Oracle-Sun Deal: European Commission to investigate

You may have read our recent post regarding the DOJ approving Oracles takeover of Sun Micosystems, at the time of the post we mentioned that a similar approval would be required from the European Commission, it seems that now the EU commission are now beginning an in-depth investigation of the proposed deal.

The deal is said to be worth $7.4 billion, however there have been some major concerns as to how this would effect competition in the database market, according to Neelie Kroes who represents the Competition Commission they will have “to examine very carefully the effects on competition in Europe when the world’s leading proprietary database company proposes to take over the world’s leading open source database company,”.

If it wasn’t for these investigations going ahead before the deal is approved it would be possible for customers to in the future face reduced choices and higher prices, obviously Sun Microsystems customer base is huge at the moment, so this deal will effect many.

For more details on the European Commissions investigation check out ComputerWorld.