Oracle Finally Completes Sun Acquisition

Oracle has finally closed its prolonged acquisition of Sun Microsystems, just hours before it outlines how it will incorporate the server maker into the fold.

Oracle’s announcement 27 January comes a week after European antitrust regulators gave their approval to the deal after a five-month investigation that focused primarily on the impact of Oracle acquiring the MySQL database technology.

Oracle officials are scheduled to talk with analysts and reporters at their Redwood Shores, California, headquarters and via a Webcast 27 January to outline their roadmap going forward as the company absorbs Sun into the fold.

The five-hour event will be a way for Oracle officials to clue in Sun customers and the rest of the IT industry on what they are going to do with Sun’s technology portfolio. That said, Oracle officials have been vocal about some plans while they waited for the European Commission to approve the deal.

For example, Robert Shimp, vice president of technology marketing at Oracle, told eWEEK 26 January that developers will not see much difference in the way Oracle handles Java.

In addition, after Oracle’s announcement of its intention to buy Sun, conflicting rumours began to spread about the fate of Sun’s hardware business. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison and other company officials have said several times over the past few months that not only do they intend to keep Sun’s SPARC/Solaris hardware business, but they will invest more money and manpower into the platform than Sun did.

They envision selling software optimized for the SPARC/Solaris hardware, including bundled packages that mirror the efforts made by other OEMs, including Cisco Systems, IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Dell, to create more tightly integrated data centre solutions.

With the questions surrounding the hardware business, IBM and HP have aggressively pursued Sun customers, using packages of services, support and financial incentives to entice them to migrate off the Sun technology. Officials with both IBM and HP have said that hundreds of Sun customers have made the move.

Regarding MySQL, in December Oracle gave European regulators a 10-point list of commitments that it will guarantee to ensure that customers won’t be harmed by Oracle’s possession of the database technology.