Oracle may be "the biggest question mark, although the company has thrown its weight behind Sun's UltraSparc Unix systems. [Oracle] said that it will continue development, but it is going to take a while for us to really see what the shape of that is going to be," said King.

Patrick Thibodeau covers SaaS and enterprise applications, outsourcing, government IT policies, data centers and IT workforce issues for Computerworld . Follow Patrick on Twitter at @DCgov , or subscribe to Patrick's RSS feed . His e-mail address is pthibodeau@computerworld.com .

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