In a Wednesday Webcast, Oracle executives outlined the company’s proposed integration of the hardware and software of Sun Microsystems with the Oracle products, once the $7.4-billion acquisition of Sun comes through.

A series of executives who took turns to talk about Oracle’s Sun-related plans said that Oracle will provide customers with tightly integrated hardware-software systems; and broaden its range of virtualization offerings – from desktops to servers.

Oracle’s president Charles Phillips said: “We want to recreate that IBM of the 1960s, but on an open standards platform. The bottom line is, we want to change and improve the way people buy IT systems, the way they run them and the way they manage them. Complete systems, not just a series of components.”

Elaborating that Oracle has worked out a wide-ranging and integrated solution set for virtualization, Oracle’s chief architect Edward Screven said that Sun’s technology development and customer support would be merged with Oracle’s operations in such a way that whenever there is any problem, the company will be able to fix it.

With the Oracle executives presenting a horde of slides to show a complete “technology stack” with servers, virtualization, storage, operating system, database, middleware and application software products, Phillips said that ever since the Oracle-Sun deal was announced in April last year, the company has had “a lot of time to plan,” and “a lot of detail” about Sun software.