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:

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...