It’s Official: Oracle Completes Acquisition of Sun Microsystems

January 27, 2010 By Geoff Duncan

The world's largest database software company is now a hardware outfit: Oracle has completed its takeover of Sun Microsystems.

Oracle has announced that it has completed its takeover of Sun Microsystems, concluding a deal values at over $7 billion and which wound slowly through the processes of antitrust regulators in both the United States and the European Union. The deal makes the world’s largest maker of database software into a hardware company which will manufacture servers, storage solutions, and other high-end hardware, as well as take over Sun’s Solaris operating system, Java, and the MySQL open source database.

In a melancholy memo, Sun founder Scott McNealy—who a decade ago famously declared “You have zero privacy anyway, get over it”—complimented Oracle founder Larry Ellison while saying goodbye to his own company. “To be honest, this is not a note this founder wants to write,” McNeally wrote. “Sun, in my mind, should have been the great and surviving consolidator. But I love the market economy and capitalism more than I love my company.”

Antirust regulators were concerned that Oracle’s control of MySQL—the most widely-used open source database on the planet—would give Oracle too much control of the database market. However, Oracle was able to convince regulators that MySQL did not directly compete with Oracle’s primary products at many levels, and that the two products could co-exist without difficulty. Oracle ha pledged to continue aggressive development of MySQL. The moves apparently satisfied both U.S. and European regulators, who signed off on the deal. China and Russia, however, have yet to give their approvals.

Showing 5 comments

Could a lawsuit derail Android? Understanding Oracle’s threat to Google | Android at 2:32am 5th November 2011 [...] do with Java technology, which became Oracle’s property when it acquired Sun Microsystems back in early 2010. In the 1990s, Sun developed Java as a “write once, run anywhere” technology that was supposed [...]
Could a lawsuit derail Android? Understanding Oracle’s threat to Google|Android Emulator at 6:40pm 28th October 2011 [...] to do with Java technology, that became Oracle’s skill when it acquired Sun Microsystems back in early 2010. In a 1990s, Sun grown Java as a “write once, run anywhere” record that was ostensible to yield [...]
SEC investigating Mark Hurd’s departure from HP at 9:49am 21st December 2010 [...] looking to ratchet up competition with Hewlett-Packard in the high-end server market. Since Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems the database giant now competes with HP, IBM, and others for enterprise hardware and software [...]
Apache quits Java group, picks up Wave at 11:38am 10th December 2010 [...] all the way back to 2006, when Java creator Sun Microsystems—whose acquisition by Oracle was finalized at the beginning of the year—refused to grant a license to the Technology Compatibility Kit (TCK) on terms compatible with [...]
Oracle flattens IBM records with SPARC Supercluster (Digital Trends) | News at 1:00pm 4th December 2010 [...] Oracle acquired Sun at the beginning of the year, and it seems as if the acquisition certainly paid off. It will be interesting to see just how well the SPARC Supercluster performs outside of first-party benchmarks (the full report is available here), but it certainly seems as if Oracle’s innovations will make an impact in terms of speed and ease of data retrieval. What this means for the end-consumer is potentially faster and more stable interfacing of information. [...]