Oracle announced Thurday that it has finally received regulatory approval from the European Commission for its acquisition of Sun Microsystems. China and Russia are expected to give unconditional approval shortly and they will then close the transaction. The Commission concluded that the transaction would not significantly impede effective competition in the European Economic Area (EEA) or any substantial part of it.
Public Relations: Pick A Busy News Cycle
In what looks like PR strategy, Oracle has scheduled an all day live event to detail an integration strategy - on the same day that Apple is expected to announce its new tablet product, an event certain to dominate the day's tech news coverage. Larry Ellison is set to host the live event next Wednesday for customers, partners, press and analysts to outline the strategy for the combined companies, product roadmaps and how customers will benefit from the hardware and software integration.
Unwanted Attention
Two other items relating to Oracle surfaced on the net Thursday. The first, covered by All Things D and GigaOm regarded a memo sent by Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz. He prepared Sun employees for the completed takeover by discussing the impact that change in control will have on Sun, including the exit of some employees. He also urged employees to "emotionally resign from Sun" as a mechansim to smooth the transition to Oracle.
Later in the day the New York Times reported that Oracle President Charles E. Phillips admitted an affair after a series of mysterious billboards appeared in New York and other cities showing romantic photographs of him with a woman.
The future of Sun Software
Ever since the acquisition news was released in April 2009 many have questioned the ultimate fate of MySQL, Java and the OpenOffice suite. A statement from the European Commission said:
The Commission also examined the potential impact of Oracle's acquisition of the intellectual property (IP) rights connected to the Java development platform in the context of the proposed transaction. It found that Oracle's ability to deny its competitors access to important IP rights would be limited by the functioning of the Java Community Process (JCP) which is a participative process for developing and revising Java technology specifications involving numerous other important players in the IT industry, including Oracle's competitors."
Many other tweets and articles came out Thursday regarding Sun software as well:
- The VAR Guy blog interviews Ingres CEO Roger Burkhardt about his analysis of the Oracle-MySQL combination.
- InfoWorld's Developer World discusses the uncertain future for Java under Oracle's grip.
- Father of the Java programming language James Gosling has a blog entry with a single R.I.P. tombstone for Sun - with a long list of user comments.
- The Register - comments from Rod Johnson - Java pioneer and general manager of VMware's new Spring Source division.
Jan. 27th will be the all day live event for Oracle. Further details can be found at oracle.com/sun