Welcome!

.NET Authors: Liz McMillan, Yakov Werde, Matthew Pollicove , Kevin Benedict

Related Topics: Oracle, Java

Oracle: Article

Oracle’s Summit with EC Apparently Fails

Co-president Safra Catz met with the European Commission’s antitrust boss

By Maureen O'Gara
Article Rating:
October 21, 2009 03:00 PM EDT
Reads:
 1,236

Oracle co-president Safra Catz met with the European Commission’s antitrust boss Neelie Kroes to try to negotiate Oracle’s way out from under the EC’s investigation into the anti-competitive issues of Oracle acquiring the European-created open source database MySQL if it takes over Sun.

Apparently she failed.

“Kroes expressed her disappointment that Oracle failed to produce, despite repeated requests, either hard evidence that there were no competition problems or a proposal for a remedy to the competition concerns identified by the commission,” EC spokesman Jonathan Todd said Wednesday according to Bloomberg. “Kroes reiterated to Catz the commission’s willingness to move quickly towards a decision but underlined that a rapid solution lies in Oracle’s hands.”

“Either they have to give us the information to prove that our competition concerns are not well founded or offer remedies to satisfy our concerns. The progress and speed on this case is entirely in the hands of Oracle,” he said.

Sun said Tuesday that it will cut 3,000 jobs over the next 12 months, blaming the decision on the EC’s delay in approving its acquisition by Oracle. Sun is supposed to be losing $100 million a month to uncertainties over its fate.

There had been whispers of a possible interim EC deadline this week. It must have depended on how negotiations between Catz and Kroes went. The EC’s formal deadline for its investigation is January 19. Oracle got US approval in August.

Microsoft, SAP and IBM are all believed to have whispered in the EC’s ear to harry Oracle and now the EC is being lobbied by an informal open source collective including MySQL’s creator to force Oracle to abandon MySQL to another company. Likely favorites include Red Hat, Google and VMware.

Published October 21, 2009 – Reads 1,236
Copyright © 2009 SYS-CON Media, Inc. — All Rights Reserved.
Syndicated stories and blog feeds, all rights reserved by the author.

More Stories By Maureen O'Gara

Maureen O'Gara the most read technology reporter for the past 20 years, is the Cloud Computing and Virtualization News Desk editor of SYS-CON Media. She is the publisher of famous "Billygrams" and the editor-in-chief of "Client/Server News" for more than a decade. One of the most respected technology reporters in the business, Maureen can be reached by email at maureen(at)sys-con.com or paperboy(at)g2news.com, and by phone at 516 759-7025.

Comments (0)

Share your thoughts on this story.

Add your comment
You must be signed in to add a comment. Sign-in | Register

In accordance with our Comment Policy, we encourage comments that are on topic, relevant and to-the-point. We will remove comments that include profanity, personal attacks, racial slurs, threats of violence, or other inappropriate material that violates our Terms and Conditions, and will block users who make repeated violations. We ask all readers to expect diversity of opinion and to treat one another with dignity and respect.