This is news – big news.

Oracle's acquisition would represent a milestone: the first time a prominent hardware company will have been acquired by a software company. The large systems landscape, currently represented by two behemoths, IBM and HP, will expand on a third axis with Oracle’s acquisition of Sun's hardware and software portfolio. The shape of the landscape, however, is still in flux. Other vendors such as EMC (VMware), Dell, Cisco, Fujitsu, Linux operating system distributors, emerging fabric-based vendors and cloud infrastructure services will also battle for new opportunities. On the packaged software front, SAP and Microsoft are the largest non-hardware platform-specific companies and HP is the largest software stack-agnostic systems company.

What remains unclear about the acquisition is how committed Oracle will be to Sun's broad roadmaps of hardware, software and operating system strategies - what stays from the Sun roadmap, and what gets the coup de grace (for more insight, see "Oracle/Sun Deal WILL Change Competitive Landscape in IT"). Sun's installed base worldwide is as varied as a rainbow coalition spanning Sparc variants, legacy and recent, from heavily mainframe-featured as the Fujitsu chip designs to power-efficient T-class Niagaras. They also broadly span a price range from $5K to $1M. According to Oracle's CEO, Larry Ellison, the entire acquisition was worth the $7.4B outlay for Java itself. But Oracle has been a proponent of rock-bottom priced hardware running Oracle's high-value, but pricey software - the cheaper the hardware supporting Oracle applications and databases, the better the overall value proposition to the enterprise. This core principle could warrant users contemplating the risk in making investments in high-end Sparc systems.

On Sun's other landscape is open source. Oracle will assume the mantel Sun wore when it proclaimed itself the largest OSS company in the world – a strange title for Oracle who has put premium value on its own internal creativity and acquisitions of blue-chip software companies. That will challenge Oracle messaging in creating a new image of dynamic software development through community processes and reference specifications such as the Java community without imprinting its own signature indelibly on the independent development process. To get more perspective on what Oracle's acquisition could mean to IT leaders, please see the "hot off the press" research. This is just our initial analysis; you will see a lot more coming from Gartner on the implications here; in the works is a Special Report that will examine the broad and intriguing possibilities that this acquisition could mean in the market. So, please stay tuned!