(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — The US Department of Justice has approved Oracle’s (www.oracle.com) plan to acquire Sun Microsystems (www.sun.com) for $7.4 billion, bringing the database provider one step closer to becoming a major contendor in the data center and cloud computing sectors.
The deal still needs to be approved by antitrust officials of the European Union, but the approval by the Department of Justice is a significant step in finalizing the completion of the buy.
European officials will decide by early September whether it wants to approve the purchase or launch a more thorough investigation.
The EU’s preliminary review looks to see whether the acquisition would give Oracle an unfair advantage over its competitors.
The database provider has been slowly gaining a greater hold on the marketplace. Earlier this year, the company acquired server virtualization software provider Virtual Iron.
Oracle first announced in April it had reached an agreement to purchase Sun after the company’s previous deal with IBM fell through.
Sun is one of the largest providers of computer servers, data storage systems and software, including MySQL and the Java programming platform.
At the time of the acquistion announcement, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said he wanted to combine Oracle and Sun’s technology to create new products for large data centers.
More recently, Oracle revealed that US officials were investigating how the proposed deal would impact the licensing of Java, which plays a large role in the way software sold by IBM and many other companies.
With regulators having already issued a “second request” for information from the two companies, many experts believe that the review might not be finalized before October as past instances show that the average antitrust review that includes a “second request” typically takes five months.
