""Our customers have been asking us to step up to a
broader role to reduce complexity, risk and cost by delivering a
highly-optimized standards-based product stack," Oracle president
Charles Phillips wrote in a letter to partners and customers.
"Oracle plans to deliver these benefits by offering a broad range
of products, including servers and storage, with all the integrated
pieces: hardware operating system, database, middleware and
applications."
"The deal is much more likely to clear antitrust hurdles than
Sun's proposed merger with IBM (NYSE: IBM), which fell apart two
weeks ago.
"But Wedbush Morgan analyst Kaushik Roy doesn't necessarily
think that's a good thing.
""IBM was a better strategic fit for Sun," he said. "Now Oracle
is getting into totally new markets in which they have no expertise
or history. I am skeptical."