Oracle's surprising US$7.4 billion deal to purchase Sun this week gives Larry Ellison and crew a big stake in the hardware market as well as control over Java and other well-known open source technologies. But it also spells the end of an independent Sun Microsystems, one of Silicon Valley's most prominent companies.
Oracle may have decided to buy Sun Microsystems because it was worth far more to the database market leader than it was to IBM. It's not a question of the price - at $US7.4 billion, Oracle didn't agree to pay much more than what IBM reportedly was considering. But Oracle may have more use for Sun's technology than IBM ever did.
Sun has tied its identity federation software to Google Apps and added its directory and Web application server to the cloud platform it is building for developers to build and test applications.
Andreas von Bechtolsheim, a Sun Microsystems co-founder and the person who holds the distinction of being employee No. 1 at the company, expressed optimism Thursday about the planned Oracle-Sun merger's impacts on database technologies, but he stayed silent about the deal otherwise.
Sun Microsystems Inc. CEO Jonathan Schwartz called it "one of the toughest e-mails I've ever had to write" when he told Sun's employees that Oracle was buying the company.
One year after spending US$1 billion to purchase MySQL, the open source database software company, Sun Microsystems is now being swallowed up by Oracle.
Sun Microystems, which announced Sun Cloud in March, is taking a different tack than the Java clouds from Google, Aptana, and Stax because it wants to be more than just a Java provider. The new cloud will create new clusters of machines from any disk image, including some of the most popular versions of Linux and Solaris. Java, of course, will be found in most of these images, but you don't need to use it if you want to, say, run some emulated version of Cobol on a version of Puppy Linux. Unless Sun Cloud is interrupted by Oracle's acquisition, it should be available in a few months.
Oracle Corp.'s planned acquisition of Sun Microsystems Inc. is raising questions among users on, well, just about every aspect of the deal.
Microsoft has had few critics more vocal than Oracle CEO Larry Ellison and Sun Chairman Scott McNealy. With their companies set to merge in a blockbuster US$7.4 billion deal announced Monday, is it time for Microsoft to worry?
Oracle's US$7.4 billion bid for Sun might win customer favor, industry watchers say, as the sum of the two companies' management technology portfolios will provide much greater value than the stand-alone parts.
Oracle Corp.'s US$7.4 billion acquisition of Sun Microsystems Inc. will bring together the world's most valuable relational database with the most popular open source one -- MySQL.
Oracle has signed a deal to purchase Sun Microsystems for US$7.4 billion, plunging the enterprise software vendor into the hardware market and making Sun the latest company to be subsumed by the Silicon Valley giant.
On the same day it appeared to have missed its chance to buy Sun Microsystems, IBM reported that revenue for the first quarter dropped 11 percent from a year earlier and had fallen short of analyst expectations.
As many as 10,000 people could lose their jobs as the result of Oracle's surprise US$7.4 billion acquisition of Silicon Valley icon Sun Microsystems, a financial analyst predicted Monday.
Oracle may end up merging the best of OpenSolaris with Linux once it takes control of Sun Microsystems, but it is unlikely to kill off Sun's widely used Solaris OS, analysts said.