Sun Finds a Buyer in Oracle

Sun and Oracle have come to terms on a $7.4B cash deal. Oracle's Ellison rejected a similar deal in 2003 due to bad timing and a PeopleSoft acquisition. Says Sun's post:

"Sun and Oracle today announced a definitive agreement for Oracle to acquire Sun for $9.50 per share in cash. The Sun Board of Directors has unanimously approved the transaction. It is anticipated to close this summer."

"The acquisition of Sun transforms the IT industry, combining best-in-class enterprise software and mission-critical computing systems," said Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. "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."

Oracle's press release mirror's Sun's:

“Sun is a pioneer in enterprise computing, and this combination recognizes the innovation and customer success the company has achieved. Our largest customers have been asking us to step up to a broader role to reduce complexity, risk and cost by delivering a highly optimized stack based on standards,” said Oracle President Charles Phillips. “This transaction will preserve and enhance investments made by our customers, while we continue to work with our partners to provide customers with choice.”

"There are substantial long-term strategic customer advantages to Oracle owning two key Sun software assets: Java and Solaris. Java is one of the computer industry’s best-known brands and most widely deployed technologies, and it is the most important software Oracle has ever acquired. Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle’s fastest growing business, is built on top of Sun’s Java language and software. Oracle can now ensure continued innovation and investment in Java technology for the benefit of customers and the Java community."

Sun's position in MySQL was not mentioned - not even as it relates to Oracle's Innobase Oy subsidiary. There is a lot of IP in the Sun/Oracle combination ready to be loosed on the world if Oracle upholds its "open source commitment."

What does this mean for VirtualBox? OracleVM is currently based on open source Xen and is a deployment platform for Oracle products. Will Oracle move away from Xen in favor of VirtualBox or Sun containers? With RedHat's exit in favor of KVM, the only major players left in Xen's camp would be Microsoft/Suse. We will see some interesting things out of Oracle/Sun... We hope to see a more aggressive approach to storage in favor of selling services and software that runs on it...