back to article Oracle reels in Sun Microsystems with $7.4bn buy

Database giant Oracle has agreed to buy Sun Microsystems for $7.4bn, or $9.5 a share, in cash. The surprise move comes in the wake of IBM walking away from a possible buyout of Sun Microsystems for $6.85bn. Oracle said the boards of both the firms had given the transaction the thumbs up. It’s expected to complete this summer …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Pirate

    Twatt Bryant laughing all the way to davey Jones locker.....

    Oh Matty Boy, still putting the brave HP face on I see?

    If you had a little read between the lines you might see that Oracle may have intentions other than dropping sparc. Perhaps have a little read of the strategic importance section, see if it raises questions : http://www.oracle.com/sun/sun-general-presentation.pdf

    "Protects massive customer investment in SPARC"

    Now, things are very early days & it's more than possible to get it wrong (and I'm first to admit I'd be gutted if Sparc was sold off to HP/IBM) but the statement above coupled with words like "massive increase in R&D" plus the fact Oracle can reset the price per core ratios that hurt T-series CPU sales, hmmm.... Are you really so sure of your HP coloured future?

    I really really want a photo of you eating humble pie, posted on the Reg if Oracle make a commitment to Sparc, altered Sparc licencing rules and confirmation of commitment to Rock CPU's...

    Hang on, whats that bell I hear in the background, Oh, the good ship Itanic going down! Your beloved superdome could be sinking fast if the licencing is right for Sparc.... :-)

    PS: Matt, keep the reply brief, some of us have work to do...

  2. Bob Boblowski
    Unhappy

    I'm not happy about this

    Oracle is a very successful company, if anything because of the way it embraces and shields its technologies. I always found that almost any Oracle solution was overly complex and geared towards The Big Oracle Integration (TM) thing. Weblogic was top heavy when under BEA's wings, but got totaly unuseable when Oracle bought it. I actually started to like Sun's appservers (and even Sun's SJS webserver). Oracle will surely use technologies like Java, MySQL, Sun's webservers, and even Solaris as an inward directed part of its business. I especially fear for Java, which will probably be reduced (as a business value) to some Oracle ecosystem language for corporate webapps. Microsoft must be very happy today...

  3. Patrick O'Reilly

    Poison Pill

    MySQL as a database won't just die over night, it does have the protection of the GNU/GPL. However Oracle may pull their financal backing.

    But why would they do something like that. Currently MySQL is used as an enterprise grade database but why not make it a little more Oracle like and then use is as a stepping block for developers, learn for free on MySQL and then progress on to Oracle for when you for some blue chip firm.

  4. ffeog
    IT Angle

    MySQL impact

    I don't imagine this would be bad for MySQL, Oracle have innodb already anyway. It's almost certainly not the main reason Oracle bought Sun.

    However, MySQL gives them a community of users whose long-term database requirements once they scale up, bring them into the OracleDB / DB2 space - and obviously Oracle want it to be them, so it makes sense to keep MySQL around. Might even migrate some features over from the XE (light) version of Oracle DB.

    They only technically near-equivalent competitor they have in the Open Source space is PostgreSQL anyway, MySQL is more of a toy with a surprising amount of mindshare (whether you agree with that or not, that's the way Oracle will look at it.)

  5. Francis Fish
    Happy

    MySQL is safe, I think

    Oracle already own some of the technology and haven't been difficult about it, so I wouldn't worry.

    You might even find them getting aggressive trying to persuade people to get off Access and move to something that will support more than 2 users.

    I have looked at Postgres and, well, it's a database and it works. Same with Firebird (which also has an Oracle PL/SQL compatibility mode if I remember).

    Thing is, to get say, MySQL and Sphinx free text equivalent you'd need Enterprise Edition of Oracle and would be broke before you started. You can use Oracle Express on restricted machines (as in single CPU less than 4 GB if memory serves) but unless you're planning on going down that route why would you bother?

    Databases are commodities now if you use them through some enterprise class tool. Oracle get lock in from PL/SQL and the blizzard of add ins that come with EE. If you don't use them then so what?

  6. John Gamble

    It's The Software

    As much as I liked Sun's hardware, it's the software that's more important to me on a day-to-day basis. Let's see:

    MySQL - Hmmm. IF it goes in a direction no one likes, there's always PostgresSQL. MySQL hasn't had a stored procedure language attached to it long enough for anyone to worry about porting their applications, making it easier to walk away.

    Java - This is the most important bit. Oracle hasn't pulled any "let me redefine Java" stunts like Microsoft, but it's still worrisome. Time to amplify the calls for an ISO standard.

    Open Solaris - Having another Unix-style OS around is a good thing. Will it still be viable now with Oracle leaning over it?

  7. Albert Gonzalez
    Linux

    Just fork MySQL

    If you don't like what oracle does to mysql, you HAVE THE SOURCE. Just will be a community fork, and then you'll be fine with your NG-MySQL, or whatever will be called.

    This is one of the strongest points of open source.

    Penguin, as it is related to open source.

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Oh my

    Lets just hope that they don't make it as difficult to work with Java as they have with Oracle products. Infact I don't think I like any of their products and i'm quite concerned now about the future of Java and MySQL.

  9. ares
    Linux

    Linux <-> Solaris

    This I am curios about: What will happen in the OS arena. Going forward, how much will Oracle invest in Linux, Solaris, OpenSolaris. Can't see a clear strategy here. They will definitely support Oracle running on both, but which way will the scale tip in the future.

  10. Thomas Swann
    Alert

    @Steve

    I personally prefer allaround's PL/SQL Developer to TOAD - I didn't so much when I first switched from one to t'other, but definitely wouldn't go back now.

    As long as I never have to use Oracle SQL Developer ever again then all will be well with the world and my PC will remain unpunched.

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    "This is the end...

    ...my only friend, the end."

    Well, well, well. All Oracle wants is Java and a few other nic-nac in Sun's curio cabinet. They even said as much in their press release. Oracle is not a hardware manufacurer. Nor do they have any interest in such things as MySQL anad Glassfish, except to bury them. So they ware going to rip Sun up and sell off the parts. This is the end of Sun Microsystems as a brand. Oracle has been pushing it's Sun customers toward Linux for some time now. I doubt they are going to change that strategy just because they now own Solaris. And say goodbye to OpenSolaris. Oracle's idea of an open systems initiative is to buy an open solution and close it.

    Scott McNeely was a fool to let IBM walk away; at least with them there was a chance for brand survival. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Oracle will pay $5.3B for Sun, not $7.4B. They're offering $9.50/share, but they won't be assuming Sun's liabilities, so the IBM deal was much better for stockholders. As soon as IBM packed up, it left the door open for Ellison to offer anything he wanted and Sun would have no choice but to take it. Such is the product of ego.

  12. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Calm down, dears!

    Re: Death of MySQL

    MySQL will be the low end offering of Oracle. Remember when Oracle bought InnoDB? Predictions of death, doom, gloom, etc. The reality? InnoDB survived.

  13. jake Silver badge

    The deal isn't done yet ...

    Hold your horses, folks. The deal isn't set in stone. Yet.

    On the other hand, should the deal go thru' ... I've been using BSD where I had been using Solaris for about three years now, so I question Sun's viability in the RealWorld[tm] ... MySQL will fork; the free version will continue, Oracle's version will languish. The world will continue to rotate.

  14. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    MySQL is safe.

    The GPL allows MySQL to be forked - and indeed it already *has* been forked.

    http://askmonty.org/wiki/index.php/MariaDB

    Have a look at who's behind that - I don't think MySQL is going away any time soon.

    Of course, that does preclude the commercially-licenced version; non-GPL distributors are now at the whim of Oracle.

    I'm not one of them.

  15. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Up

    Wow

    I go to bed as a Sun Certified Sys and Network Admin and when I wake up, I am now magically Oracle certified too! That has to look good on the CV.

  16. Tim Hogard

    Sometimes you just gots to ho

    When you have a major stock holder that wants to bail, your going to get sold when your pimp says so and you can't argue that with out a slap-down. Sun has only one machine in their lineup this month I would buy which is the lowest server count since I started using their hardware in 1987. Its been a nice ride but it looks like we both need to move on. It hasn't been a good sign for the last few years when the grey-beard types are using BSD on sun kit since the new OS is bloat rich and stability free worse that the stuff from Redmond.

  17. Ramazan
    Alert

    @Pony Tail

    JFYI: HP has IUM.

    But SunOS 5.9/sparc + Oracle used/uses to power Siemens' IN@vantage...

  18. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    @ AC 16,38 GMT

    "Well, well, well. All Oracle wants is Java and a few other nic-nac in Sun's curio cabinet. They even said as much in their press release"

    Errrr, no they didn't.

    Don't you just love the way people speculate based upon voices in their heads ?

  19. Ian Michael Gumby
    Coat

    MySQL should be spun off.

    Sorry but Oracle *is* the dominant database on the market and with mySQL they would be a bit too large.

    Will the EU block the deal until Oracle divests itself from mySQL?

    Oracle doesn't play well when you have multiple products in the mix. You can look at IBM and what it means having IDS and DB2 in the same space. While IBM doesn't release their license numbers, the whispers are that IDS is actually doing better in this space than DB2. Of course they are only rumors.

    But based on the internal competition and the fact that mySQL has a lot of work required, it would be easier for Oracle to put mySQL out under Apache licensing.

    The other database that isn't talked about is JavaDB. aka Derby, aka Cloudscape which was once the property of IBM when they bought Informix who bought Cloudscape for 80 million or so.

  20. Tom
    Linux

    Intriguing

    This wont mean too much change currently for users of Sun's open source tech

    ZFS is CDDL, and healthily exists in Darwin and FreeBSD already. If Oracle dropped this as open source, then they would continue to thrive there. OpenSolaris is CDDL also, so same goes there.

    MySQL is where it is interesting. MySQL has been feature complete for basic use for quite some time - 5.0 has proper i18n support, stored procedures, transactions (with InnoDB, heh) and I can't see Oracle wanting to add more features than that to their 'basic' DB.

    The features MySQL are currently adding to 6.0, are real enterprise features. Row based replication, enhanced MySQL cluster, the new Falcon engine etc are all features designed to target MySQL towards Oracle users, or at least to eat into them. This was the perfect game whilst Sun was running MySQL (get MySQL on more boxes, get more people to buy Sun boxes when they want to run MySQL), but surely this will change when Oracle are directing the development.

    At the London MySQL customer conference last October, the two vendor keynotes were from Continuent - who provide heterogeneous replication systems designed to cut down the number of Oracle licenses required (by replacing some of them with MySQL) - and from Infobright - who have a custom MySQL engine for doing data warehousing, so you don't need so many Oracle licenses. I would LOVE to know if the keynotes have been changed there today!

    PS: Sun market capitalisation October 4th, 2000 - ~$200bn. Gosh.

  21. Ramazan
    Coat

    Oracle ... the only ... integrated system

    "Oracle will be the only company that can engineer an integrated system - applications to disk - where all the pieces fit and work together so customers do not have to do it themselves" - blah, blah, blah...

    What about e.g. the AS/400?

  22. Anonymous Coward
    Paris Hilton

    ROCK's deaths is why Mark Tremblay left

    plan and simple...unless of course Oracle gives the systems away to change their 12 licenes per chip!!!! LOL

  23. zvonr

    Oracle vs IBM

    Oracle is now like IBM, with better products than IBM though...

    on the Linux vs Solaris front:

    Oracle was investing in SystemTap and BTRFS that tried to mimic DTrace and ZFS.

    Now with ZFS and DTrace in its portfolio that does not make sense anymore...

    however adding Dtrace probes to Oracle will make more sense, or optimizing oracle to use zvols for storage might make more sense too....

    it will always come down to $ ... oracle will shut down every product that is not making money ...

  24. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Death to IBM Power and DB2

    You software heads don't get it. Most of Sun's revenue and margin comes from enterprise computing and support services. If Oracle is smart, it will re-invest in Sun's enterprise business, which the current dough heads managing the company let atrophy, and Oracle/Sun will kick IBM's ass like it used to do. The added insult to IBM is that it will hurt their hardware and software DB2 sales.

  25. Beelzeebub
    Flame

    Heheheh!

    Java used to be write once run anywhere, now it will be write once run it where Oracle says.

    I hope it's forked, easily so co's don't need big investment to carry on. Sorry, bit naive, open source has always been about develop it free, get it out there, try to monetize later. Oracle is very good at that game.

    Same with MySql.

    Otherwise, Sparc has been dead since Xeon came along, with Linux, of course. Oracle will discard. They don't want to get into CPU engineering. Too complex, more than J2EE actually. Can't have the geeks in control, now, can we?

    This is bad news, I think.

  26. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Who owns SPARC?

    Do Sun still own SPARC? I thought it was owned by SPARC International these days, and that they were supposedly an "independent" company. And indeed at least one SPARC variant has been released under GPL licence (by Sun? By SPARC International?)

  27. Lou
    Alien

    Be prepared to be assimilated ....

    Why - easy - as usual with the Borg - after individuality has been stripped, and assimilation into the collective is complete, all extra parts will be ditched.

    The Schwartz forthwith to be know as 4 of 2009.

    RIP - it will be interesting to watch the assimilation though.

  28. Daniel B.

    MySQL's arse was already Oracle's since some time ago...

    Some commenters forget that Oracle has already owned InnoDB and BDB for some time now. Thanks to Monty's stubborness, the standard MyISAM tables don't support transactions or referential integrity, and even for some time, their own documentation dissed the transactional paradigm! So it had to be a BDB plugin hack, and then InnoDB the ones that took on their hands to implement the missing functionality.

    If Oracle had wanted MySQL dead, they would've killed it already. Without InnoDB, MySQL would've crashed down hard thanks to that "we don't need no steeeeenkin' transactions" attitude from their early days.

    I worry more about Sparc ... I'd rather have more RISC stuff on my server side than Intel crap...

  29. raving angry loony

    Goodbye

    Goodbye MySQL, goodbye Sparc, goodbye Sun. It was a good run. You'll be missed.

  30. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Look Scotty I shrunk the company (and gave it away for free)

    __________________Oracle______________Sun

    LTM (bil)_________________24_________________13

    Employees______________86500______________30000

    Return per empl__________277.45 ______________433.33

    Hmm - lets see - Sun's employees has been able to bring in 1.6 times the Oracle earnings?

    Its the Management stupid!!! Thanks Jonathan

    see http://www.oracle.com/sun/sun-general-presentation.pdf

  31. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Down

    Adios El Sol

    "Java used to be write once run anywhere, now it will be write once run it where Oracle says."

    Java has never been write once run anywhere. Not really, except in the minds of Sun's marketeers. Java is a runtime 4GL, nothing more. It has it's place, but that place is (or should be) very limited. I've never seen a Java console app that wasn't a piece of crap.

    I cannot understnad how anyone can't see that this is pretty much the worst case scenario for Sun come true.

  32. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    SUNCLE?

    Larry gets to be the Man from S.U.N.C.L.E.

  33. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    MySQL not necessarily doomed

    MySQLon OpenSolaris could be seen as an environment in which Oracle can cultivate future Oracle on Sparc business. At the very least it steals some market share from IBM and Microsoft.

  34. Matt Bryant Silver badge
    Pirate

    Dear Sunshiners......

    Nice to see the usual Anonymous Sun Marketeers propping up their fantasies again. Did you happen to forget that the first time round, Oracle asked hp to take the hardware bizz part of Sun as they didn't want it? Oh, you do remember the joint hp-Oracle offer? Just trying to ignore the very clear writing on the wall, I see.

    As to the hp-Oracle relationship, hp is Oracle's #1 partner - more Oracle instances go on more hp servers than any other vendor, in fact it is touted by Oracle to be close to 50% of all Oracle instances are on hp kit, so I can't see Oracle letting the surviving Sun employees get in the way of that nice little earner.

    What I can see is Oracle now turning round and off-loading the Sun hardware bizz to hp so hp can pillage the accounts and transfer all those dire SPARC and Galaxy servers out for Integrity and ProLiant. Winners all round - well, except for the frothing Sunshiners. Even Oracle are only promising to "Protects massive customer investment in SPARC" - that sounds like providing support until EOL, not continued development. Where's the commitment to release Rock or include the next gen of SPARC64? There isn't one, beacuse Oracle have no intention of lumbering their business with a massive loss-maker like SPARC. And everyone is reading that for exactly what it is - SPARC has just got its death certificate.

    Oracle will settle quickly with NetApp, they do far too much business with NetApp as the storage device for their DB and won't want to p*ss off NetApp. Since you can't put the genie back in the bottle, Oracle will probably come up with some restrictive licence for non-business users, and pass the rest over to NetApp to screw over for a WAFL licence fee. Bye-bye Sun storage!

    And don't start hoping Fujitsu will magically buy up the Sun hardware bizz, they've already said they don't have the cash or the desire to. At best, you can hope Fujitsu manage to transfer some of those Sun accounts onto SPARC64 so you can get a few more years of Slowaris before it all goes. The SPARC64 chip, whilst better than any Sun SPARC chip, still isn't good enough to beat Power and Itanium in the long run.

    Which leaves the software. Slowaris x86 is just a profits blackhole, and Oracle already know how hard it is trying to push a Linux clone. I suspect Slowaris x86 will live on as a means to migrate SPARC customers off to x86, but via other vendors kit. I can see Oracle trying to flog on the Galaxy servers to someone like Lenovo, but otherwise I can't see Oracle keeping them. They don't need the aggro of going up against hp, IBM and Dell, all of which have already trounced Galaxy. Glassfish isn't needed, we've already covered ZFS, so what's left? Java and MySQL.

    So Oracle just spent $7bn for Java and MySQL, so expect some interesting licensing deals soon! MySQL may survive as a cheap-to-free alternative to fight low-end MS SQL, but expect it to remain relatively feature-free to make sure it doesn't steal sales from real database products like Oracle DB. I can only really see Oracle making any real investment into Java. The rest of the albatross will be carved up and sold off to claw back some of that purchase price.

    Hard luck, Sunshiners. You can go back to selling double-glazing now.

  35. Anonymous Coward
    Happy

    Oh Matt...

    Well, credit to you for keeping up the rhetoric (and the 2000 character replies) even in the face of what could be very stiff competition. Come on Matt, you must have heard the quips from Oracle/Larry, "offering disk to app" style services, increasing profitiability from Sun products in the next 12 months etc. You think he'll sell on the hardware+IP for enough to get several billion from HP?

    That's an awfull lot of product overlap for HP and regulatory cr@p to overcome.

    Oracle seem pretty keen on getting into hardware style products as evidenced by the HP - Oracle Exadata product so can you really see Oracle being happy with handing off extra profit to HP when they can the same on their own/Sun hardware. How can they pile on the profits if they just offloaded half of what constitutes Sun?

    x86 is x86 (waiting for your usual guff about how good HP stuff is) but come on Matt, your logic doesn't add up. If CISCO are stepping into the x86 hardware game why the hell would Oracle want to throw away an established brand with an engineering group and support / sales structure? They have Blade Servers, standalone + the biggest Inifiniband switch going, combined that would let them make monster sized RAC clusters!

    I don't know whats coming but I sure hope it's altered licence pricing to even up the Sparc vs x86 socket/core licence multipliers & some product bundles with discounts.

    I hope they invest & ensure Rock comes to existence, many analysts quote the high end having larger profit margins so even it should be a large source of income for them. Let's hope they go to market big time with x86 and wipeout a large portion of HP's market share over the next year or two (and wipe out some smug comments from people not so far across the posting world)

    I might be eating it soon if a "yard-sale" occurs but oh for a picture of you eating humble pie....

    ;-)

  36. David Halko
    Go

    @Anonymous: Who owns SPARC?

    Anonymous asks, "Do Sun still own SPARC? I thought it was owned by SPARC International"

    No, SUN does not own SPARC.

    SUN worked with other industry vendors to create an open specification, called SPARC, that any vendor can produce a chip for.

    In more recent years, SUN created OpenSPARC, which was a release of the source code for one of their implementation of CoolThreads processors (i.e. T1, T2, T2+, etc.)

    No one really owns SPARC. Anyone who wants to create SPARC can.

    This is why companies like Afara Websystems and HAL Computing Systems created their own SPARC variants.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afara_Websystems

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparc64

    This allows for people with an innovative ideas, to seek venture capital, create those ideas, and see them come to realization!

    Note, I have not seen anyone get sued over implementing a SPARC processor.

    Many innovations happened with the open SPARC implementations.

    How many companies have been sued over x86 processors by Intel?

    A lot of innovation has been stifled in the proprietary x86 industry.

  37. Anonymous Coward
    Joke

    Re: Oh Matt...

    "Well, credit to you for keeping up the rhetoric (and the 2000 character replies)"

    Wait! Isn't that the limit on varchar columns in Oracle? Maybe there's a limit to how much of Matt's ramblings Larry needs to listen to after all.

  38. Anonymous Coward
    Happy

    Here Matty Matty Matty....

    Ahem, Matt, FYI : http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/04/23/oracle_sun_town_hall/

    "Phillips and Screven also attempted to re-assure employees that Oracle's not about to sell of the hardware business" & "we needed to be comfortable with the fact these were hardware platforms, systems, that we were going to keep selling and developing...we are very comfortable."

    Thats not exactly the description of a sell off Matt, looks like it's you who needs some investment in Double Glazing sales techniques if you want a career in 5 years time....

    We could send you some Solaris training Manuals if double glazing isn't really your thing?

    Your Psychic abilities certainly aren't going to earn you anything.

  39. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    re. Just fork MySQL

    Forking hell!

    Provisional MySQL, Continuity MySQL, The Real MySQL and "I can't believe it's not MySQL".

  40. Matt Bryant Silver badge
    Happy

    Laughing at all the Sunshiners

    Yeah, so Larry is just going to continue on with exactly teh same loss-making Sun products that buried Sun! Go on, try saying it into the mirror with a straight face. You know that is just male bovine manure. Larry is going to want to make a profit - he is going to take an axe to Sun and gut it. Anything less and IBM will be buying Oracle in five years.

    As for the Oracle-hp relationship suddenly crumbling, that's almost as laughable as the rest of your delusions. If all else fails, there is nothing to stop hp simply ratcheting up their relationship with MS (or did you forget they are also MS's biggest partner as well as Oracle's) and start really pushing MS SQL into the datacenter. Or even partner up with the MarisDB people. Oh dear, did those facts just blow a great big hole in your fantasy world?

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