Monday 20 April 2009

Oracle buys Sun

(By Anthony Miller – Monday, 20th April 2009 2:00pm). At first we thought it was a belated April Fool’s prank but, no, it’s for real. Oracle is to pay $9.50 a share for Sun (i.e. 10 cents more than IBM’s mooted offer) in a $7.4bn all cash deal ($5.6bn net of cash and debt). Oracle has some $8.2bn cash in the bank. It will take us a little while to digest the reams of PR material that Oracle has put out on the deal but our first reaction is that this is just a bit bonkers. OK, it does make sense for Oracle to get Java and MySQL – but why on earth does it want to buy into the highly commoditised desktop and server market? We don’t take Larry Ellison for a fool, but it just looks odd. What would Oracle’s key hardware partners – notably IBM and HP – think about it all? More on this after we’ve taken our stress pills.

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