I have been wondering how Crossflo will get in on the action that seems like to me will be controled by the big boys in the health care and government information fields. Our CEO says we have the software that allows all the other technolgies to talk to each other. Whether that proves to be true or not, I like what I see develping as far as big boy parternships go. All of these large companies are data base provider powerhouse companies. I've been reading many of the articles about the Oracle / Sun merger and who their friends and competitors are. You may or may not be interested in these probable "long term" developments? However, I do think after reading some of these stories, that we,"Crossflo", through our relationship with HP will end up on the right side of the fence...

Didn't some here recently post about Sun possibly receiving a military contract?

Here are the cut and paste comments that I felt were somewhat relevant.

"Oracle is the new hardware/software/services powerhouse," wrote Stuart Williams, an analyst at Technology Business Research (TBR), in a note released Monday. "This deal directly threatens the dominance of IBM and Microsoft>(MSFT Quote) on the software side and IBM and HP on the hardware side."

By nabbing Sun, Oracle has also gained a foothold in the growing market for blade servers. Cisco(CSCO Quote), for example, recently jumped into this space with the launch of its Unified Computing System, much to the annoyance of its long-time partner and blade supremo Hewlett-Packard(HPQ Quote).

The $7.1 billion (4.8 billion pound) deal, which Oracle reached after the collapse of Sun's (JAVA.O) talks with International Business Machines Corp (IBM.N), will make it the No. 2 player in the $17 billion market for high-end Unix computers used in corporate data centers. That puts Oracle behind IBM and ahead of Hewlett Packard Co (HPQ.N).

"I think that software and networking services is where the value add and the rich margins are going to be for companies in our economy," said George Calhoun, professor of business and technology at Stevens Institute in Hoboken, N.J. "If I was building a hospital now and I wanted someone to help me put the information systems in, I would probably call IBM."

Calhoun, who is a former IBM shareholder and customer, told TheStreet.com that the company is one of a handful of tech firms that can tie together a bewildering array of networking, storage and server technologies.

"The really hard issue in technology systems is not which box to buy, but how to put them all together," he said. "IBM is pre-eminent in this role [although] H-P is trying to be a player there."

Little Hardware Experience

But to gain those assets, Oracle also has to take on a hardware business, something it has little experience running. Ellison will have to make a success of Sun's server business, which has been losing money. Oracle has made its own forays into the hardware business, striking a deal with Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) last year to produce servers designed to provide a performance boost to Oracle databases that run on them.

A spokeswoman for Hewlett-Packard said her company, a close partner of Oracle and Sun, will look to strengthen its ties with the larger Oracle.