Oracle announced today that it had completed its acquisition of Sun Microsystems.

This combination transforms the IT industry. With the addition of servers, storage, SPARC processors, the Solaris operating system, Java, and the MySQL database to Oracle's portfolio of database, middleware, and business applications, Oracle plans to engineer and deliver open and integrated systems?from applications to disk?where all the pieces fit and work together out of the box.

"Each layer of the stack will be architected to improve performance, leverage innovation and centralize management so that IT will be more predictable, more supportable, and more secure," Oracle said in a statement. "Customers will benefit as their system performance, reliability and security goes up and their system integration and management costs go down," the company added.

Oracle will host an all-day live event, which also will be webcast, for customers, partners, press and analysts today at 9:00 AM Pacific time, at its headquarters in Redwood Shores, California.