Oracle and Sun alliance in the works

Next Tuesday, on the same day as the Steve Jobs Macworld Expo keynote, Larry Ellison and Scott McNealy are holding a town meeting for employees at Oracle's headquarters, which is in close proximity to Sun's. Here's the preliminary description from the e-mail invite:

="" their="" from="" hear="" they="" as="" and="" both="" employees="" sun="" oracle="" ceos="">Join employees from both Sun and Oracle as they hear from their CEOs about:

-Why the time is right to kick off the next phase of the Sun/Oracle alliance
-How both companies intend to extend the importance of Java for the future
-How Oracle's new pricing model for multi-core systems benefits customers
-How Sun and Oracle will go to market together to expand adoption for Sun and Oracle technologies

As partners for more than 20 years, Sun and Oracle have established themselves as a force in the enterprise, making Sun the #1 marketshare leader with Oracle globally and the #1 marketshare platform for Oracle Database and Applications. Over the last several months, the two companies have re-established closer ties on a number of fronts from Oracle's selection of Solaris 10 as its preferred 64-bit application development and deployment platform to Charles Phillips' participation in the launch of Sun's new Sun Fire T1000 and T2000 servers.

Sun has been busy with alliances over the past year--Microsoft and Google, for example--but they haven't yielded much except cash from Microsoft and some press. This apparent recharged relationship appears to be more about Sun & Oracle against Microsoft,  Sun vs. IBM, HP et al servers and perhaps some posturing versus IBM around Java. I'm surprised I didn't hear about this first in Jonathan Schwartz's blog...