Oracle Buys Sun Microsystems

Apr 20, 2009

Anika Kehrer

After weeks' long rumor mill, the word is finally out: database specialist Oracle is buying Sun Microsystems for around $7.4 billion. This just two weeks after IBM abandoned its bid to do the same thing.

Oracle and Sun announced that Oracle will acquire Sun's stock by the end of the summer, paying $9.40 per share. Oracle expects in the first year of the purchase to add $1.5 billion in adjusted profits with at least 15 cents more per share. They're also expecting $2 billion more in profits the second year.

Particularly interesting for Oracle, at least according to a first statement of the parties, are the Sun freebies Java and Solaris. In their joint statement, they declared that the "Sun Solaris operating system is the leading platform for the Oracle database" and that they can now "optimize the Oracle database for some of the unique, high-end features of Solaris." Oracle CEO Larry Ellison can now claim that "Oracle will be the only company that can engineer an integrated system." What will happen with open source MySQL, which Sun bought over a year ago, is anyone's guess.

The announcement is the first tangible result of the weeks-long takeovergame. The Wall Street Journal had reported that IBM was in talks with Sun, but had broken them off due to the high price set by Sun. No official statement ensued. Oracle was then brought up again in connection with a Red Hat takeover, again with no definite statement of facts to prove it.

Comments

Sun's failure was set in the 1990s

adam hartung
Sun had no hope of survival by the late 1990s when McNeely Locked-in on selling "boxes" and stopped listening to the marketplace. Sun created huge value with Solaris and Java, but had no idea how to capture that value so it just kept doing what it always did. Eventually, the market didn't see the value in the boxes any more, and the value of Solaris and Java had been frittered away. A lesson for any company that it must adapt to market needs or it will be squashed. Read more at http://WWW.ThePhoenixPrinciple.com
hmm...

matthewm.org
7.4 million or billion?
Gosh who know where that is going to take Oracle!

Alex
That means Oracle owning OpenOffice, Solaris, MySql, Sun Servers (exaData), all the Storage Management Software, and of course the crown jewel java amongst other Sun technology!

Will that make Oracle the biggest "Software" provider in the world!