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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
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 1,301

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 1,301
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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.

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