Mergers and Legal Dribble

The SEC filings on the merger are available for the public to review. The document has lots of interesting details about the merger process, conditions, etc. Reading through the document provides an interesting lesson in how mergers are designed and how things get sorted out. Items such as severance pay for the executives, beneficial stock holders, waiving of rights, etc. are all very fascinating to read through. It provides an interesting glimpse into the legal process and how companies organize such activities. I was not surprised to see my old employer BGI holding a significant amount of securities in the company. I think those who hold on to their stock and enjoy the gains from the conversion to Oracle common stock will be happy over time.

Of course some of the other interesting bits of information surround the history behind the merger itself. Some of the other parties who were interested, have been masked over. Reading through the document, it's obvious the other suiters were HP, Fujitsu, and of course IBM. I never thought that Sun would be a good fit for HP, other than to kill off the competition, considering HP's rather bloody and unfruitful past mergers. Fujitsu has done worse in the server market space outside of the Asia region, and has such a limited market in the US, it didn't make sense unless they were willing to commit to the US market. While the R&D mentality of Fujitsu would have brought something to the table with Sun, they seem to suffer the same sales and marketing issues Sun has been unable to address over the years. Ultimately, I still think the Oracle merger makes the most sense seeing how Oracle has strong ambitions, sales, and marketing power. The vision of supplying the whole solution stack makes increasingly more sense as one looks at the IT landscape. Oracle stands to change the game and go headon with IBM and HP.

Speaking of a changing landscape, Rackable is merging with SGI and taking on its name. SGI has been through some rough times over the years. I remember when I first lived in Silicon Valley seeing the huge campus for SGI and thinking they must be doing well. It's amazing how fast things can change.

And speaking of Oracle, it is buying out Virtual Iron which will give Oracle access to some interesting Xen management tools. It might also be interesting to see how Oracle will cherry-pick components from Oracle VM, Virtual Iron, and Sun's xVM. Oracle is definitely tooling up on components for its stack. Considering that Oracle will own Dynamic Systems Domains, Logical Domains, Solaris Containers, xVM Server, VirtualBox, Sun Rays, etc. through the Sun merger, they will have the widest virtualization portfolio in the industry. A solution for each situation and platform. Something to think about:)