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In a year and an era of some major acquisitions, perhaps few compare to the breadth and the ongoing buzz around Oracle's (NASDQ: ORCL) acquisition of technology pioneer Sun Microsystems (NASDAQ: JAVA).

Announced in April but yet to close due to still outstanding regulatory issues, the US$7.4 billion deal has largely overshadowed what has been an otherwise busy year for Sun, with several key technology announcements and important moves to revise and refresh the company's channel partner program.

As vice-president of channels and alliances with Sun Canada, John Cammalleri has had the challenging task of trying to keep onboard a channel base with questions about what the pending acquisition will mean for them and their businesses, and likely desirous of more information than he's able to give them at this moment.

And at the same time, rivals such as HP and IBM have been hungrily eyeing Sun customers. Oracle has sought to assure Sun partners and customers of its ongoing commitment to key pieces of the Sun business. Speaking with CDN via e-mail, Cammalleri declined to go into detail about the pending Oracle deal.

“Our partners are expected to benefit by working with a single vendor to address customer needs for enterprise systems,” Cammalleri said, via e-mail. “Our partners will benefit from Oracle's support of Sun partners and increased investment in the combined solutions.”

While the year has largely been overshadowed by Oracle, Sun has still been active on the technology innovation front.

Cammalleri points to the 7000 Unified Storage System and its ability to mix protocols and share storage in new ways. He's also proud of Sun's High Performance Computing (HPC) technologies and how Sun and Consortium Laval, Université du Québec, McGill and Eastern Quebec (CLUMEQ) leveraged Sun's Constellation System to build one of the largest high-throughput interconnect supercomputers in Canada.

On the partner front, Sun took flak from some Canadian partners in the fall when, as part of a global compliance program, it required them to provide personal background information on themselves, their businesses and their employees that some partners felt was unnecessary and an invasion of their privacy.

“I did fill it out because the implication was if you want to be a Sun partner you'd better comply, so we did comply,” said one partner. “But it was overly intrusive.”

In a statement, Sun Canada told CDN the questionnaire was reviewed for global data privacy issues and was on par with questionnaires used by many other companies.

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