Oracle's US$7.4 billion bid for Sun might win customer favor, industry watchers say, as the sum of the two companies' management technology portfolios will provide much greater value than the stand-alone parts.

"I see this acquisition as a real coup for Oracle from a management perspective," says Andi Mann, vice president of research at Enterprise Management Associates (EMA).

Oracle hasn't made much noise in the systems management market, though experts have been speculating recently about the company's need to acquire solid management software if it wants to compete with the likes of HP, IBM and Microsoft. But with acquisitions such as ClearApp and mValent under its belt, Oracle has been able to build a strong application management product for its customers.

"Oracle Enterprise Manager (EM) is a solid management solution, with surprisingly deep capabilities. However, it is very Oracle-centric, and that has always been its biggest sticking point," Mann explains. "Sun's Ops Center, Management Center and N1 solutions will combine with EM very organically. The combination will go a long way toward lifting Oracle in the management stakes, and for Oracle-Sun customers in particular it will be very hard to go past."

Yet the combined company won't be able to compete head-on with vendors such as BMC, CA, HP and IBM, each of which offers heterogeneous systems management applications.

"Sun was not exactly beating the market in management, so even the combined solutions of Sun and Oracle will not rival larger vendors such as IBM Tivoli or HP (or non-hardware management vendors like BMC) in breadth and functionality and platform support especially," Mann says. "For Sun and Oracle enterprise customers, this makes Oracle much more attractive as a primary vendor, because it has exceptional depth and expertise in those specific areas."

Still Oracle will increase its management capabilities so much so that customers won't be able to ignore a combined Oracle-Sun management stack. It would rival IBM- or HP-specific offerings, experts say, and potentially draw customers to Oracle for their management software needs in that environment.

"Oracle will link their software and database management with Sun's systems management solutions so they will have a more complete stack for managing their own environment," says Jasmine Noel, co-founder and principal analyst at Ptak, Noel & Associates. "This means customers can have an integrated management solution for Oracle software on Oracle hardware just as they can for IBM software running on IBM hardware or HP software running on HP hardware."