First and foremost, the biggest losers in this deal would appear to be the users - those who use Sun's Identity Manager but also (surprisingly) those who use Oracle's. It seems obvious that the combined organization won't support both stacks. It seems equally obvious that Oracle won't sell of one to a potential competitor. So some things, many things, will have to go. Not overnight, but in time one stack or the other - or, more probably, parts of each - will wither away.

My good friends at Oracle, and whichever of the fine members of the identity team at Sun that will be joining them, need to make haste, slowly. They need to move quickly to decide what the roadmap will be, laying out their plans for meshing (and weeding out) the various facets of their identity stack. Then they need to move slowly to carry out the plan so that customers can comfortably make the inevitable changes at a deliberate pace. Anything else and those customers will be looking for somewhere else to go, somewhere that offers them some stability.

Sun Wednesday tied its identity federation software to Google Apps and added its directory and Web application server to the cloud platform it is building for developers to build and test applications.

Sun said it was adding support for Google App Premier Edition (GAPE) to its OpenSSO Express an open source identity federation project that releases an update every three months.

GAPE, -- which includes Gmail with voice and video chat, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Sites, and Google Video for business -- is aimed at business users. OpenSSO Express will allow those users to sign onto GAPE using their corporate credentials.

OpenSSO is a set of Java-based technologies that include single sign-on, access management, federation and secure Web services. OpenSSO incorporates such standards as the Security Assertion Markup Language 2.0, Extensible Access Control Markup Language and WS-Federation; and such projects as OpenID and Information Cards

Sun Microsystems has announced expanded interoperability between its Identity Management Suite and MySQL open-source database. The firm said the enhancement would help firms lower their total cost of ownership, while improving the database's capabilities.

Sun made the announcement at the MySQL Conference & Expo in California, telling attendees that they now had a much more flexible and scalable system at their disposal.

Oracle's stealing Sun at the altar of a possible marriage with IBM not only saves Oracle from a long-standing partnership going stale, but also significantly bolsters Oracle's security capabilities.

Oracle has a long line-up of its own security capabilities, from database encryption and masking in Oracle Database Vault, as well as its Audit Vault, Secure Backup, Secure Enterprise Search, and Oracle Authentication Services for Operating Systems.

Then there's the Oracle Single Sign-On and Web Access Control through a number of its acquisitions, included Web SSO vendor Oblix a number of years ago. The list of IdM apps is long: Oracle Access Manager, Oracle Identity Federation, Oracle Enterprise Single Sign-On Suite, Oracle Access Manager, Identity Manager, Role Manager, as well as Oracle Enterprise Single Sign-On Password Reset.