With EU Approval, Oracle Set to Detail Oracle-Sun Product Integration
After several months of review, the EU has formally approved the Oracle-Sun merger, concluding that the transaction would not significantly impede competition.
"I am now satisfied that competition and innovation will be preserved on all the markets concerned. Oracle's acquisition of Sun has the potential to revitalise important assets and create new and innovative products," said EU Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes in a statement.
The EU started its Oracle-Sun inquiry on Sept. 3, 2009, to assess whether the acquisition of Sun would impede the open-source database market.
"The commission's in-depth investigation showed that although MySQL and Oracle compete in certain parts of the database market, they are not close competitors in others, such as the high-end segment," according to the EU's findings. "Given the open source nature of MySQL, the Commission also assessed Oracle's ability and incentive to remove the constraint exerted by MySQL after the merger and the extent to which this constraint could, if necessary, be replaced by other actors on the database market."
The EU also examined the potential impact of Oracle's acquisition of the intellectual property of Java, but found that Oracle's ability to deny competitors access to Java would actually hurt itself given the breadth of third-party Java Community Process players and that it would jeapordize the gains derived from a broad adoption of the Java platform.
"The proposed transaction would raise no competition concerns in respect of the licensing of IP rights connected with Java," according to an EU release.
Oracle issued a short announcement of the EU approval and noted that it expects approval from China and Russia soon which will allow it to close the transaction.
For the Jan. 27 Webcast, Ellison will be joined by other executives and it will be broadcast globally, according to Oracle.
The company "will outline the strategy for the combined companies, product roadmaps, and how customers will benefit from having all components—hardware, operating system, database, middleware, and applications - engineered to work together," according to a release.