The software industry's evolution continues at the tail end of 2009 with strategic moves among friends and foes. Last week's two-day hearing before the European Union apparently turned the corner in seeking a favorable decision for the long-delayed Oracle acquisition of Sun Microsystems. We'll know for sure by no later than January 27. Oracle took steps to influence a positive outcome by promising it will invest in developing MySQL, provide written guarantees that it will maintain its open-source licensing model, and keep its storage APIs public.

Meanwhile during the delayed approval of the acquisition, Oracle's foe, HP, has been successfully stealing Sun customers. This week HP formed an alliance with Microsoft, Novell, and Red Hat to offer discounts and other incentives to lure Sun customers to switch providers.

If the EU decision is a "go" for the Sun acquisition, it will pit Oracle as a powerful competitor against IBM in the data center and hardware realm. Though sparks are bound to fly and market share is bound to undergo some dramatic reshaping, Ellison indicates he's not worried about competing against rivals HP, Dell, Cisco, and even IBM. His strategy: let the others play in the low-end server market while Oracle sells higher-priced, high-performance Sparc servers loaded with Oracle software. He's counting on a bottom-line profit of $1.5 billion in the first year of owning Sun.

Oracle's already doing great without Sun and despite this year's economic challenges. Yesterday it reported second-quarter net income of $1.5 billion with a four percent rise in revenue.

Friends Yahoo and Microsoft are teaming up with a revenue-sharing agreement to fight against Google in the search engine arena. The agreement is awaiting regulatory approval.

IBM is acquiring its 90th company since 2003; Lombardi Software will enhance Big Blue's business process management capabilities. Microsoft is acquiring Opalis Software and its data center process-automation products. However, technology investment research firm, The 451 Group, says merger/acquisition activity was lower in 2009 than last year. Total M&A value this year reached $142 billion, in contrast to $173 in just the second quarter of 2008.

Moving beyond beta testing, Amazon opened up its Virtual Private Cloud this week to users of its EC2 cloud-computing services.

Symantec, Veritas, and Amazon are new friends. End-point protection solutions from Symantec and secure storage from Veritas are now available as next-generation cloud security/storage offerings through Amazon's EC2 with pay-as-you-go pricing.

HP is now offering two new products to help enterprises move to the cloud. And it's befriending telecom companies by building a platform for telecom SaaS suppliers with applications especially attractive to small and midsize businesses.

Clarizen, developer of work and project management software, has friends in the venture capital world, which just invested $8 million in the company.

Among the software world's foes are the leaders in the mobile applications segment: Apple, Google, Nokia, Microsoft, Samsung, Vodafone. A study by Screen Digest's Mobile Intelligence Service predicts that revenue from applications on mobile devices on mobile devices will double in the next four years. Considering that revenue is already explosive (at least according to the stats on Apple Store downloads), that's a big pie and the leaders will be scrambling to claim their share. Screen Digest predicts that the competitive products will create "unnecessary market fragmentation."

Finally, Microsoft has two new foes. Plurk. The Canadian firm claims Microsoft plagiarized the programming code of its Web site. Microsoft says it's innocent. And a Missouri company named Bing! Information Design LLC, has filed a trademark infringement lawsuit against Microsoft's Bing search engine. Microsoft says it's not worried.

Noted & Quoted

• Novell is undertaking a major reorganization. A new focus for the firm will be "Intelligent Workload Management" - it's basically what everybody else is referring to as the cloud
• Citrix debuted disaster recovery software that uses Microsoft Hyper-V virtualization technology to accelerate the recovery process
• Shares of Research in Motion, the maker of BlackBerry, jumped up 12 percent this week after reporting earnings higher than had been forecasted
• Only 22 percent of UK companies are using SaaS applications, which is less than half the number of U.S. SaaS adopting firms
• 6,500 servers and three million new files per hour characterize Autonomy Corp's private cloud - currently the largest one in the world

"We are definitely seeing customers back buying…. The products are very, very, very, strong and so I think what's happening is we are clearly winning at the expense of others…."
-- Safra Catz, Oracle President