Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison unveiled a surprise $7.4bn offer for Sun Microsystems on Monday, turning Sun’s collection of widely-used but undervalued software properties into the next targets for his wholesale consolidation of the software industry.

The agreed offer, which followed closely on the heels of a failed IBM bid for Sun, threw the spotlight squarely onto Sun’s Java, a programming language developed in the mid-1990s to counter Microsoft’s growing dominance of the software industry.