What will happen to Sun (by Oracle)?

I read an interesting article with some quotes and insight from Marc Andreessen speculating that the end of Oracle may be near.  While he makes some good points I don’t think this is true.

On the hardware front (the legacy Sun portion of Oracle) this may be a valid point.  Between commodity priced hardware solutions and outsourced virtualized solutions (to include “cloud” – though that term annoys me to no end) the days of needing the Sun hardware architecture are most likely limited.

But on the software front there are numerous large corporations that are heavily invested in Oracle products – from the well known database to the application server and identity products.  Many large shops do not have any desire to attempt to run critical applications on the Microsoft platform.  Outside of IBM’s WebSphere suite (Portal & Commerce, in particular) I don’t see anyone rushing out to get UDB/DB2.  MySQL is coming up to speed pretty fast but since this is another product from Oracle there’s really no harm if MySQL continues to accelerate in adoption for critical applications.

The question that remains is can Oracle survive as a company on the software alone?  Is there enough of a market to keep them afloat?  Only time will tell.  I’m hoping they do, but hope alone doesn’t help the balance sheets.