Ellison: Sun Losing $100 Million Each Month Acquisition Is Delayed

Ellison's comments, made during a dinner at the Churchill Club, a Silicon Valley speaker forum, are the latest indication that Sun's business is suffering as the acquisition process drags on.

"The longer this takes, the more money Sun is going to lose," Ellison said during the dinner at the Fairmont Hotel in San Jose, according to a Reuters report.

Two weeks ago Avnet CEO Roy Vallee said customers are holding off purchasing Sun servers because of uncertainty created by Oracle. And Sun channel partners, worried about Oracle's commitment to maintaining Sun's hardware product lines, have been calling IBM and Hewlett-Packard about joining those vendor's partner programs.

Oracle has tried to limit the damage, recently taking out advertisements in The Wall Street Journal promising to spend more money developing Sun's Sparc microprocessor technology and the Solaris operating system than Sun does today, and "dramatically improve Sun's hardware performance by integrating Oracle software with Sun hardware."

U.S. regulators and Sun's shareholders have given their approval for the acquisition. But earlier this month the European Commission said it was investigating whether the acquisition of Sun, specifically Oracle's prospective ownership of the open-source MySQL database, would be anti-competitive. The EC, the European Union's governing body, has until January 19 to make a decision.

During his comments Ellison said Oracle would not sell off the MySQL product, according to a Financial Times story. He said Oracle's strategy is to become "a systems" company by combining Sun's hardware and software products with Oracle's software.