DOJ Gives Oracle Approval To Buy Sun

k33l0r writes "The BBC is reporting that the US Justice Department has approved Oracle's takeover of Sun Microsystems. The acquisition gives Oracle control over (or a leading role in), among other things, Java, MySQL, (Open)Solaris, ZFS, OpenOffice, and the NetBeans IDE. 'The European Commission has still to rule on the deal, a step that will be required before it can close. That body has indicated it will issue an initial opinion on Sept. 3, according to the Wall Street Journal. It may OK the deal at that time or launch a four-month probe of it. ... The Justice Department ruling came earlier than expected, a possible response to Sun's declining revenues and precarious business position in a steep recession, as the required reviews proceeded.' We first discussed the deal back when it was announced in April."

Comments

Oracle and Sun combine and rename themeless as...

[jellomizer]

Apollo.

As far as mergers go this is probably a good fit. Oracle and Sun always needed each other for the most part. However I feel both are a dyeing breed. The industry wether you like it or not is moving away from those two companies core competencies.
High End Servers which are highly scalable with high end software which is highly scalable, is no longer the way it is now. We are moving to more smaller systems and don't need such scalability features as we realize that cost benefit really isn't there, for most situations.

Re:Bad deal for both companies

[davecb]

My leaky memory says that 40% of Oracle's income (profit?) comes from Oracle on SPARC, and another 20% from Oracle on other Unix.

If IBM had bought Sun and phased out SPARC like they did Sequent, then they'd probably own 50% of Oracle's market.

It's far better for Oracle to buy their own hardware supplier than depend on others: the Sequent was highly optimized for Oracle performance, and then disappeared in a little puff of greasy smoke when IBM bought it and shut it down in favor of Power. That's got to have been painful!

As other commentators have pointed out, Oracle is heavily invested in Java, and sees MySQL as a "channel" that brings them customers. You note that Oracle invested in improving the performance of the transactional engine that MySQL uses instead of shutting it down...

I suspect Sun was a perfect fit: it complemented the things Oracle needed, and didn't have any important products that compete directly. Win-win.

That in turn could be good for me, as I'm a capacity planner & performance guy, working mostly on large systems, like the ones Oracle and Sun customers use.

--dave