Oracle Agrees to Acquire Sun Microsystems - WSJ.com

Oracle Agrees to Acquire Sun Microsystems - WSJ.com: "

TECHNOLOGY APRIL 20, 2009, 4:45 P.M. ET
Oracle Agrees to Acquire Sun Microsystems
 
By DON CLARK and BEN WORTHEN

Oracle Corp. announced a deal to buy Sun Microsystems Inc. for $7.4 billion, a surprise union of software and hardware companies that emerged following failed talks for International Business Machines Corp. to buy Sun.

Oracle, which has been snapping up smaller software companies for several years, agreed to pay $9.50 a share for Sun."

(Via .)

As a CIO, I have a hard time seeing much customer benefit from this transaction unless you were committed to Oracle DB/Apps on Solaris. If I was in that camp, I'd immediately begin looking for a negotiated reduction in my maintenance expenses based on the combined spend. I'd expect a visit from my CFO as well, asking where I was in that negotiation. Particularly in this part of the economic cycle renegotiating maintenance deals is par for the course. The bigger the customer, the bigger the discount that I'd be pushing for especially if I had a significant Solaris footprint. Tough to switch databases, less so for the hardware/OS underneath. Given that, I don't see how the deal adds profit to Oracle absent significant and fast cost take-outs from Sun.

If I'm not committed to Oracle on Solaris, and in the shops I've run as CIO I never was in that group, I am worried about a variety of things. Not the least of these is the commitment to MySQL. With any kind of installed base of this open source DBMS, I'd be looking very carefully at options. Oracle pricing, particularly maintenance pricing and the (perceived, at least) de-bundling of products over time, has been a significant annoyance at best.

Will be interesting to see how this plays out. What's your take on things?