Barron’s writer Eric Savitz reported that SAP executive board member John Schwarz was puzzled by rival Oracle’s purchase of open-source cloud provider Sun Microsystems.

"I have a hard time understanding why they did this," Schwarz told Savitz in an article published on Thursday. " in a world where mobile devices are moving to the cloud, where mobile devices are more important, and where the infrastructure on which an application runs doesn’t really matter. Why have a full stack in that world? We see having heterogeneous, multi-platform capacity as being a more flexible, powerful economically reasonable strategy than Oracle with Sun."

Indeed, ChannelWeb’s Rick Whiting reported, Sun’s clients appeared to be uncertain about the news. Whiting wrote earlier this week that "Sun channel partners now will be looking for a little reassurance about Oracle’s commitment to them," and that the company would cede the "lower-end, volume server" market to Dell and Hewlett-Packard.

Schwarz is a comparatively recent arrival at SAP, having joined the company’s Industry and Solution Management board on January 14. His previous employer, Business Objects, was acquired by SAP in 2007.