I sat down with Scott McNealy today after he spoke on a panel here at TUCON, the Tibco annual conference here in Las Vegas.
McNealy covers a lot of topics. He discussed his new startup WayIn that provides a corporate social media experience. He jokingly says Larry (Ellison) never calls, referring to Oracle, which acquired Sun Microsystems, the company he co-founded. → Read More
When I first started using Linux, way back in the last century, one of the biggest challenges was the lack of a decent productivity suite of the sort to which every Windows user is accustomed. The only real option was StarOffice, which worked but was unbearably slow to load and cumbersome to use. Sun Microsystems bought StarDivision, the makers of StarOffice, in 1999 and released the source code… → Read More
If you are reading TechCrunch you probably already realize this fact: Flavor-of-the-month consumer Internet companies have a way of hogging the spotlight. If you didn’t, we conveniently published some evidence of it yesterday.
But that reality predates us by at least a decade. In 1999 when the world talked about Silicon Valley, they usually meant sexy dot coms. In 2005 when people were writing… → Read More
When you’re on your way out of a job, there’s a lot of fun ways to exit. Some choose to take all the staplers in the office, some show up to the last day in shorts, some pull a Jerry Maguire. And some tweet out a haiku.
That’s exactly what Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz did tonight. Here’s his tweet:
Today’s my last day at Sun. I’ll miss it. Seems only fitting to end on a #haiku. → Read More
It’s official: the European Commission has granted regulatory approval for Oracle to acquire Sun Microsystems for approximately $7.4 billion, without further conditions. In a statement released moments ago, Oracle says it expects unconditional approval from China and Russia as well and intends to close the transaction shortly.
Oracle will host an all-day live event for customers, partners, press… → Read More
We track a lot of acquisitions on CrunchBase. At the beginning of 2009, acquisitions were at a standstill. But as the economy begrudgingly roused itself from recession, the deal flow started to pick up in the summer, and then rebounded more in the third quarter. There are still a couple weeks left in the year, and a lot can still happen, such as Google buying Yelp for more than $500… → Read More
Sun Microsystems sure had some very nice things to say about the zembly project when it was introduced a couple of years ago:
We like to say that zembly is the development environment for Sun’s bold vision—an application development environment that not only targets the web as its native platform, but uses cutting-edge web innovations such as web services, social networking, and Web 2.0, to… → Read More
Mårten Gustaf Mickos, former CEO of MySQL, is Benchmark Capital‘s newest Entrepreneur In Residence (EIR).
Mickos served as chief executive officer for the open source database company from January 2001 to February 2008, when Sun Microsystems acquired MySQL for $1 billion. Benchmark was a relatively early investor in the company; they participated in the $20 million Series B round together with… → Read More
In venture capital, Vinod Khosla likes to go his own way, which is why he’s been so successful. He was the founding CEO of Sun Microsystems, and then moved to venture capital and became a star partner at Kleiner Perkins, where he backed Juniper Networks, Cerent (sold to Cisco for $7 billion) and NexGen (sold to AMD and formed the basis for its challenge to Intel). About five years ago, after… → Read More
Gotta love this advertisement from Oracle, directed at current Sun Microsystems customers (and now rival IBM), stating its intentions with SPARC and Solaris before the monster acquisition is even a done deal. It’s a full-page ad that appeared in the European edition of the Wall Street Journal today, and you can find it online on the Oracle website as well.
However, as Matt Asay noted earlier, no… → Read More
Sun Microsystems has debuted its own version of Apple’s App store: The Java Store. The early version of the site features a storefront of Java applications, including social software applications and games. Sun said that they are hoping to create a marketplace to connect developers to the nearly 800 million desktop Java users worldwide. Sun also announced the Java Warehouse, a platform where… → Read More
Larry Ellison has always wanted to be the Steve Jobs of the enterprise. With this morning’s announcement that Oracle will buy Sun Microsystems for $7.4 billion, he took a big step towards making Oracle more of a soup-to-nuts provider of enterprise technology. With Sun, he will now be able to build and package together everything from chips and servers to operating systems, Java middleware… → Read More
Oracle Corporation is to buy Sun Microsystems for $9.50 a share in a deal valued at approximately $7.4 billion, just a few weeks after a deal by IBM to buy Sun fell apart. It looks like Oracle will pay a premium of $2.81 a share, or 42%, over Sun Micro’s closing price of $6.69 a share on Friday.
Oracle said the deal is valued at $5.6 billion excluding cash and debt. Oracle is calling Sun’s Java… → Read More
McKinsey & Company released a report, “Clearing the Air on Cloud Computing,” today that claims that large corporations could lose money through the adoption of cloud computing. The report paints cloud computing as over-hyped and maintains that cloud computing services like Amazon Web Services (AWS) overcharge large companies for a service the companies could do better on their own. The study… → Read More
Looks like Sun Microsystems is open to renewing acquisition talks with International Business Machines (IBM) if the latter makes a stronger commitment to actually closing the deal, according to Bloomberg sources.
Earlier this month, discussions over a potential takeover broke down when IBM withdrew its earlier $7 billion bid to buy Sun.
Discussions have stalled, still according to the sources… → Read More
The consolidation in enterprise technology is upon us. Once mighty Sun Microsystems is now reportedly; in talks to be acquired by IBM for a mere $6.5 billion. That is two quarters of revenues for Sun. If you factor in the $2.6 billion in cash and short term investments on Sun’s balance sheet, the true offer is closer to $4 billion. Sun’s shares jumped this morning 65 percent. → Read More
Jonathan Schwartz has embarked on a series of blog posts to explain Sun Microsystems’ business and strategy in light of the downturn. The first post sets up a series of 3 or 4 posts describing different areas of Sun’s market opportunity – storage, networking, Solaris and MySQL OEMs, and the cloud computing initiative to be announced in two weeks. This just may be another in a… → Read More
Sun Microsystems is elevating its presence in the cloud with the acquisition of Belgium-based Q-layer, which is in the business of automation of cloud computing deployments. Q-layer will become part of Sun’s cloud computing unit.
The official statement doesn’t provide much more details, and the terms of the agreement remain undisclosed ‘as the transaction is not material to Sun’. → Read More
Never mind that Sun Microsystems just announced a $1.7 billion loss for its most recent quarter (mostly due to write downs of pricey acquisitions like the $4.1 billion it spent on StorageTek). Never mind that its market cap is only $4 billion, despite having three times as much annual revenues and $2 billion in cash. Never mind that… → Read More
Earlier today at Sun Microsystem’s press conference, Neil Young announced he would be releasing his entire archive of tunes onto Blu-ray. They’ll be released in chronological order and the first 10-disc set will be available in the fall from Reprise/WB Records. Extras like unreleased tracks, hadnwritten manuscripts, videos and other junk will be included on top of the audio tracks. → Read More
The interface between the CPU and the motherboard is a good place for electricity and heat leakage, and it’s also a computation bottleneck. In the interest of faster, better supercomputers (probably to better calculate oil revenues), the Pentagon has granted Sun Microsystems a $44 million contract to investigate an alternative to the physical connections which seem to be holding out systems… → Read More
Breaking news, folks. Sun Microsystems, creators of hit products like Java and the Java Runtime Engine and Java 2, have acquired all the assets and intellectual property of SavaJe, which is some startup that made a Java-based OS for cellphones. The company is now out of business, hence why Sun was actually able to afford a purchase since, last I checked, Sun isn’t exactly rolling in cash. No… → Read More
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