Oracle CEO Larry Ellison and Sun Chairman/CEO Scott McNealy took the stage at an Oracle-Sun "Employee Town Hall" meeting at Oracle headquarters to herald this partnership. Specifically, they revealed that Oracle has signed up for a new 10-year license to develop on the Java platform, and Sun will offer a specially priced bundle of a Sun UltraSPARC server with Oracle Database10g software and a year of service.

Sun also will migrate its internal ERP systems to Oracle's latest ERP software and rely on Oracle's advertising and marketing group to help promote Sun products.

"We have a good position here with you guys and we want to maintain that," McNealy said.

"We're going to market together against some fairly formidable competition," McNealy added. Both companies are on the same team, he said.

"I can't emphasize how important Java is to Oracle," Ellison said. "We have based our entire middleware strategy on Java and J2EE."