DoJ Clears Oracle's Acquisition Of Sun, EC Approval Pending

Oracle has cleared one of its last remaining hurdles in its proposed $7.4 billion acquisition of Sun Microsystems by gaining the U.S. Department of Justice's approval to go ahead with the deal.

That appears to leave approval by the European Commission as the last hurdle before the acquisition can finally close.

Oracle on Thursday said the Department of Justice approved Oracle's proposed acquisition of Sun and terminated the waiting period under the Hart-Scott-Rodino Act.

Oracle declined to provide any other details related to the change in status.

Sun's shareholders approved the deal on July 16.

Oracle in April said it plans to acquire Sun in a $7.4 billion deal announced shortly after an earlier bid by IBM to acquire Sun fell through.

Oracle and Sun have had complementary businesses for years, and a significant, if not major portion, of Oracle's installed base has been on Sun hardware and Sun's Solaris operating system.

The acquisition of Sun would force Oracle to decide how much of a hardware vendor it wants to be, given Sun's huge server, storage and appliance business.

However, the software side of Sun is very compatible with Oracle's product offerings, and there are relatively few overlaps between their product lines. The primary overlap is in databases, where Oracle will have to decide how to handle Sun's MySQL product.

In other areas, Sun would bring Oracle top-notch technologies in areas such as the Java programming language, security, the StarOffice suite of office applications, server virtualization, Sun's ZFS file system with advanced data security and data management features, the GlassFish application server, and the Solaris operating system.

One other software-related issue to be determined is how much Oracle will commit itself to supporting the open-source community given the amount of technology Sun has brought to that community.

Oracle in early July also said it would sell new investment notes to the tune of $4.5 billion in order to have extra cash on-hand for its acquisition of Sun and possibly other potential acquisitions.

In the meantime, Oracle has not been sitting on its hands waiting for other acquisition opportunities.

The company in June acquired server virtualization technology developer Virtual Iron Software in a move to boost its software application business and in the process its competitiveness vis-a-vis Microsoft.

Oracle this year alone has acquired mValent, a leading provider of application configuration management solutions, and Conformia, a developer of product and process life-cycle management software for managing drug design, development and transfer to production.

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