In their marathon webcast extravaganza last week, Oracle had a lot to say about the types of customers they’re looking for and how they’re going to sell stuff to them. The overarching themes that we heard over and over again as they laid out their forthcoming value proposition were “Enterprise,” “Mission-critical,” and “Integrated.” The ‘old’ Sun used to talk about this same game, but with a very large, heaping helping of Web 2.0, new app developers, and utility computing. We didn’t hear much, if any, of that stuff from Oracle – which is a good thing, since concentrating on those markets only served to drive Sun into the ground in terms of sales and profitability.

Oracle has come out with a firm message regarding Sun’s sales strategy: it will change.

A few years back, when Sun was flailing, they announced that they would service their top 300 accounts directly and push the rest to the channel. We thought it was a terrible idea at the time, and at analyst conferences, we questioned company management about it. The answers were various flavors of “Everyone else is doing it” and “This will make the channel love us like a junior high school girl with her first boy-band crush.” OK, well, that last quote might not be verbatim; our notes have faded a bit over time.

Finally… the roadblocks to Oracle’s purchase of Sun Microsystems have fallen away, and the deal is – for all intents and purposes – done.

So what did we learn during Wednesday’s 5-hour marathon webcast? A lot. Oracle laid out their entire strategy, at least in a broad sense. True to their word, they intend to stay in the hardware market and carry forward most of Sun’s major product lines. This includes Solaris, of course, but also UltraSPARC-based systems, x86-based systems, and the SPARC64-based systems developed in conjunction with Fujitsu. One of the most detailed accounts of what transpired yesterday is Timothy Prickett Morgan’s article here.

This heralds the beginning of some very interesting times in the industry. Almost from the beginning we believed that Oracle, with the purchase of Sun, had the potential to change the game… and we were pretty much alone in that opinion for quite a while. We communicated that belief to our vendor and end-user clients with varying results and wrote about it here and here.

Our friends at insideHPC pushed this story recently, but there hasn’t been an accompanying groundswell of buzz, so I’m attempting to get the ball rolling.  Mattel, purveyor of the iconic Barbie doll, is running a contest to decide Barbie’s next career. She has quite a wide range of choices for her new job: surgeon, architect, environmentalist, news anchor, and computer engineer.

In the wake of the Google vs. China dustup, we’re starting to see some discussion of the greater implications for computing, both in general and the cloudy Google way. The fact that at least a few Gmail accounts were accessed by hackers looking for dissidents is bound to raise some questions about the security of Gmail specifically and the entire cloud model as well.

For my part, I’ve always felt that security was – and is – one of the biggest concerns with the entire cloud concept.