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.”
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.
On a conference call with analysts, Ellison said that Oracle’s acquisitions to date have been market leaders - PeopleSoft, Hyperion and Siebel. With Sun, Oracle said Java and Solaris are the keepers in the deal.
“More Oracle databases run on the Solaris Sparc than any other system,” said Ellison, noting Linux was second. “We’ll engineer the Oracle database and Solaris operating system together. With Sun we can make all components of the IT stack integrated and work well.”
Regarding Java, Ellison said it wanted Sun so it could own the building blocks for its middleware. Oracle’s middleware is built on Java and the applications giant said it will continue to invest in the software.
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