Oracle - Sun Deal Gets EU Approval After Several Delays

More than a few months after Oracle made its intentions to buy Sun Microsystems known, with a $7.4 bid for the tech company, the deal has cleared all major hurdles and seems set to go though in the short term. EU regulators have given their go-ahead and said they were satisfied that the database market was healthy enough not to be affected by Oracle getting its hands on MySQL, owned by Sun, the major issue holding back the deal.

"I am now satisfied that competition and innovation will be preserved on all the markets concerned. Oracle's acquisition of Sun has the potential to revitalise important assets and create new and innovative products," EU Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes said in a statement.

The EU Competition Commission has now approved the deal, after several delays, without any conditions attached, with only China and Russia still investigating the deal for potential anti-trust issues. Those investigations are expected to come to similar conclusions. The EU concluded that, even though the database market is concentrated in the hands of only a few players, with Oracle Microsoft and IBM getting 85 percent of the revenue between them, there are alternative to those vendors, mostly from open-source projects.

It also believed that, even though MySQL did compete with Oracle's own offerings, this was only in the entry-level market and there wasn't a significant overlap to create a problem. Also, alternatives to MySQL, like PostgreSQL and even its own 'forks', were viable competitors. Oracle's pledge to protect MySQL also played a role in the approval process.

The approval marks the end of an investigation that has been in the works since summer. The deal had been approved by the US Department of Justice, but some concerns made the EU regulators extend the investigation a couple of times. Oracle complained that the move was hurting Sun's business, and there's clear evidence of that though necessarily to the detriment of Oracle, but started to soften its position last month, culminating with a public pledge to invest in MySQL and keep the project alive. Even if that wasn't enough for the software's creator, it apparently was for the EU Commission.