Oracle wins more time for Sun merger

The European Commission has agreed to a request by Oracle to extend the deadline for approval of its proposed $7.4bn merger with Sun Microsystems .

The Commission, which has been holding up the deal because of antitrust concerns over Oracle’s acquisition of a Sun-owned open source database company, said that the US software group had requested the extension in order to “have the opportunity to further develop its arguments in relation to the Commission’s concerns”.

The extension will push back the latest date for a Commission decision from January 19 to January 27.

The move triggered speculation on Friday of a possible softening in the stand-off which has developed between the company and the European regulator. But Oracle said that the delay in the timetable had been made to allow more time given next week’s Thanksgiving holiday in the US.

In the absence of any discussions on concessions, the next likely step would be for Oracle to ask for an oral hearing in Brussels, although it is not obliged to do so. If a hearing does go ahead, this now seems likely to take place in mid-December.

The Sun deal, which has already secured approval from antitrust authorities in the US, had been held up because of the Commission’s worries about Oracle’s gaining control of MySQL, an open source database company which Sun acquired last year.

Critics say that Oracle would have an incentive to suppress or restructure a product which is currently given away and poses a disruptive threat to its own business.

This month, Brussels sent a formal statement of objections to Oracle, and revealed that customer complaints had been one of the driving forces behind its concerns over the deal’s impact on the database market. That prompted a fierce response from the software group, which said it would “vigorously oppose” the Commission’s position.

Oracle’s frustration appears to have been intensified by the fact that the MySQL business is only a small part of the Sun deal.

Since then, senior commission officials have indicated that they hope the situation could be resolved through appropriate remedies. Last week, for example, EU competition commissioner Neelie Kroes said: “Let’s be optimistic . . . let’s find out if they [Oracle] could take us to a point where we say: ‘Okay, we can take the result as a satisfying result for fair competition’.”