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.

I'm not yet sure how Sun's identity and access management tools will fit within Oracle's line-up, but I am sure that they're better off (for Oracle) in Oracle's hands - rather than IBM's.

Plus, Sun's security services group, as well as Solaris 10 Security and Trusted Solaris will be a nice fit for the government market.

While none of this, in the bigger scheme of IT, is as important as Oracle owning the Solaris operating system, the open source MySQL database, and the Java programming language - it will be a big change in the identity and access management market.