Sun Microsystems hemorrhaging over $100m a month

Sun Microsystems is “losing over $100m (£61m) a month” according to Oracle
chief executive Larry Ellison.

Ellison is urging the European Commission to speed up its decision on
Oracle’s acquisition of Sun – as the company continues to lose millions of
dollars.

“The longer this takes, the more money Sun is going to lose, and that’s not
good for anybody,” said Ellison, at a US technology forum in Silicon Valley
earlier this week.

The software and database company is currently awaiting confirmation from the
European Commission that a planned merger with Oracle can go ahead without
violating anti-competitive rules.

However Sun is hemorrhaging money with the company losing $147m in the last
month alone while it waits,
Computing
reported.

The EC is expected to give its verdict in January which could mean that Sun
will lose half a billion dollars by then.

US anti-trust regulators have already approved the Oracle bid of $7.4bn

Ellison is predicting the EC will approve the deal as Oracle sells to big
corporation and government agencies, while many Sun programmes are downloaded
for free and largely used for web-based functions.

However, European anti-trust regulators are concerned over what Oracle will
do with Sun’s enterprise software, MySQL. The technology is currently a
competitor to Oracle’s own enterprise database software. Critics believe Oracle
could cut resources for MySQL users and try to convert them to Oracle systems,
thereby reducing competition in that sector.

Oracle bid for Sun Microsystems