Oracle Integrating Sun at 'Arm's Length'

Safra Catz, Oracle's CFO, told financial analysts during a conference call Wednesday that work continues on paving the way for the deal to close even though that will now happen several months after Oracle had initially thought it would be done. Earlier in the week, the company announced that a new Exadata database machine would be built with Oracle software on Sun hardware -- the first, big joint product announcement between the companies since Oracle agreed to buy Sun earlier this year for $7.4 billion.

"Obviously we continue to do integration planning," Catz said. "That's what we are allowed to do and Sun historically was a very big partner of Oracle, generally, and so the Exadata version 2 announcement yesterday is the perfect example of things we can do together at arm's length which I think benefit our customers and both companies very well. So we get a better sense of the Sun business and we continue to be able to do what we can at arm's length."

For the most part, Oracle and Sun executives have been very tight-lipped about the deal and what it would mean for the solution provider channel and full product lines of each company.

U.S. regulators have already cleared the way here for a deal to take place. European Commission antitrust examiners have entered into a Phase Two analysis of the deal, reportedly to take a closer look at how an Oracle-Sun combination would impact competition in the database space -- given that Oracle is the world's largest database company and Sun owns the world's largest open-source database property, MySQL.