Oracle buys Sun

Oracle buys Sun Microsystems for 9,50US$ per share, approx 7,4 billion US$ total.  Prior to that IBM offered 7 billion US$ , earlier this year.

While the boards have already agreed, the shareholders are yet to decide and it is estimated that the trade should be finished by late summer 2009.

The new company will have a great depth in added value and Oracles get a high innovation quota. Oracle is now into databases, ERP, CRM and BI market - so software towards business administration.

Sun is known as the inventor of innovative and powerful hardware, Solaris and Java platform. As well, many open source projects are driven by Sun.

Oracle currently has no major open source engagements, the future of open source products such as the 3D MMOP engine or Sun's Project Wonderland is unknown at this point. Only MySQL was covered in the FAQ.

Sun head Scott McNealy explained, that the 20 years of historical cooperation between the companies would be a solid basis for the sale.  The major products of interest to Oracle are presumably Java and Solaris.

Maxing comment...
The acquisition of Sun by Oracle is a major milestone. When times are tough the big players have a tendency to do this kind of thing, merge, de-merge, buy, sell it's all part of the ongoing mealstrom of modern business. We can only presume that the economic downturn has hit major players like Sun hard - don't forget that the majority of the world's banking infrastructure is build on Java so with their key sector in dire straits it's hardly surprising that Sun is feeling the pinch.

Of course Sun has been a great supporter of Open Source so it remains to be seen if Oracle will carry the flag.

Lets hope so!

Sun Microsystems - 3 month chart	Oracle - 3 month chart