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European Commission Clears Oracle's Bid for Sun
By
ChannelTimes Staff
Mumbai, Jan 25, 2010 1459 hrs IST
Brussels regulators on Thursday approved US business software giant Oracle's acquisition of hardware and software vendor Sun Microsystems, saying the deal would not skew the market in Europe.
A major concern before the Commission was the effect the takeover would have on the open source MySQL platform -- a freely-accessed software for millions of business users.
The concern involved fears that Oracle was likely to protect its core product, the Oracle proprietary database, from losing market share and shrinking licensing fees at the expense of MySQL.
The EC had been investigating since September last year whether Oracle would continue to push a Sun software option that is free despite it potentially affecting Oracle's paid-for alternatives. However, it accepted proposals made by Oracle saying "Oracle has already taken steps to implement some of its pledges".
Oracle promised to continue to support, develop and provide MySQL technology.
"I am now satisfied that competition and innovation will be preserved on all the markets concerned," EU Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes said in a statement. "Oracle's acquisition of Sun has the potential to revitalise important assets and create new and innovative products."
Concessions by Oracle included the company's extension for up to five years of the terms and conditions of existing commercial licenses.
Oracle, IBM and Microsoft control about 85 percent of the market in terms of revenue. Sun's revenue share was low, given users download and use the database software for free.
MySQL competes mainly against Microsoft Corp's SQL Server and is used to run websites operated by companies including Google, Facebook and Amazon.com. Its main customers are small and mid-sized businesses.
The investigation found that in the high end of the market, competition primarily came from other proprietary database solutions.
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