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Comment by mcormier | Hacker News Reader

"The transaction is valued at approximately $7.4 billion". The value of the failed IBM deal was $7 billion.

Yup. They rejected IBM's offer for 9.40 a share, but are accepting this one for 9.50 a share. After their stock plummeted for rejecting IBM, I suspect they didn't want to pull another Yahoo.

This is all interesting, but I think IBM may regret not getting this deal done. It seems "owning" Java gives Oracle some leverage over IBM as so much of their services business hinges on Java. The possibility of turn key solution stacks with hardware/Solaris/Oracle/business apps might give Oracle a chance to compete in IBM's markets, too, or at least reduce demand for IBM services. If you can get all that installed and supported from one vendor, you might need fewer service agreements from third party vendors like IBM.

Unfortunately that takes companies back to the old days of being a hostage to their vendors.

IBM lowered it's offer after discovering a few things about Sun it didn't like. Sun was OK with the price, but added some legal causes IBM didn't like - so IBM walked away.

can you elaborate, please?

Then there were also the regulatory issues that the IBM+Sun deal would have faced. IBM and Sun are the main competitors in a few areas (large scale tape storage, for example). This would have made the deal more expensive for IBM than just the $7 billion price tag.

Oracle and Sun have very few overlapping markets (I can't think of any off hand, aside from the Oracle Red Hat clone and Solaris). As such, this deal will be much smoother for both parties.

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