Oracle CEO Larry Ellison told a Silicon Valley audience Monday that Sun Microsystems is losing about $100 million a month because of delays in Oracle’s acquisition of the company. “The longer this takes, the more money Sun is going to lose, and that’s not good for anybody,” Ellison said, according to the Financial Times.
Oracle’s $7.4 billion deal for Sun, which was originally announced in April, was approved by U.S. antitrust authorities in August. However, the European Commission’s recent decision to open an in-depth investigation into the acquisition means that Oracle cannot expect to close the deal anytime soon.
“The U.S. took their time and deliberations and cleared it,” saying the acquisition “was overwhelmingly a pro-competitive deal,” Ellison told an event sponsored by the nonprofit Churchill Club in San Jose, Calif. “I think once the [Europeans] do their job, they’ll come to the same conclusion.”
A Database Snafu
The bad news for Oracle is that the EC’s investigation could take until the middle of next January to complete. According to EC Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes, European antitrust authorities have an obligation to ensure that customers looking to buy database products will not face reduced choice or higher prices as a result of this takeover.
“Databases are a key element of company IT systems,” Kroes said. “The commission has to ensure that [open-source] alternatives would continue to be available.”
If Oracle is forced to divest Sun’s open-source MySQL database to receive the EC’s blessing, Piper Jaffray analyst Mark Murphy thinks it would have a “small effect” on Sun’s estimated contribution to Oracle’s bottom line.
“My sense is that MySQL is growing extremely rapidly but is not wildly profitable yet, and is still probably inconsequential against the backdrop of Sun’s total server and software business, in terms of how much operating profit it produces,” Murphy…