Last week, some of my friends felt a sense of loss when they typed “www.sun.com” into their browsers and wound up on Oracle’s home page. Oracle’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems took all 9 months to complete – as long as conceiving and delivering a baby – but it did mark the end of an era.
Sun Microsystems, which was founded in 1982 by Scott McNealy, Bill Joy, Andreas Bechtolsheim, and Vinod Khosla, was once upon a time a leader in the computing world. During the Internet boom more than two decades ago, Sun made the servers which powered that boom. Those were the good old days.
After the European Union approved the acquisition, Oracle announced on January 27th, Wednesday, that it had completed its acquisition of Sun Microsystems in a deal valued at more than $7 billion, transforming the database and business-software giant into an integrated systems company. With that, the integration begins, the Sun will set and emerges as part of the big Oracle umbrella..
In the years to come, I believe Sun Microsystems will end up being an excellent case study in many business schools across the world. Many will debate and argue on what went wrong, how did Sun ended up selling itself, the reasons, the faults, etc. Would be an interesting case indeed.
Oracle, on the other hand, is a fast growing giant. Within a short span of 5 years, Oracle have grown more than double in revenues and have acquired countless of companies. Being a dominant market leader in the database segment, and being cash rich, Oracle is a growing giant. How will its acquisition of Sun going to transform this giant? We shall see soon…
Tags: acquisition, Business, merger, strategy