Ellison – "Sun losing US$100m a month"

Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison is urging European Commission anti-trust regulators to expedite their approval of his company's acquisition of Sun, because the struggling enterprise hardware and software outfit is bleeding cash at an alarming rate.

At one of Silicon Valley's most prominent speaker's forums, the Churchill Club, Ellison is on record as saying, "Sun is losing US$100 million a month."

The massive US$7bn ($8bn) acquisition was announced in July and US regulators have already given the deal the 'thumbs up'.

But the sticking point for EC regulators appears to be what Oracle plans to do with MySQL, the former open source database outfit acquired by Sun in January 2008.

The European Commissioners have set deadline to deliver their decision on the deal of 19 January 2010 – still over three months away.

Last month Sun's losses were US$147 million, which, extrapolated three months into the future would mean close to half a billion dollars.

At the Churchill Club, Ellison is also reported to have said that Oracle is not going to spin off MySQL.

MySQL is a competitor to Oracle's own enterprise database software, so European trust busters fear that Ellison's firm will starve it of development resources and try to convert current users to Oracle database products, thus reducing competition.

The EC has given large IT vendors a rough ride recently with rulings against Intel and Microsoft on grounds of stifling competition.