We reported about a possible acquisition of Sun by IBM, but Sun's board rejected the offer from the industry giant close to two weeks ago. Well, as it turns out, instead Oracle tied the knot with them yesterday and bought Sun for $7.4 Billion, although Sun brings $1.8 billion of net cash to the deal, making the net cost to Oracle as low as $5.6 billion.

"We're thrilled to be acquired by Oracle and have our technologies, innovations and communities as part of the Oracle vision," Scott McNealy, Sun's chairman, said.

The acquisition will allow Oracle to combine enterprise hardware and software into a total solution, it said. "Oracle will be the only company that can engineer an integrated system -- applications to disk -- where all the pieces fit and work together so customers do not have to do it themselves," Ellison said. "Our customers benefit as their systems integration costs go down while system performance, reliability and security go up."