On Monday, April 20, 2009 Oracle announced that it is going to acquire Sun Microsystems. This acquisition is of vital importance to the virtualization industry for three major reasons:

1. Oracle is already the largest enterprise software company with the brand, products, technology and partnerships to make virtualization a core part of its enterprise solution portfolio.

2. With Sun Microsystems under its wing, Oracle will be able to offer a complete solution stack to customers spanning hardware, software and services.

3. With a robust ISV community building Java-based applications, Oracle has all the necessary ingredients to stimulate development of virtualization management applications.

Today, VMware continues to be the de facto leader in enterprise virtualization deployments. Citrix and Microsoft are challenging VMware's position but both vendors are more likely to succeed in the SMB segment, at least in the short term. In contrast the Oracle/Sun combination has the potential to become a formidable challenger to VMware in the enterprise, especially since Oracle will be able to offer a complete stack across hardware and software.

The big question now is how quickly will Oracle be able to integrate Sun and accelerate its investment in virtualization?