You don’t just initiate one of Silicon Valley’s most ambitious and high-profile acquisitions of recent years without a plan. Oracle will have seen Sun Microsystems, a leading software provider that has been struggling in recent years, and recognised the problem it has had in managing its supply chain as something that it could turn to its advantage.

How it does that is what everyone wants to know and that’s something that’s become only slightly clearer in the days following the deal being finalised.  

Much of the attention following the deal, which was valued at more than $7bn, was on the potential for job losses. However, another interesting story is how Oracle plans to achieve its lofty goals through thoroughly altering Sun’s way of doing business.

“The uncertainty of the past is now gone” for Sun customers, said Oracle CEO Larry Ellison at last week’s press conference, but if you move beyond the bluster, the situation is far from clear for Sun’s suppliers and customers.  

Oracle’s website trumpets plans to combine “servers, storage, SPARC processors, the Solaris operating system, Java, and the MySQL database to Oracle's portfolio of database, middleware, and business applications. [Oracle] plan[s] to engineer and deliver open and integrated systems—from applications to disk—where all the pieces fit and work together out of the box.”

Oracle has made no bones about its intentions to take what it sees as an inefficient model, integrate it into its infrastructure and begin eliminating the unnecessary parts in order to offer a single technology stack. And it seems to have a record of getting the integration process right, in a string of acquisitions over recent years, as Gartner recognised in a recent report.

The software giant feels its best route is to develop a sales model and offer technology services directly to its customers, effectively eliminating third-party integrators that Sun had used. Customers may then have to contend with this new integrated approach and dealing with Oracle direct.  However, should they succeed, Oracle looks well set to compete with some of the players higher up the food chain; IBM for example.

“We've got channel partners. Sun has channel partners,” Ellison said. “We know the technology is great, but we have to transfer that technology to our customers.”

Sun’s approach of providing different products, customised down to a granular level to meet its clients’ needs may have won it favour, but looks to be on the chopping block under new management. By reducing, standardising and “stacking” its products and the technologies it looks to sell, it reduces a huge component inventory and targets savings, not just through integrating the systems, but unlocking what may be perceived as an unwieldy approach to demand management.

If they are successful, Oracle will be able to build Sun products in a build-to-order supply chain and not a build-to-inventory supply chain.

Oracle are bullish – but with the disparities between them and the company they are acquiring, they have their work cut out for them.