Oracle Agrees to Buy Sun Microsystems

Oracle has agreed to purchase Sun Microsystems for approximately $9.40 per share in a $7.4 Billion cash purchase.

The two companies have been closely allied over the past two decades but the purchase comes two weeks after IBM declined to buy Sun Microsystems.

“Oracle and Sun have been industry pioneers and close partners for more than 20 years,” said Sun Chairman Scott McNealy. “This combination is a natural evolution of our relationship and will be an industry-defining event.”

In previous years, Oracle and Sun had worked very closely together though recently, Oracle has shifted its business towards other hardware manufacturers. The purchase substantially alters the landscape in the software/hardware business putting renewed pressures on companies as varied as IBM, Dell and HP.

The deal is subject to a Sun shareholder vote but is expected to close in the early summer. Over the weekend, the Sun board of directors unanimously approved the deal.

“The acquisition of Sun transforms the IT industry, combining best-in-class enterprise software and mission-critical computing systems,” said Oracle CEO Larry Ellison in a press release. “Oracle will be the only company that can engineer an integrated system – applications to disk – where all the pieces fit and work together so customers do not have to do it themselves. Our customers benefit as their systems integration costs go down while system performance, reliability and security go up.”