Does Oracle want to own the entire stack from top to bottom just like IBM? IBM has numerous hardware offerings with the iSeries, pSeries, and zSeries. They have proprietary operating systems for each platform, and numerous databases that run on these platforms. IBM offers software infrastructure such as applications servers and enterprise service bus. Oracle has strength here since the BEA acquistion. This puts Oracle head to head with IBM in too many areas to count. Hardware sales are different than software sales with different margins and business models. This is a huge step for Oracle. One also wonders what will happen to MySQL, the open source database that Sun acquired that competes with other open source offerings as well as the Oracle database. This could run into some regulatory hurdles. Oracle has a voracious appetite for growth and they have now acquired their way from the top to the bottom of the software stack.