Oracle Buys Sun

Wow – it might be one of those times when Twitter could have been my friend. While I was writing about Sun, and what might happen, or should happen, Larry Dignan has taken a shot over my bow with the news above.

This must have been one of those hush-hush things, where the principals meet in an undisclosed location, over the weekend, to be able to spring it on Wall Street early Monday morning.

Just a small bit -

Oracle said Monday that it will buy Sun Microsystems for $9.50 a share in cash, or about $5.6 billion excluding debt, in a deal that plunges Larry Ellison & Co. into the hardware market. The company added that the acquisition of Java “is the most important software Oracle has ever acquired.”

Sun Chairman Scott McNealy (left) with Oracle chief Larry Ellison.

With the move—valued at $7.4 billion including Sun’s debt— Oracle also becomes a full-fledged hardware player. Oracle has been dabbling with the storage appliance with HP, but the acquisition of Sun puts the company in an entirely different realm. Oracle and Sun have been long-time partners.

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Ellison said in a statement:

“The acquisition of Sun transforms the IT industry, combining best-in-class enterprise software and mission-critical computing systems. 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. Our customers benefit as their systems integration costs go down while system performance, reliability and security go up.”

That pitch sort of sounds like Apple’s approach on the consumer side. Apple’s strategy is to integrate hardware and software to make things easy. Oracle with Sun appears to be the Apple of the enterprise.

The rest of the story can be found by following the link of the author’s name.

This really makes sense, and I wonder why no one was writing about it before the announcement – the standing joke is that Larry Ellison has more money than any deity you can name.

Dignan says its all about Java, as Oracle apps are very dependant upon it, but if Java was that important, you might think IBM would not have been so quick to walk away.

I wonder what will happen to the ’smaller projects’ like Sun Office. ???

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