Sun shareholders approve Oracle deal

Far from unanimous

By Timothy Prickett Morgan • Get more from this author

Posted in Financial News, 16th July 2009 18:34 GMT

Free whitepaper – The Dell Management Console and ITIL

The shareholders that actually own Sun Microsystems - as opposed to the people who used to run it and behaved as if they owned it - approved of the $5.6bn takeover of Sun by software powerhouse and server and storage (not)wannabe Oracle.

According to a terse statement from Sun - and the last thing Sun will say as an independent company unless antitrust regulators in the United States and Europe have issues with the takeover - shareholders representing approximately 62 per cent of the outstanding common stock of Sun have voted to approve the deal, which calls for Oracle to shell out $9.50 per Sun share. Net of debts and cash on hand, that values Sun at $5.6bn based on the latest financial figures available for Sun. (This may wiggle a bit when Sun's fourth quarter of fiscal 2009 financial results are announced later in July or August).

Oracle has said in the past that it expects to close the acquisition by the end of summer and is working with regulatory agencies to answer questions regarding Java and other products where maintaining competition is an issue. No one seriously thinks that the US or European antitrust authorities will try to stop the deal, but they may ask for certain assurances from Oracle to maintain competition before giving the acquisition the nod.

Once Oracle is done eating Sun, it can move on to dessert and buy Red Hat. ®

Free whitepaper – Thermal design of Dell PowerEdge server