Oracle to Acquire Sun for $7.4 Billion

Oracle has announced plans to acquire Sun for $7.4 billion today. The transaction is valued at approximately $7.4 billion, or $5.6 billion net of Sun’s cash and debt. Oracle has setup a special informational site regarding the transaction. This deal comes weeks after talks between IBM and Sun dissolved.

Oracle President Charles Phillips noted regarding the deal, “Our customers have been asking us to step up to a broader role to reduce complexity, risk, and cost by delivering a highly-optimized standards-based product stack. Oracle plans to deliver these benefits by offering a broad range of products, including servers and storage, with all the integrated pieces: hardware operating system, database, middleware and applications. We plan to preserve and enhance investments made by our customers, while we continue to work with our partners to provide customers with choice.”

Regarding Linux Oracle notes, “Oracle is as committed as ever to Linux and other platforms and will continue to support and enhance our strong industry partnerships.” Naturally there is no discussion in the announcement about staffing changes and potential layoffs from the overlap of the two companies.

Oracle also picks up MySQL, the database used by this and many other bloggers and web applications. Sun acquired MySQL last year for $1 billion.

The companies expect the deal to close this summer.