Oracle, the world’s largest enterprise software company, announced in a press release this past Monday that they have entered into an agreement to purchase Sun Microsystems for $9.50 per share (a total value of $7.4 billion). I know by now this is old news, but I just wanted to take a moment to add some personal thoughts based on industry experience.

Anybody who has spent time developing enterprise systems likely has experience with both Oracle and Sun products. Oracle’s database applications are ubiquitous in the commercial sector, and Sun’s enterprise servers and numerous software products are almost synonymous with enterprise systems. What, then, does this merger mean for the industry?

Though I’ve only been immersed in the industry for a relatively short amount of time, almost every day on the job I’ve touched both Sun and Oracle products. Another product I use every day at work comes from a different called BEA Systems. Before you preemptively point your browser to bea.com, I’ll save you some clicks; bea.com no longer exists because Oracle recently acquired BEA Systems. My experience during Oracle’s acquisition of BEA has been rocky at best. As an application developer, I often seek support for issues that come up during development. After Oracle acquired BEA Systems, I would often find that support for BEA products started to become harder find. Even the BEA documentation that was preserved was strewn with broken links. Will the same happen for Sun products? I don’t think it will. I believe that Oracle understands the importance of preserving the massive community base that has grown up around Sun’s golden child: Java. The same can be said for Sun’s high-quality enterprise servers and its Solaris operating system.

That said, I do have one concern. Sun recently acquired what I presume to be the world’s most popular open source database application: MySQL. Will Oracle, with its competing database application, be willing to help MySQL to continue to evolve and prosper in the open source community? Time will tell, I suppose.