Oracle Buys Sun 906
bruunb writes "Oracle Corporation (NASDAQ: ORCL) and Sun Microsystems (NASDAQ: JAVA) announced today they have entered into a definitive agreement under which Oracle will acquire Sun common stock for $9.50 per share in cash. The transaction is valued at approximately $7.4 billion, or $5.6 billion net of Sun's cash and debt. 'We expect this acquisition to be accretive to Oracle's earnings by at least 15 cents on a non-GAAP basis in the first full year after closing. We estimate that the acquired business will contribute over $1.5 billion to Oracle's non-GAAP operating profit in the first year, increasing to over $2 billion in the second year. This would make the Sun acquisition more profitable in per share contribution in the first year than we had planned for the acquisitions of BEA, PeopleSoft and Siebel combined,' said Oracle President Safra Catz."
The internal announcement (Score:5, Informative)
For anyone with morbid curiosity:
From: Jonathan I. Schwartz
To: allsun@sun.com
Subject: Today's Sun/Oracle Announcement
Date: Mon, 20 Apr 2009 04:34:16 -0700 (07:34 EDT)
Today's Sun/Oracle Announcement
This is one of the toughest emails I've ever had to write.
It's also one of the most hopeful about Sun's future in the industry.
For 27 years, Sun has stood for courage, innovation, a willingness to blaze trails, to envision and engineer the future. No matter our ups and downs, we've remained committed to those ideals, and to the R&D that's allowed us to differentiate. We've committed to decade long pursuits, from the evolution of one of the world's most powerful datacenter operating systems, to one of the world's most advanced multi-core microelectronics. We've never walked away from the wholesale reinvention of business models, the redefinition of technology boundaries or the pursuit of new routes to market.
Because of the unparalleled talent at Sun, we've also fueled entire industries with our people and technologies, and fostered extraordinary companies and market successes. Our products and services have driven the discovery of new drugs, transformed social media, and created a better understanding of the world and marketplace around us. All, while we've undergone a near constant transformation in the face of a rapidly changing marketplace and global economy. We've never walked away from a challenge - or an opportunity.
So today we take another step forward in our journey, but along a different path - by announcing that this weekend, our board of directors and I approved the acquisition of Sun Microsystems by the Oracle Corporation for $9.50/share in cash. All members of the board present at the meeting to review the transaction voted for it with enthusiasm, and the transaction stands to utterly transform the marketplace - bringing together two companies with a long history of working together to create a newly unified vision of the future.
Oracle's interest in Sun is very clear - they aspire to help customers simplify the development, deployment and operation of high value business systems, from applications all the way to datacenters. By acquiring Sun, Oracle will be well positioned to help customers solve the most complex technology problems related to running a business.
To me, this proposed acquisition totally redefines the industry, resetting the competitive landscape by creating a company with great reach, expertise and innovation. A combined Oracle/Sun will be capable of cultivating one of the world's most vibrant and far reaching developer communities, accelerating the convergence of storage, networking and computing, and delivering one of the world's most powerful and complete portfolios of business and technical software.
I do not consider the announcement to be the end of the road, not by any stretch of the imagination. I believe this is the first step down a different path, one that takes us and our innovations to an even broader market, one that ensures the ubiquitous role we play in the world around us. The deal was announced today, and, after regulatory review and shareholder approval, will take some months to close - until that close occurs, however, we are a separate company, operating independently. No matter how long it takes, the world changed starting today.
But it's important to note it's not the acquisition that's changing the world - it's the people that fuel both companies. Having spent a considerable amount of time talking to Oracle, let me assure you they are single minded in their focus on the one asset that doesn't appear in our financial statements: our people. That's their highest priority - creating an inviting and compelling environment in which our brightest minds can continue to invent and deliver the future.
Thank you for everything you've done over the years, and for everything you will do in the future to carry the business forward. I'm incredibly proud of this company and what we've accomplished together.
Details will be forthcoming as we work together on the integration planning process.
Jonathan
Re:Wow. Just Wow. (Score:5, Informative)
Its highly unlikely Oracle will maintain Sun's hardware aspect of the business. Sun already has put SPARC into legacy mode. Oracle will probably keep or sell off the hardware products that can sustain itself. It will probably maintain the legacy server stuff, to keep its high-end ticket customers who buy Sun for high-availability systems.
An accepted tactic to grow a customer base is to buyout another company's customer base. Its usually considered to be a cheaper route than investing in taking away a competitor's customer base. This is probably the reason Oracle went for Sun. Oracle has become more services/consultant oriented. It can't really break into IBM's territory, partly because of IBM's hardware components for "complete solutions" or enterprise market. This allows Oracle to grab all the customers IBM hasn't already taken away.
The bigger question is what Oracle plans for Sun's software products, like Solaris, MYSQL, and Java.
Postgres is looking better than ever (Score:5, Informative)
Re:What about MySQL? (Score:5, Informative)
Since Oracle likes primarily using "their own thing", my guess is they'll move to Solaris, and their Linux distro will take a bow, since it's based off of someone elses work, that they've not yet acquired.
Solaris used to be the primary development environment and when Oracle switched to Linux the developers seemed to miss DTrace [intel.com].
In the past, Solaris was the best platform to deploy Oracle on. That may still be true today, even with all the support Oracle has put into Linux. Oracle has kept up with Solaris/Sparc but lagged releases for Solaris/x86. Hopefully that changes now.
As much as I like Linux, I still prefer Solaris, especially since Solaris 10.
Sun's hardware works best (faster doesn't mean better) with Solaris, so I can't see Oracle dropping Solaris. I agree that it wouldn't be surprising to see Oracle moving more towards Solaris.
Re:What about MySQL? (Score:1, Informative)
Eclipse is open-source.
So is Netbeans.
Only in name. Not in practice.
Sun doesn't accept contributions to Netbeans itself citing that their development pace is too fast. They relegate contributions to plug ins.
Re:Wow (Score:5, Informative)
Why would they use Solaris? Even Sun hardly seemed to use it that much ;o)
When you say stupid things, you might want to consider posting anonymously next time :)
Anyway....
When IBM was considering buying Sun, Forbes put out a video on Sun's legacy [forbes.com] which some of you might find interesting.
It's sad to see Sun go down, but I'm optimistic about the merger with Oracle.
Re:SPARC going out...? (Score:5, Informative)
I think the interesting question is, does Oracle care about SPARC?
The majority of Sun's $13billion in revenues comes from hardware.
The majority of their hardware comes from Sparc.
Why would you buy a company for billions of dollars and ditch it's most popular product?
Re:Bad news for MySQL (Score:3, Informative)
Look out for some significant changes to MySQL licensing and pricing. It's my guess that databases just got a whole load more expensive.
Eh, no. MySQL is GPL. Oracle can't make it more expensive and if they try to kill it, someone will just fork it and take the project away from them.
That happened with X11 a couple years ago and today Xorg is the standard X windows server for Linux.
Should I feed the troll? (Score:5, Informative)
Source IDC 2008:
market share:
"Unix, mid-to-high-end servers ($17.2 billion in 2008)
IBM 37.2 pct
Sun 28.1 pct
HP 26.5 pct
"
Don't give a flying fig about Suns servers?
IIRC Solaris still has the highest market share among proprietary Unixes. And AIX ist only third after HP-UX.
And if you think about Oracle as a database company you've kind of missed the last 8 years or so. They've bought a lot of stuff and are number two behind SAP.
"IBM provides Java and Java products. "
Well I guess Sun does that too.
Regarding virtualization: XVM Server [sun.com]
Should be enough to keep the troll busy ;-)
Bye egghat
Re:What about MySQL? (Score:3, Informative)
Just last month Sun confirmed Rock would be out this year. That's not exactly "scrapped".
Arrogance is blinding you (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Java 8 Preview (Score:2, Informative)
nice
Re:What about MySQL? (Score:5, Informative)
Sun doesn't accept contributions to Netbeans itself citing that their development pace is too fast
Last time I checked, open source just means that the source is available. There's no requirement that they accept external contributions. If you want to contribute, fork it and go from there.
Scared after seeing what happened to Berkeley DB (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I doubt it (Score:4, Informative)
They contribute to a few projects but not a lot, mainly kernel work take a look at http://oss.oracle.com/ [oracle.com]
Re:What about MySQL? (Score:2, Informative)
Oracle joined the Eclipse foundation reluctantly and they have, as far as I know, not released an IDE based on Eclipse.
JDeveloper is more targeted for RAD development or development for software to run on Oracle software (such as JHeadstart) - although JDeveloper is certainly not limited to Oracle software. By the way, JDeveloper is based on a old version of JBuilder (I think it was JBuilder 2)
I, as many programmers, like Netbeans more then Eclipse, so changes are big Netbeans will get (more) support of Oracle.
Re:.10 a share, argh! (Score:3, Informative)
Because IBM kept low-balling the buyout price. Its was under $9.50 before IBM bailed out.
Re:What about MySQL? (Score:3, Informative)
I don't think JDeveloper is based on Eclipse though.
JDeveloper is based on an older version of JBuilder AFAIK.
Re:Should I feed the troll? (Score:5, Informative)
IBM may have been doing virtualization for longer than anyone else, but they certainly aren't the only ones with an impressive lineup in that area anymore. Their POWER systems have the same kind of hardware partitioning that SPARC supports, but they still seem to regard it as an enterprise feature.
Re:What about MySQL? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Postgres is looking better than ever (Score:5, Informative)
Imagine this - I need to grab the physical file for a db or table.... what do I look for?
Imagine this - you'd never, ever want to do that with a production database. What good is a copy of a table file with no context, no foreign key integrity, no transactional integrity, nothing? If you must back up a single table, pg_dump works.
Re:Good-bye MySQL (Score:4, Informative)
EXCEPT/INTERSECT in UNION,
...just to name a few.
MySQL offers some speed benefits, but mostly when you're using MyISAM, which costs you ACID. For some applications that may be a desirable trade off, but I'm inclined to use BerkelyDB or SQLite for those, and use PostgreSQL when heavier lifting is called for. Most of MySQL's speed advantages over PostgreSQL narrow when MySQL runs with InnoDB rather than MyISAM and Postgres is given more memory than its rather conservative (for up to date hardware) default settings.
Seems like good news for MariaDB, the MySQL fork (Score:1, Informative)
See:
http://askmonty.org/wiki/index.php/MariaDB
Re:Postgres is looking better than ever (Score:1, Informative)
string comparison using MATCH(row) AGAINST ('string') is case insensitive.
Re:Postgres is looking better than ever (Score:3, Informative)
OMG! TSIF! (the sky is falling)
You get to CHOOSE what collation you use - case sensitive or case insensitive...
see: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/case-sensitivity.html
Re:Wow. Just Wow. (Score:3, Informative)
Java really doesn't make much sense for Oracle, either. A lot of databases might get use Java front-ends, but so what? Oracle hasn't been in that business.
You're joking, right? Oracle owns BEA now, and therefore both their Weblogic app server and the JRockit VM. Oracle has the TopLink implementation of the JPA-compliant ORM layer. They have the JDeveloper IDE. Those are just the things off the top of my head without searching.
Re:Postgres is looking better than ever (Score:1, Informative)
VARCHAR(...) CHARSET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci
Why on earth a password would be encoded in base64 in MySQL is a mystery to me.
Re:Wow (Score:5, Informative)
Most of Sun's revenue comes from their Sparc hardware, even though sales have been declining.
They need Solaris for their Sparc servers and since the x86 and Sparc versions come from the same codebase, and the x86 server sales are increasing, it doesn't make sense to ditch Solaris.
One of the reasons Sun's became such a dominant player in the unix market (especially considering their relatively small size) is that, in addition to buying Sun's hardware on the merits of the hardware, a lot of people would buy sun hardware to be able to run Solaris. The same is not true for HPUX and AIX. While there are some fans of those OSs, they dwarf in comparison to Solaris.
Oracle wants sun's hardware business, including SPARC. That means Solaris isn't going anywhere.
Re: Solaris (Score:5, Informative)
I'm listening to the conference call now.
One of the first thing Larry Ellison said was two of the main reasons they were buying sun were for Solaris and Java.
Solaris/Sparc is the largest base where Oracle is deployed. Linux is number 2. He also said "Solaris is the best unix techonology available in the market."
Solaris isn't going anywhere.
Re:What about MySQL? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Bad news for MySQL (Score:1, Informative)
Support
Re:Bad news for MySQL (Score:3, Informative)
Percona [percona.com]
Google [blogspot.com]
Mariadb [askmonty.org]
Re:What about MySQL? (Score:5, Informative)
Please reread your open source concepts and licenses. Just because a project is open source, doesn't mean the project's host have to accept any incoming changes from any random person.
In fact you can't commit to the Linux kernel tree too, until you have build some credibility with the core kernel team. You can submit patches, but don't hold your breath for them to be accepted any time soon, unless you have build some sort of repertoire.
Re:What about MySQL? (Score:0, Informative)
"Eclipse" is when the Sun is blocked/hidden/occulted by something else. It makes IBM's reasons for funding Eclipse dead obvious.
I completely agree so long as you remember that Eclipse targeted Visual Studio and not Sun. http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Application-Development/Eclipse-Behind-the-Name/ [eweek.com]
Re:What about MySQL? (Score:4, Informative)
JDeveloper was originally based on JBuilder, 5 I believe, but was completely re-written and diverged to be infinitely better...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JDeveloper [wikipedia.org]
Re:What about MySQL? (Score:3, Informative)
No, "occulted" means exactly what the previous poster used it to mean. The root of "occult" mean to hide from view, and while the noun and adjective forms in general use have wandered off to refer to specific things because those things are usually hidden, the verb form remains much closer to the root. (See, e.g., here [reference.com], or any other decent dictionary.)
Re:What about MySQL? (Score:4, Informative)
According to IBM, the name was meant to indicate the goal of eclipsing Microsoft Visual Studio, not anything to do with Sun Microsystems. http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Application-Development/Eclipse-Behind-the-Name/ [eweek.com]
Re:What about MySQL? (Score:2, Informative)
I don't know where the parent poster got the impression that Sun doesn't accept contributions to NetBeans. I'm a non-Sun contributor.
Look up (Score:3, Informative)
"Occultation" in the dictionary. It's an astronomical term and refers to what happens when one heavenly body is concealed because another heavenly body passes in front of it.....
Re:What about MySQL? (Score:3, Informative)
"Eclipse" is when the Sun is blocked/hidden/occulted
I think you mean occluded [thefreedictionary.com]. "occulted" is when you wave a dead chicken at it at midnight.
That usage of "occult" is unusual but not incorrect. Both occult and occlude are derived from the same Latin root. See here: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/occult [reference.com] Entries 4 and 9-11 cover the usage regarding something being hidden
Re:What about MySQL? (Score:3, Informative)
I'm not thinking of table A joined to table B is slower than querying table A then table B.
Think of a hundred tables, some of which are related (by keys) and some of which are not. As in, say 20 of them contain preferences about a user's web site layout, 20 contain general layout preference information, 20 contain the top content according to all user ratings, and 20 contain seasonal news/promo items.
All of which is used to create a website layout for a customer.
One approach would be to have one stored procedure, that does 5 queries, one after another, one per set of 20 tables, and merge the results into one set that is used to build the web view.
A better approach would be to have your application execute the 5 queries simultaneously by kicking off 5 mini programs, and return the results to the application for merging.
One big stored procedure handling it versus the application taking some of the load and having the option to run things in parallel.
You divide the work up among the database server and the app server, as well as gaining the ability to run things simultaneously via multiple threads.
This is where having ultrasparcs with 8 cores each and 8 threads per core really shines.
Re:Dear Slashdot (Score:1, Informative)
1) No. Oracle really has little to gain by re-licensing ZFS. It is far more likely that Oracle abandons Linux alltogether, in favour of Open/Solaris.
2) Yes. IBM competes with Sun in pretty much every market Sun competes in. There would be much duplication of products, which usually means much termination of products, which would have most likely meant no more Solaris (see AIX), no more netbeans (see Eclipse), no more glassfish (see WebSphere), no more Sparc (see Power and PPC), no Sun Blades (see IBM blades), IBM already has its own Java, etc.
Oracle's product line doesn't overlap with Sun's. Solaris runs best on UltraSPARC, and Solaris has always been the best platform to deploy Oracle on. Oracle sells the db-in-a-box product, and frankly, given that they now own Solaris and SPARC, there's a reason for Sun's product lines to stay alive.
This is only worse if you a) hate Sun b) like MySQL or c) are a rabid Linux zealots who thinks everyone and everything should be running it (since its most likely that Oracle drops Linux for Solaris).