EU Clears Oracle To Buy Sun Microsystems Unconditionally

The European Commission Thursday cleared U.S. software giant Oracle Corp. (ORCL) to take over smaller rival Sun Microsystems Inc. (JAVA), after a drawn out investigation.

Oracle is buying Sun for $7.38 billion, or $9.50 a share.

"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 revitalize important assets and create new and innovative products," said Neelie Kroes, the European competition commissioner.

The clearance comes after an in-depth antitrust investigation opened on September 3 on worries that Oracle's acquisition of the world's leading open source database MySQL would hamper competition in the database market.

The database market is highly concentrated with the three main proprietary database vendors --Oracle, International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) and Microsoft Corp. (MSFT)--controlling about 85% of the market in terms of revenue, the commission said.

-By Peppi Kiviniemi, Dow Jones Newswires; +32 (0)2 741 1 483; peppi.kiviniemi@dowjones.com

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