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Oracle Buys Sun

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the there-can-be-only-one dept.

bruunb writes "Oracle Corporation (NASDAQ: ORCL) and Sun Microsystems (NASDAQ: JAVA) announced today they have entered into a definitive agreement under which Oracle will acquire Sun common stock for $9.50 per share in cash. The transaction is valued at approximately $7.4 billion, or $5.6 billion net of Sun's cash and debt. 'We expect this acquisition to be accretive to Oracle's earnings by at least 15 cents on a non-GAAP basis in the first full year after closing. We estimate that the acquired business will contribute over $1.5 billion to Oracle's non-GAAP operating profit in the first year, increasing to over $2 billion in the second year. This would make the Sun acquisition more profitable in per share contribution in the first year than we had planned for the acquisitions of BEA, PeopleSoft and Siebel combined,' said Oracle President Safra Catz."

9 of 906 comments (clear)

  1. What about MySQL? by kaffiene · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Well well well. I can see this working well for Oracle - they use Java a great deal... and it should be good news for Sun's open source projects like Netbeans - which would, I think, be maintained under Oracle.

    I guess it's a little sad to see Sun unable to continue by themselves, but the writing was on the wall and I think Oracle will keep all the Sun products working, but of course the big question is what does this mean for MySQL?

    1. Re:What about MySQL? by ByOhTek · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Oracle already has Linux (a re-branded RHEL) for it's *NIX platform.

      My guess is they'll relegate either their Linux, or Solaris to the back (either way, I wouldn't be surprised if Solaris went completely open source, no non-open-source Solaris).

      Since Oracle likes primarily using "their own thing", my guess is they'll move to Solaris, and their Linux distro will take a bow, since it's based off of someone elses work, that they've not yet acquired.

      --
      Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
    2. Re:What about MySQL? by BlackCreek · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I have many co-workers that use Eclipse everyday, but that never got hold of point of the joke in the name.

      "Eclipse" is when the Sun is blocked/hidden/occulted by something else. It makes IBM's reasons for funding Eclipse dead obvious. Turn one of your competitor's product niche into a commodity.

    3. Re:What about MySQL? by McKing · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I concur with this assessment. We recently moved from a $300,000 SunFire 6900 (a system the size of a standard full-size 42U rack) with 12 dual core CPU's and 48 GB of RAM that drew massive amounts of power and cooling, to a $30,000 T2 blade with 64GB of RAM that runs cool and sips power. Our DBA's were amazed at the improvement. We need to upgrade the front end systems now to keep up with the increase in performance of the backend! We were able to trade in the 6900, and the savings on *support* for the 6900 offset the purchase price of 2 blade chassis, 10 blades and a SAN!

      For our workload, the massive parallel architecture of the T2 really suits Oracle. For any type of multithreaded or multiprocessed throughput-based app (web serving, front-end app servers, LDAP server, database server), the T1 and T2 design is perfect.

      --
      If only "common" sense was actually that common...
  2. I'm quite sure that IBM hates itself now by egghat · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Oracle+Sun has the power to seriously harm IBM. IBMs big plus was the combination of good hardware + OS + DB + consultants.

    Oracle + Sun can now deliver exactly the same.

    bye egghat

    --
    -- "As a human being I claim the right to be widely inconsistent", John Peel
  3. Facinating combination by downix · · Score: 5, Interesting

    What we have here on one hand is Oracle, a company that is incredibly well run, but with products that don't cover a complete spectrum, and Sun, a so-so run company with a wide range of product lines. This can go two ways, Suns platform quality goes down while Oracles management goes down with it, *or*, and this is the scenario I hope for, Oracle cleans out the dead wood in Sun management, and adopts the Sun technology in force. I've worked on Oracle machines, and Sun machines. I've also delt with both companies sales forces. If the synergy can be hammered out, this can really shake up the business world.

    One suggestion tho, keep both names. Use Sun for the hardware, Oracle for the software.

    --
    Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
  4. I doubt it by shis-ka-bob · · Score: 5, Interesting

    MySQL is in a very different niche than Oracle. When is the last time you saw Oracle used as the back end for a Wiki or a large company use MySQL for an enterprise ERP system? It may happen that somebody uses a product outside of its niche, but like a lungfish on land, it just isn't as effective as something that has evolved to better fill that role.

    --
    Think global, act loco
  5. Good move...for Oracle by ErichTheRed · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I remember seeing Oracle rebranding high-end server hardware recently, and tweaking Oracle to run ultra-fast on that particular configuration. Now they have a hardware platform (Sun's x86 and Sparc lines), a software infrastructure (Java) and a marketing lock (Sun hardware and Oracle database purchases seem to go hand in hand, even now.)

    So it's a good move for them. We'll see how well it works out for everyone else. Oracle hasn't been known for developing products that don't require an army of Oracle consultants to get working. If they use the Sun acquisition to build their "database in a box" product, then customers face lock-in on the hardware and software fronts, just like back in the mainframe/midrange days.

    It might be the cynic in me talking, but Oracle has been one of the major causes of large-scale IT failures you read about in the industry press. It's helped along by bad requirements and idiotic lowest-bidder consulting firms, but Oracle is sometimes forced to pay large settlements for running a project over budget. That's just a natural side effect of designing products that are so complex that you have no choice but to buy support. Also, you have to wonder what Oracle's going to do with MySQL now...

    Oracle consumed J.D. Edwards, PeopleSoft and BEA. Let's see how well they digest this one!

  6. Re:The internal announcement by mzs · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The rumors are that the IBM deal fell through when IBM balked at the size of the golden parachutes that Sun expected. My guess of what happened is that Oracle was scared of IBM+Sun as their competitor. So they bought Sun so IBM wold not. Oracle does not really believe all of the stuff they stated (about financials) and others are inferring (like they were interested in MySQL, Java, sparc, etc). They simply saw that if they offered a better deal to the Sun execs they could prevent the creation of the most serious competitor they had ever faced. The Sun execs cared more for themselves than the long term good of Sun's products and employees.