It's safe to say that only Larry Ellison and a few of his top level Oracle executives really know "what's next for customers at Sun," but there is plenty of room for informed speculation on this score, and that is what Paul Murphy provides in his brief blog post on that topic. By and large, what Murphy sees will be welcomed by Sun customers.

For starters, made-to-order and direct-ship are long overdue and should be enthusiastically received by customers, Murphy projects. Outlays formerly dedicated to inventory and distribution costs can now more appropriately be allotted to sales compensation and support engineering he writes. Furthermore, sales people will know the gear they are selling and be able to intelligently match it to customer needs.

Next, Murphy mildly reproves Sun for not having long ago focused more clearly on what he terms "selling appliance computing focused on application delivery." Under the Oracle banner, he notes, customers can expect "a pre-configured rack with applications, site specific configuration, installation, and support services all on one bill - just like IBM, but with at least one zero chopped off on the right." It's certain no customer will argue with that change.

And, deserving even more emphasis than Sun gave it, Oracle will aggressively market the Sun Ray, saving customers significant dollars on hardware and support costs in doing so.

A shift about which Murphy has mixed feelings, some of them nostalgic, involves Project Wonderland, which will continue under Oracle but without the Darkstar gaming engine. Project Wonderland itself has enormous potential for the advanced enterprise communications environment, Murphy writes. Darkstar, on the other hand, is something the project can do without, he opines, for two reasons: Oracle apparently sees no market for it and what Darkstar does can less expensively be accomplished by using Solaris/CMT, though currently only at a smaller scale.

Murphy speculates that many similar changes will come about in the BEA products that Oracle acquired some years ago, as Oracle management realizes, in Murphy's words, " ... the most complex, overhead intensive, (and commercially valuable because proven), components coded into those products are simply not needed on Sun gear."

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