On Sun's part, the acquisition gives the server and software company a database offering that is capable of storing and manipulating the information used by its software tools, a role it has largely handed to Oracle.
Shalom says his firm's decision to target specific hardware, in pursuit of higher performance and greater scalability, is in some ways similar to Oracle's recent moves to leverage the proprietary server hardware it got with its acquisition of Sun Microsystems.
Sun's applications server strategy became somewhat hazy after the acquisition, when, as a spin-off of America Online's (AOL)purchase of Netscape Communications, Sun acquired Netscape's application server software.