Costly delays to European Commission approval of Oracle's
proposed$7.4bn acquisitionof Sun Microsystems look set to
continue.
Oracle CEO Larry Ellison has claimed that Sun is
losing $100m a month while Oracle waits for approval of the
deal and end-users are still
mired in uncertainty around the future of Sun's products.
Sun has also blamed the delay as the reason the company was
forced to announce a further
3,000 job cuts last month.
But European competition regulators are said to be close to
issuing an official statement of objections in a first step to
blocking the deal, according to sources cited by the
Financial Times.
The move is thought to be likely because Oracle has refused to
offer any concessions to meet concerns over the company's
acquisition of Sun's open source MySQL database software.
European competition commissioner Neelie Kroes is concerned
MySQL users will lose out if it becomes a serious competitor to
Oracle's core database business in the longer term.
EC officials have complained that despite repeated requests,
Oracle has neither provided evidence that the deal will not cause
competition problems, nor proposed any remedies.
If the EC does not back down, Oracle will be forced to offer
concessions or face a legal battle to save the deal, which will
cause further damaging delays for Sun.
Sun's business has already suffered because of IT budget cuts
due to the recession and according to analysts, prolonged delays to
the deal could jeopardise its survival.