SAN FRANCISCO - The impending merger with Sun Microsystems heralds Oracle's long-term plan of becoming a major player in an increasingly consolidating technology industry.

In this year’s Oracle Open World conference here, the leaders of both companies – Oracle’s Larry Ellison and Sun’s Scott McNealy – provided a glimpse of what the future holds for the resulting union between one of the world’s biggest software companies and an established hardware vendor.

In a nutshell, the partnership intends to bring innovation into its current businesses.

“There's a limit to how far you can go if you just do software,” Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said in his keynote address at the start of the conference. “And if you can engineer the hardware while you are engineering the software, you can come up with systems that are faster, more reliable and easy to use.”

That would cover the SPARC chip architecture for servers and the Solaris operating system. As the acquiring company, Oracle promises to continue – and spend – on innovating further Sun’s core technologies such as SPARC and Solaris and even mySQL, an open-source counterpart to Oracle’s database software.

“We will make sure all Oracle products will run better, faster and more reliably on Solaris,” Ellison said, pledging the software firm’s commitment on improving on Sun’s hardware.

During the conference, Oracle announced a database machine called Exadata, which combines technologies from both companies, as well as enhancements in its own products (including database and business applications like ERP and CRM) that point to tighter integration between hardware and software.

The end-goal, therefore, is to be a totally consolidated vendor in the mold of IBM or HP – a fact Ellison himself acknowledged.

“Once we own Sun, we’ll be able to plan and synchronize new features from silicon to software, just like IBM and the other big system suppliers,” he said in a published interview with Reuters.

But while the ingredients in the technology side are there, how to bring all that innovation to customers is a significant side of the merger.

Oracle announced the merger in April - a deal valued at $7.34 billion – but the deal is yet to consummate. So understandably, Oracle executives are careful not to answer questions on how the merger would impact its partners and customers.

In markets like the Philippines, for example, Oracle and Sun have their own set of partners that distribute their respective products.

Oracle, though, announced an improvement to its partner program calling it Oracle Partner Network Specialized that stands to benefit smaller partners and system integrators, according to Judson Althoff, Oracle senior vice president for worldwide alliance and partners.

In essence, the program intends to refine further the expertise of these partners. So that in major Oracle offerings, such as database or middleware, there will be specializations that cater more specifically to customers

“It provides customers with a system of preference. This is exactly what customers are looking f0r,” Althoff said in a media session with journalists here.

George Wong, Oracle Asia Pacific group VP for alliances and channels, said 70 to 80 percent of the company’s business in the region is driven by partners.

“Customers are not very clear about the level of competency (of these partners). We have mid-sized partners that are unable to take on many clients. This program allows them to take on customers at their own pace,” Wong said.