ACCC eyes Oracle's Sun buy

The Australian Consumer and Competition Commission (ACCC) today commenced monitoring Oracle's proposed US$7.4 billion acquisition of Sun Microsystems.

The ACCC has not indicated what part of the proposed acquisition it is monitoring, with the deal only expected to be finalised around September or October this year. Spokespeople for the competition watchdog were unable to provide any further detail.

Intelligent Business Research Services analyst, Kevin McIsaac, said the only areas of the yet-to-be merged business that could impact competition would be in the database and application server market, but not the hardware market.

The last time the ACCC showed interest in an Oracle acquisition was when it announced it would acquire Siebel in 2005, which in the end it did not oppose.

In a recent interview with news outlet Reuters, Oracle chief Larry Ellison said the software company intended to retain Sun's hardware business, citing Apple and Cisco as having enviable business models that offer high returns due the hardware-software combination. In September 2008 Ellison announced Oracle's first hardware product, Exadata, a high-end database storage system developed in partnership with Hewlett-Packard.