Oracle Completes Sun Microsystems Purchase

Database giant Oracle Corp. has finalized its $7.4 billion dollar acquisition of Sun Microsystems.
Oracle Completes Sun Microsystems Purchase
1/28/2010
Updated:
1/28/2010
Database giant Oracle Corp. has finalized its $7.4 billion dollar acquisition of Sun Microsystems, bringing the merger to fruition after some scrutiny from the European antitrust department.

In addition, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison announced that the acquisition of Sun Microsystems would add $1.5 billion to Oracle’s bottom line within just a year of purchase.

Oracle also seems confident that the purchase will render the joint company stronger.

“Our vision for 2010 is the same as IBM’s vision for 1960,” CEO Larry Ellison said in a statement, referring to how the tech giant IBM had been an industry leader through vertically integrating all its IT offerings, such as hardware, software, and services.

The Oracle-Sun merger will bring the diverse strength of the two IT giants into one vertically integrated solution, allowing it to compete directly with IBM in the server space.

Oracle is well known for its database and enterprise offerings. In recent years, it has been an aggressive purchaser of related companies that have expanded its influence in the enterprise arena: in the last three years, Oracle has acquired BEA Systems, Hyperion Solutions, Siebel Systems, and PeopleSoft, all of which had unique offerings in the enterprise market.

With the Sun Microsystems acquisition, Oracle has access to high-end data servers that can run Oracle, as well as high-end networking storage, and other hardware offerings.

Oracle also has access to Sun’s famous Java programming platform, which is ubiquitously used in enterprises. Once pitched as a next-generation rich media platform for consumers, the platform never really caught on on the desktop, but has been extensively utilized on the server side to build applications. Oracle is also a heavy user of the Java platform and offers many products based on Java.

Industry analysts say that Oracle will continue with Sun’s existing policies on the Java platform and the MySQL database, an open-source database that was acquired by Sun before the merger.