Sun Microsystems has agreed to be bought by US tech giant Oracle in a $7.4bn (£5.1bn) deal, just two weeks after takeover talks with IBM fell apart.
Oracle announced today that it will pay $9.50 a share for Sun, making the company the latest in a string of acquisitions for Oracle’s chief executive Larry Ellison.
Oracle’s offer is only slightly more than IBM was proposing to pay. The future of Sun was plunged into uncertainty on 6 April when the IBM talks collapsed.
Oracle, which offers a range of business software including databases, customer relationship management programs and collaboration tools, hopes to conclude the deal by this summer.
“Oracle and Sun have been industry pioneers and close partners for more than 20 years,” said Sun chairman Scott McNealy. “This combination is a natural evolution of our relationship and will be an industry-defining event.”
Sun, which developed the Java software platform and whose products include Sparc chips, the Solaris operating system and the MySQL open source database, has cut thousands of jobs in recent years as it attempted to reduce costs. Under chief executive Jonathan Schwartz it has pursued an open source strategy, but the company struggled to deliver sufficient revenue growth after the dotcom boom ended.
Some analysts have speculated that Sun could be broken up, with its semiconductor, database and other software arms sold to different players.
Ellison said the deal would allow Oracle to “engineer an integrated system – applications to disk – where all the pieces fit and work together so customers do not have to do it themselves”. This, he claimed, would cut costs while improving performance and security.
In recent years, Oracle has also bought Siebel, PeopleSoft – after a long and bitter battle – and BEA Systems.
Oracle said that net of Sun’s cash and debt, the deal is valued at $5.6bn.
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