Lawsuits Undermine Oracle Takeover by Sun

Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems isn't going to be smooth sailing after all, what with Sun shareholders filing three class action lawsuits against the business intelligence solutions company in order to block the planned $7.4 billion deal.

Even though the board members of Sun agreed to the terms of the deal at the end of last month, some influential shareholders appear to have collaborated to stop the transaction from happening.

It has been conjectured that the malcontent shareholders were among those who bought shares in Sun when they were still beyond the $20 range, which has made them dissatisfied with the present buying price of around $9.50 per share.

These shareholders submitted a 10-Q filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which reveals that their lawsuits are arguing that Sun's own executive team are accountable for "aiding and abetting a breach of fiduciary duty against the corporate defendants" and the "unfair and inadequate" price tag for the company.

Oracle takeover of Sun

If Oracle's acquisition of Sun proves successful, it should give Oracle precious assets in open source database technology, MySQL, the Java platform, and Sun's premiere Solaris operating system.

However, there are those who hypothesize that Oracle may want to abandon or consolidate any of Sun's middleware technology because they overlap with Oracle's own BEA line.

There are also uncertainties over the disparities between the two corporation's office cultures.

Tony Byrne, the founder of the analyst firm CMS Watch, contended in a personal blog post that the laid-back personnel of Sun may have a difficult time adjusting to the stricter, more professional Oracle workplace.

He also surmises that if the deal goes through, Sun customers should prepare themselves for the more forceful and insistent salespeople of Oracle.
 
Meanwhile, Sun has decided to halt talks of mergers and share price tags for the sake of consolidating its database architecture into a solitary worldwide enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. According to the filing, Sun has undergone a lot of difficulties during the entire deal, which has affected the company's continued operations.

Sun further states that the project will be delayed for the next six months in order to give them enough time to evaluate alternative solutions to the situation.