Oracle buys Sun for $7 billion

[Raptor]

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Oracle Corp plans to enter the computer hardware market by buying Sun Microsystems Inc for more than $7 billion, swooping in after Sun’s talks with IBM fell apart. The announcement on Monday surprised many Oracle watchers, who believed the company can boost profitability at Sun’s software businesses but were unsure if it can be as successful with Sun’s hardware unit amid stiff competition against IBM, Hewlett-Packard Co, Dell Inc and new entrant Cisco Systems Inc. “It’s an out-of-the-box, left-field type of a deal because Oracle is buying a predominantly hardware business,” said Jefferies & Co analyst Ross MacMillan. “The push-pull of the deal is the uncertainty of the hardware business with the earnings accretion of the software business.”

Oracle will pay $9.50 a share for Sun, which values the high-end server and software maker at about $7.06 billion, based on 743 million shares outstanding as of the end of its second fiscal quarter on December 28, according to Sun. Sun had previously rejected IBM’s offer to pay up to $9.40 a share, according to sources with knowledge of the matter. Shares of Sun jumped 35.7 percent to $9.08 in morning Nasdaq trading, while Oracle shares fell 3.7 percent to $18.36. Shares of IBM, which did not immediately return calls for comment, fell 1.8 percent to $99.49 on the NYSE. Oracle President Safra Catz said on a conference call that Oracle intends to make the hardware division profitable. Sun’s top-selling products are high-end servers and storage equipment.

Source: Reuters

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[Nikki]

That is some dollar

[cronus71]

Interesting...

[Nikki]

recession and future technology taking effect

[TwoPlAnKs]

Sun make phenomenal hardware. We specced up a single Sun 2U server that would have theoretically run 70-odd Windows virtual servers, if only it used Intel chips.

Oracle has a lot of potential now, they can deliver the full system now - set the IP address and away it goes. Combine that with what they can do with Java, Open Office, Open Solaris, JSPs and adding MySQL and the MySQL developers to their database products. It could be a real winner.

[BertRoot]

Oracle has a lot of potential now, they can deliver the full system now - set the IP address and away it goes. Combine that with what they can do with Java, Open Office, Open Solaris, JSPs and adding MySQL and the MySQL developers to their database products. It could be a real winner.

Oracle do indeed have a lot of potential but do you really think MySQL will carry on being free and as feature rich as it is now? Same with all the other packages. Oracle are a serious player in the DBMS market and while the two packages are infinitely different I think we wll see some changes in the dev strategy for MySQL as Oracle think out how best to turn it into a going concern. They may consume some of the MySQL platform into Oracle but their business model does not really lend itself to freebies. Give it twelve months and see what happens.

Will be interesting to see how this all pans out.

[tombott]

Thats MySql, VirtualBox and possibly OpenOffice all fucked then.