Watch your "E's" and "A's" not your "P's" and "Q's" for this one. Yesterday. Oracle acquired middleware solution provider and SOA evangelist BEA Systems for $8.5 billion. The deal has been on again, off again for months. BEA's competitive advantage is in business process improvement software (BPM) the espousal of service oriented architecture (SOA).

But don't confuse BEA Systems with BAE Systems, a defense contractor and geospatial solution provider of image analysis software.

"It's a watershed event for location," said Ted Morgan, CEO and Founder of Skyhook as over 4 million iPhones can automatically determine the phone's position. I caught up with Morgan as he was busily running around San Francisco demonstrating the iPhone's use of Skyhooks Wi-Fi Positioning System (WPS) that became available in a software upgrade from Apple Computer yesterday. "It's a huge deal for us," said Morgan who can now say that his company geo-enabled the iPhone and iPod Touch, something I've vented about in previous blog posts.

But there are some trade offs. The time to first fix via AT&T's EDGE network "can be a bit sleepy," said Morgan, which takes about 5 seconds. Once locked in, the map interfaces offers a "confidence circle" to show the users approximate location. The circle can be larger if a Wi-Fi hot spot in not identified and has to drop back to a cell tower location.

Skyhook continues to upgrate its database of 23 million hot spots and Morgan sees that number growing to 30 million pretty quickly. Expansion plans are ongoing in Europe and Asia.

There was a time that Sun Microsytems was closely engaged in the GIS and LBS marketplaces selling workstations running Solaris-based solutions. Not so much anymore. MySQL supports spatial datatypes but they don't actively participate in the growth of the open source geospatial market like other open source solutions though many implementations exist. My attempts to contact them have always been rebuffed leading me to conclude that "spatial is not special" to them.

Now comes word that Sun is buying MySQL. Sun has always pushed open source technology and now they have the "M" in the "LAMP" according to the press release, referring to Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Perl that is driving Web 2.0 initiatives. Don't expect Sun to all of a sudden become a force in the spatial business but they now have a very solid foundation to support the open source geospatial community if they wanted to.