KEY POINTS:
I wasn't expecting much from Sun Microsystems boss Jonathan Schwartz's keynote delivered here at OpenWorld this morning, but it threw up a surprise development for the computer maker and Java pioneer.
A video of the keynote is available here.
Schwartz revealed that Sun's latest iteration of its operating system, Solaris 10, is set to be shipped on servers supplied by computer maker Dell and supported by the company.
IT geeks will know that the two companies have a longstanding rivalry due to their opposing position in the market for computer servers.
Dell currently supports Windows, Red Hat and SUSE Linux on its servers, and claims there was increasing demand for Solaris to be supported also. Solaris is open-source software so free to download, but Sun and its hardware partners - Dell now included, make revenue from support subscriptions.
Sun also got in on the virtualisation action at OracleWorld, announcing xVM, a virtualisation and management platform made up of Sun xVM Server, a virtualisation hypervisor, and virtualisation management tool Sun xVM Ops Centre.
It's all about making the so-called next-generation data centre as efficient as possible, according to the company.
Meanwhile, there's been surprisingly little talk on the periphery of OpenWorld about BEA Systems and the state of play of Oracle's quest to acquire it.
On the schedule this afternoon are the Larry Ellison and Michael Dell keynotes, so there's still the prospect of more surprises out of OracleWorld.
