“The decrease in _____ revenue was primarily due to _____” and “uncertainty associated with the proposed acquisition by Oracle and increased competition.” That refrain is repeated over and over again in Sun’s latest grim earnings report, which was filed without much in the way of announcement Friday afternoon.
Oracle CEO Larry Ellison is famous for his admiration of “The Art of War,” Sun Tzu’s sixth-century treatise on battle tactics. And the ancient wisdom has served Ellison well in Oracle’s long-running battle with SAP and its hostile bid for PeopleSoft. But it may get him in trouble when it comes to Oracle’s dealings with the European Commission and its inquiry into the company’s planned acquisition of Sun. The Financial Times reports that Oracle’s refusal to offer any concessions to European antitrust regulators may lead them to issue a formal complaint objecting to the deal.
What’s the difference between European Commission competition watchdog Neelie Kroes and Oracle CEO Larry Ellison? Kroes isn’t losing $100 million a month on Sun Microsystems. Much as Ellison would like to blame the European Commission for yesterday’s bloodletting at Sun, responsibility lies squarely with Oracle–at least, according to Competition Commissioner Kroes.
Ugly news. The end of Sun Microsystems as an independent company after 27 years is to be prefaced with a bloodletting. And a big one too. The company is sacking some 3,000 employees as it awaits the closing of Oracle’s planned $7.4 billion takeover.
Though he resigned earlier this year, former MySQL boss Mårten Mickos still has strong opinions about the open-source database outfit, which was acquired by Sun in 2008. In a letter to the European Commission Thursday, Mickos urged regulators to green-light Oracle’s takeover of Sun, arguing that to delay it will only harm competition.
Randy Seidl’s bio is still live on the Sun Microsystems Web site, but the exec who once oversaw the company’s North American sales has new digs. At Hewlett-Packard.
If you’re going to claim in an advertisement that Transaction Processing Council benchmarks show that a hybrid Sun-Oracle server runs faster than a competing product from IBM, it’s probably wise to make sure you have the TPC benchmarks to back up your claim. Not if you’re Oracle, though.
Though some analysts claim otherwise, MySQL is an asset, not baggage, and Oracle has no plans to unload it. Nor does the company think it will be forced to win regulatory approval for its proposed purchase of Sun Microsystems. “No, we’re not going to spin [MySQL] off,” Oracle CEO Larry Ellison told attendees of a Churchill Club event in Silicon Valley Monday evening.
The European Commission’s inquiry into Oracle’s proposed acquisition of Sun is costing the database giant dearly. Speaking at a Churchill Club event in Silicon Valley Monday evening, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said Sun is losing $100 million a month because of the extended European antitrust review. He also said he’d like his company to be “the successor to IBM.”
Oracle’s pending acquisition of Sun will undoubtedly be the subject of much discussion this afternoon when the database behemoth reports fiscal first-quarter earnings after the market close. Indeed, there’s quite a bit of jawing about it already, particularly about Oracle’s continued commitment to the deal in light of the ugly decline in Sun’s revenues and profitability since it was announced in April.
Oracle has a message for CIOs concerned about its plans for Sun’s hardware, Solaris and SPARC businesses: Relax. In a full-page ad published in The Wall Street Journal today, the database giant made a very public commitment to all of them.
Approved without incident by Sun shareholders in July and the U.S. Justice Department in August, Oracle’s planned $7.4 billion acquisition of Sun Microsystems seemed poised to easily pass muster with European regulators as well. Sadly for Oracle, that’s not how things have played out. Citing “serious concerns” about the deal’s effect on competition in the market for databases, the European Commission has opened an in-depth investigation into it.
Sun Microsystems’s last quarterly report as an independent company was about as miserable as earnings reports get. No surprise, then, that the company didn’t bother to issue a press release or hold a conference call with analysts to discuss them.
The Justice Department’s extended antitrust review of Oracle’s proposed acquisition of Sun apparently turned up few issues of concern. Oracle said this afternoon that regulators have approved the $7.4 billion deal with no restrictions.
John Paczkowski has been poking fun at the tech industry and the personalities that drive it since 1997. From 1999 to 2007, he wrote the award-winning tech news Web log Good Morning Silicon Valley for the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley's daily newspaper.
Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.
Best video mashup ever.
A Facebook Memorial
Wow.
Worth it for the Rickrolling photo alone.
Excellent.
Flughumor!
… you vacuous, toffee-nosed, malodorous perverts
Stephen Fry and zoologist Mark Carwardine meet the kakapo — a fat, flightless and very randy rare parrot.
Spectacular in the bellowing Russian sailor sense of the word …
“If you spell something wrong on your insurance claim, do you really deserve surgery? I don’t think so …”
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