EC approves Oracle's big deal

THE EUROPEAN COMMISSION has announced its approval of Oracle's purchase of Sun.

This morning, presumably while Larry Ellison and company were still asleep in California, the EC made the announcement, explaining that it had approved the acquisition after an in-depth investigation. In a statement it added that it now believes that the deal will not have any negative impact on competition in Europe.

Concluding some four months of paper pushing, legal wrangling and whining from a few interested parties, Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes said, "I am now satisfied that competition and innovation will be preserved on all the markets concerned. Oracle's acquisition of Sun has the potential to revitalise important assets and create new and innovative products."

Kroes and her fellow commissioners have been debating the purchase since September, despite it having already been approved by similar regulators in the US without controversy.

Oracle had been expecting a decision soon, and its cupboards will have been stocked with party supplies for this occasion. Barely before the chime had stopped signalling the arrival of the EC's announcement in our inbox it was followed by news of an Oracle press conference slated for 27th January.

"Join Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, along with executives from Oracle and Sun, for a live Webcast on January 27. Learn about the strategy for the combined companies post close, product roadmaps, and how our customers, will benefit from having all components-hardware, operating system, database, middleware, and applications-engineered to work together," it urges us.

In the meantime, the EC seems to have settled its concerns about the impact that the consolidation will have on MySQL and the middleware market. In particular, it said that in December when Oracle made a public commitment to the future of MySQL, and its availability under the GPL, many of its concerns were resolved. µ