Wednesday, November 11, 2009

European Commission objects to Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems

The European Commission has issued a formal 'statement of objections' over Oracle's planned acquisition of Sun Microsystems which had earlier obtained the approval of the U.S Department of Justice which expressed that the deal was unlikely to be anti-competitive. Oracle made public its plan to acquire Sun for USD 7.4 Billion in April this year.
The primary concern of the European Commission is Sun's open source MySQL database product. The acquisition by Oracle would have negative effects for the database products market with Oracle also marketing its own 'enterprise' database products.
Oracle in the meanwhile has asserted that the acquisition would not be anti-competitive, especially in the database market since MySQL is open source and it cannot be controlled by any entity. It asserted that the database products market had at least eight strong players including IBM and Microsoft. Oracle argues that the deal is essential for competition in the high-end server market claiming that the deal would revitalise Sun's Sparc processor and Solaris OS platforms. Sourced from: Reuters

No comments:

Post a Comment