Oracle Corp. announced today that it will acquire Sun Microsystems for $7.4 billion. When talks between IBM and Sun deteriorated earlier this month, Oracle wasted no time initiating new talks with Sun. This purchase price is $9.50 per Sun share, which is a 42% premium over Sun’s share price last Friday. IBM had offered to buy Sun for as much as $9.40 per share, but the talks failed due in part to antitrust issues.
Oracle on the other hand is primarily a database software company. This means there are fewer antitrust issues with this merger because Sun deals primarily with hardware products. Oracle will now be a massive company with solutions for a very broad spectrum of computer needs. Sun’s primary technologies are Java and MySQL.
Larry Dignan of CNET wrote a great article describing Oracle’s motivations behind this deal, as well as their possible future plans. Check out the complete Oracle press release of this acquisition here.
