Sun/Liferay: why? and what is the next step?

Yesterday, I have been surprised when I saw the following announcement:

• Sun Microsystems Joins Liferay Open Source Community / Sun's new Web platform to leverage core elements of Liferay Portal 5.0.

One interesting thing is Brian Chan's blog entry about Liferay and Sun explaining how they have been working together so far... to fill the limitations of each other solutions.

So today what does that means? Liferay is leveraging the development power of Sun to implements standards (for example JSR-286). I have always been frustrated by the lack of standard support and 'real' innovation in Liferay (compare to its competitors such as eXo Platform, and Jboss for example). In the other hand Sun will leverage the "tiny Liferay product" killing its own solution. Sun's portal is really to big without that benefits for developers/users (compare to its competitors, BEA,IBM, Oracle for example).

So what's the next step for this partnership? If Sun wants to push a real portal offering, it can only finish by a full acquisition of Liferay... even if it is stated that it is not the plan.

Let's wait and see how this "WebSynergy" goes... However one thing is cool, it will put more visibility on Enteprise Portals. With all the Web 2.0 stuff: social computing, mashups, collaborative works/intelligence, the need for "Enterprise Portal" (I should add a 2.0) is back stronger than before...