Oracle on Friday strongly downplayed comments made by co-President Charles Phillips at a conference on Thursday, saying that contrary to Phillips' suggestion, it is "highly unlikely" that it will spend roughly $US70 billion buying up companies during the next five years.
SAP said Tuesday that the European Commission has approved its pending acquisition of Sybase.
Frustrated by what they consider poor treatment and lack of interest from Oracle, members of the OpenSolaris Governing Board are essentially delivering an ultimatum to the vendor, asking that it appoint a liaison to the group by no later than Aug. 16, or else the board will be disbanded.
Ever-acquisitive Oracle apparently has no immediate plans to stop buying up companies, as indicated by a US$3.25 billion debt issue it made this week.
Oracle is preparing to launch a major migration of portals that serve customers and technologies gained through its acquisition of Sun Microsystems.
MySQL users now have another choice for support besides Oracle, which acquired the open-source database through its purchase of Sun Microsystems.
Monty Widenius, a leading open-source software proponent, lodged an appeal on Friday against the European Union's antitrust authorities over their decision to green-light Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems at the beginning of this year.
Oracle reported fourth-quarter earnings of US$0.46 per share on Thursday, a 24 percent jump over the same period last year. Revenue rose 39 percent to $9.5 billion.
Lew Tucker, who was vice president and chief technology officer of cloud computing at Sun Microsystems, has been named the first CTO of cloud computing at Cisco Systems.
The Tasmanian Department of Police and Emergency Management will shortly upgrade its legacy Solaris Software and SUN Infrastructure in a bid to modernise its back-end IT systems.
Oracle, which spent $US7.4 billion to acquire once-high-flying Sun Microsystems, has been losing prominent Sun technologists since shortly after the deal was forged. The acquisition was supposed to give Oracle control not only over such technologies as Sun's flagship Java implementation and Sun's Sparc hardware, but access to engineers and developers who were nothing short of celebrities in their field. But it has not worked out that way.
Oracle has officially put both legs on the cloud-computing bandwagon, recently launching a roughly 50-date global road show on the topic for developers and system administrators.
The Oracle and Sun Microsystems road map [[artnid: 333300|due to be announced this week by Larry Ellison]] will likely include moves to forge the pair into a solutions provider in the vein of IBM and HP, according to analyst firm Frost & Sullivan.
Oracle's Australian representatives are staying mum over the impact attempts to acquire Sun Microsystems are having on its operations down under.
It was a week where competition regulators danced with IT industry behemoths: the U.S. Federal Trade Commission filed an antitrust lawsuit against Intel, while the European Commission gave approval to Microsoft's proposed browser "ballot screen" and pushed the proposed Oracle-Sun Microsystems deal forward. Meanwhile, a French court slapped down Google for what it saw as a copyright grab in a book-scanning case.