Sun Microsystems will be sold to Oracle for $7.4 billion including debt with the deal moving the database and enterprise application giant directly into the data center business.

Oracle wants to "simplify deployment from the application to the data center."

Besides Sun's server business, from which its sells its own Sparc chip based and Intel Xeon x86 servers, Sun's data center inventory includes its POD containerised data centers. Sun also has a large storage division through its purchase of StorageTek.

In the announcement on the deal Oracle's CEO Larry Ellison said the company would integrate and engineer its database product for Sun's Solaris operating system.

It is too early to say how the Oracle acquisition will affect Sun's data center sales operation but in the past Oracle has focused on buying up rivals in the enterprise application space such as Peoplesoft and Siebel and Ellison has described the acquisition of Sun's programming language Java as the most important software purchase in the company's history.

Comment: Larry Ellison has software in his blood and even before the acquisition commentators were asking if Sun was becoming a software company under the leadership of Jonathan Schwartz. As part of Oracle its data center operation does not look like a core business but with unified platforms springing up from the likes of Cisco, the temptation of owning the whole pie may preclude any urge to divest.