The European Commission (EC) has given the green light to the acquisition of U.S. computer group Sun Microsystems to Oracle, one of the world's largest manufacturers of computer software, noting that the operation would not lead significant competition in the EU.
This was announced by the EU executive said in a statement, after having conducted a thorough investigation of the proposed transaction, which began last September.
The EC then assessed whether the acquisition by Oracle, the leading database vendor proprietary, leading system management database MySQL open source, belonging to Sun, could lead to competition concerns in the European Economic Area (ESA).
'Revitalizing assets'
The EU Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes, said in the note that Sun's acquisition by Oracle "has the potential to revitalize important assets and create new and innovative products."
Oracle is working on developing, manufacturing and distribution enterprise software, including middleware (software for databases) and software for enterprise applications and related services.
For its part, Sun, which acquired MySQL in 2008, manufactures standard-based computing infrastructure, including enterprise systems, software and storage.
The Commission notes that the database market is highly concentrated, as the three largest companies-Oracle, IBM and Microsoft, dominate 85% of the sector.
Competition
The research we conducted showed that although MySQL and Oracle compete in certain parts of the market for databases, they are not close competitors "in other, as in the high-end segment.
The investigation showed that Brussels also another database open source, PostgreSQL, is considered by many users as a "credible alternative" to MySQL, which could be expected to replace to some extent the competitive force exerted by MySQL currently on the market of databases.
Furthermore, the EC indicated that, given the "specifics" of the industry's open-source software took into account the "promises" announced last December by Oracle customers and developers of MySQL, as to the continued future releases of the database under the General Public License (open source license).
The Commission also examined the possible impact of Oracle's acquisition of intellectual property rights related to the Java programming platform.
In that sense, found that Oracle's ability to deny competitors access to important intellectual property rights would be limited by what is called the Java Community Process, established to develop and revise Java technology, which are involved many other players in the computer industry, including Oracle's competitors.
The EC's investigation also found that Oracle would have no incentive to restrain its competitors access to intellectual property rights of Java.
The two U.S. companies reached an agreement in April, which Oracle acquired by Sun Microsystems for a total of 5,700 million euros.
No comments:
Post a Comment