September 22nd, 2009
Oracle won't spin-off MySQL despite EU
Oracle CEO Larry Ellison and former Motorola CEO and Sun Microsystems executive Ed Zander appeared together on stage last night at an event organized by the Churchill Club.
TechPulse360 reported that Larry Ellison said he would not spin-off MySQL despite possible objections by European regulators looking into Oracle’s acquisition of Sun, which owned MySQL.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cya5Tnv92p4&feature=player_embedded
Mr Ellison also said that Sun is losing about $100m a month and he would like to complete the acquisition, which has been held up because of a review by the European Commission.
Oracle’s Sun deal is in a holding pattern as it waits for the EU’s European Commission to approve the merger. The EC set a deadline of January, 2010 to issue its ruling.
Ellison was careful not to say anything critical of the EC, noting they have a job to do, but the delay in approval is having a very real impact. “Sun is losing $100 million a month, we’d like to get this thing done,” said Ellison.
He said he thought the EC would okay the deal and that he would not consider spinning off mySQL even if the EC made it a condition of approval. In any case, he doesn’t think there should be an issue because the open source database is in a completely different market than Oracle.
“mySQL and Oracle do not compete at all. If you look at where we compete it’s with DB2, Microsoft’s SQL Server, Sybase and a long list of others. We never compete against mySQL, it addresses very different markets.”
Ellison: ‘Sun losing $100 million a month’
Tom Foremski reports on the business and culture of Silicon Valley at the intersection of technology and media. He also writes at Silicon Valley Watcher. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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