based Access On Sun Cloud Storage Service

Getting Started With File Based Access On The Sun Cloud

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