Oracle to buy Sun Microsystems for a Ka-jillion Dollars

Hot off the presses! Oracle has decided to buy the Sun Microsystems for over $7 billion. The deep talks between Sun Microsystems and IBM has already fallen apart. That gives major rise to Oracle’s hopes of buying the IT giant, which produces the widely accepted programming language Java. Oracle has announced that it will pay $9.50 per share. Good ol’ Sun Microsystems has already refused the IBM offer of $9.40 per share. It’s not known whether Sun Microsystems will respond positively to Oracle’s offer or not. However, the deal will give a boost to Oracle’s position against the IBM, as both are considered as bitter rivals.

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. The companies valued the transaction at about $5.6 billion, excluding Sun’s cash and debt. As of Dec. 28, Sun had about $2.6 billion in cash and short-term investments and about $700 million in long-term debt. IBM is “highly unlikely” to reenter the bidding for Sun, according to people familiar with the matter. – from WSJ

Larry Ellison has always wanted to be the Steve Jobs of the enterprise. With this morning’s announcement that Oracle will buy Sun Microsystems for $7.4 billion, he took a big step towards making Oracle more of a soup-to-nuts provider of enterprise technology. With Sun, he will now be able to build and package together everything from chips and servers to operating systems, Java middleware, databases, and enterprise applications. – from TechCrunch