In a development that only Scrooge and the Grinch would find amusing, the tech industry has entered into a fevered period of pre-holiday job cuts. In the last few weeks, there have been layoff announcements from Adobe (ADBE) (680 jobs), Electronic Arts (ERTS) (1,500 jobs), Sprint (S) (up to 2,500 jobs), Microsoft (MSFT) (800 jobs), RealNetworks (RNWK) (70 jobs), AOL (100 jobs), Sun Microsystems (JAVA) (3,000 jobs), Blue Coat (BCSI) (roughly 150 jobs), Lexmark (LXK) (825 jobs) and Nokia Siemens (NOK) (potentially north of of 5,000 jobs).

Applied Materials (AMAT) could be next.

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Many big tech hardware makers are expanding into services. Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) last year bought Electronic Data Systems; Dell (DELL) agreed last month to buy Perot Systems; and Xerox (XRX) cut a deal for Affiliated Computer Services (ACS), also last month.

Software giant Oracle (ORCL), however, is expanding into hardware, and has no interest in buying a services company, said Chief Executive Larry Ellison at an event for financial analysts on Thursday.

“We are really brilliant or we’re idiots,” Ellison said of his company’s $7.4 billion acquisition of Sun Microsystems (JAVA), a deal that is currently being held up by European antitrust regulators.

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In order to win European Union regulatory approval for the pending acquisition of Sun Microsystems (JAVA), Oracle (ORCL) may need to spin-off or sell Sun’s MySQL open-source database business, according to analyst Trip Chowdhry, of Global Equities Research.

Chowdhry says the “MySQL community” is concerned about Oracle owning MySQL, asserting that users don’t believe Oracle has good intentions. What matters more, of course, is what the European regulators think, since they are the last obstacle to completion of the merger. And he thinks they will see Oracle owning MySQL as reducing competition in the corporate database market.

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Venture-capital firm Khosla Ventures announced Tuesday that it had raised more than $1 billion in two new funds–the first time the firm has raised funds from outside investors instead of just investing the money of its founder, Vinod Khosla, a longtime venture capitalist and a founder of Sun Microsystems (JAVA). Khosla Ventures is putting two thirds of the money towards clean technology investments. But what about tech?

David Weiden, one of Khosla’s partners who concentrates specifically in tech investments, said the firm is allotting more money towards clean tech because that sector boasts “a lot of opportunity where there’s relatively little competition relative to the size of the market.” In the crowded tech field, meanwhile, opportunities can be “somewhat harder to come by,” he said.

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The Oracle (ORCL) acquisition machine struck again Thursday, as the software giant snapped up GoldenGate Software, a closely held company whose products help businesses tie together data stored in different systems.

Oracle didn’t disclose terms of the deal. But this isn’t one of the mega deals that Oracle has become famous for, the most recent one being the pending $7.4 billion acquisition of Sun Microsystems (JAVA). Still, it doesn’t seem to be a tiny one, either.

GoldenGate booked about $100 million in revenue over the last year, estimates research company 451 Group, which reported that a deal was in the works last month.

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SAP’s new CEO Leo Apotheker says the software giant will focus on its core software business, even as its rivals expand beyond their traditional boundaries.

The latest trend in the tech industry–at least among its biggest companies–is to offer products and services that used to be provided by partners. H-P (HPQ) expanded into consulting last year when it bought EDS, Cisco announced in March that it was moving into the server business, in April SAP’s (SAP) software rival Oracle agreed to buy hardware maker Sun Microsystems (JAVA), and in June, Intel (INTC), which makes chips, agreed to buy a software company.

SAP has no such ambition, says Apotheker. Whereas Cisco (CSCO), Oracle (ORCL) et al. say that they can reduce complexity for customers by developing all-in-one products, SAP plans to keep making software and work with partners to achieve the same goal. “People want to reduce complexity, but they don’t want it all to come from one company,” he says.

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Oracle (ORCL) shares actually have gained ground since the company announced its plans to acquire Sun Microsystems (JAVA) thanks in part to the company’s promises to make the deal rapidly accretive to earnings. But in their enthusiasm for the deal, investors may be ignoring some significant risks.

Cowen analyst Peter Goldmacher today cut his rating on ORCL to Neutral from Outperform, asserting that the Street’s assumptions about how the the deal will boost profits are overly ambitious “given the considerable challenges” associated with the combination. He contends the decision to do the deal was largely defensive, as Oracle sought to keep Java out of the hands of IBM (IBM), given that the programming language is the base for its entire software stack, and notes that Sun is 4x larger than any company ORCL has ever bought.

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Oracle (ORCL) pounced on Sun Microsystems (JAVA) a week ago, agreeing to buy the battered server maker for $5.6 billion, excluding Sun’s cash. On the surface, the tech world responded relatively quietly to Oracle’s bombshell by getting about the business of reporting earnings. Behind closed doors, however, the entire industry has been turned topsy-turvy.

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Business at Sun Microsystems (JAVA) continues to, well, stink.

For the fiscal third quarter ended March 29, the server, storage and software company posted revenue of $2.614 billion, down 20 percent from a year ago, off 18.8 percent sequentially, and well short of the Street consensus of $2.86 billion. On the other hand, on a non-GAAP basis, the company lost 7 cents a share, which was not as bad as the 19 cent loss the Street had been expecting. On a GAAP basis, the company lost $201 million, or 27 cents a share.

Gross margin was 42.7 percent, down 2.2 points from a year ago, but up 0.8 points from the fiscal second quarter.

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Sun (JAVA) Microsystems will issue its quarterly financial results on Tuesday afternoon, right on schedule, despite the looming takeover by Oracle (ORCL). But Sun won’t hold a conference call; the company says it plans to simply post a press release and associated financial slides on its Web site.

That’s not surprising, given the circumstances. It’s certainly a change, though, for one of the chattiest companies in Silicon Valley. And it raises questions about what could happen, communications-wise, because of the deal.

Sun’s leaders have not said anything to speak of since the transaction was announced last Monday.

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As investors and analysts digest this morning’s Oracle-Sun news, some are wondering what will happen to Sun (JAVA)-owned MySQL, and whether combining the Oracle (ORCL) and MySQL database businesses would represent an antitrust concern.

While MySQL would be a small part of Oracle’s overall business, it’s a popular open-source database that competes with other Oracle offerings. The deal, writes Seeking Alpha’s Mike Butcher, “has massive implications for the future openness of Java and MySQL.”

“MySQL is clearly a big prize for Oracle,” writes Om Malik on GigaOm, who says that the acquisition takes out Oracle’s No. 1 threat.

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In a stunning turn of events, Oracle (ORCL) this morning announced perhaps its most aggressive acquisition yet, agreeing to acquire Sun Microsystems (JAVA) for $9.50 a share in cash, or $7.4 billion. Net of balance sheet cash and debt, the deal is worth $5.6 billion. The news follows the reported recent collapse of talks between IBM (IBM) and Sun.

Oracle said it expects the deal to be at least 15 cents accretive to earnings on a non-GAAP basis in the first full year after closing, contributing over $1.5 billion to non-GAAP profit in the first year, and over $2 billion in the second year.

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There’s a hot formula for hardware start-ups these days: Take standard components that are declining steadily in price, and offer proprietary chips and software that make them work much better.

That’s the path being pursued by Virident Systems, a Silicon Valley company that plans to offer its own server systems as well as sell technology to much larger server makers.

The company’s chief executive is Raj Parekh, who held executive titles at Sun Microsystems (JAVA) in the 1990s and also was a co-founder of Silicon Graphics (SGIC). He traces Virident’s existence to the fact that the design of most servers stacking up in computer rooms evolved years before the Internet. They often have massive number-crunching power, Parekh says, but aren’t particularly good at the main thing they are purchased to do–-answer Web queries.

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On Monday, the markets started to question whether International Business Machines (IBM) and Sun Microsystems (JAVA) will really get a deal done.

It was on March 19 that The Wall Street Journal reported that IBM was in talks to acquire Sun Micro. But it wasn’t until Monday that stock prices of the two companies really started to diverge, a sign perhaps that traders suddenly believed the deal could be endangered.

But there was no news that had been announced and no expectation of any news. IBM, which closed at $92.66 when news of the talks were reported on March 19, is still trading relatively up at $94.52. But Sun shares took a hit. Two weeks ago, they were held aloft by an 80 percent jump to around $8.63. The spur was the tempting merger price IBM was offering, which was reported to be in the range of $10 to $11. Monday, Sun’s shares fell to $7.24, down nearly eight percent on the day and the lowest since the talks were announced. (The shares are up 14 cents, or 1.9 percent, to $7.38 today.)

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When I talked the other day with Bill Coleman, CEO of Cassatt and a former colleague of new Yahoo (YHOO) CEO Carol Bartz at Sun Microsystems (JAVA), he said he was initially surprised she would take on such a demanding job. After all, she stepped back from being CEO of Autodesk (ADSK) to be executive chairman, seeming to head toward relative retirement. “I thought, why does Carol need that at this time of her life?” But he thinks she was ready to get back to full-time work. “I think she misses that energy.”

I’m sure he’s right. But there’s another reason, too: money. According to a new Securities and Exchange Commission filing, she will be paid a base salary of $1 million plus up to a $3 million annual bonus, plus an annual equity grant worth $8 million in 2009, plus a $10 million equity grant this year to make up for forfeiting Autodesk grants and medical coverage. Nice.

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