Sun's McNealy, Schwartz Won't Be Joining New Oracle (
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Sun Microsystems co-founder and Chairman Scott McNealy, 55, the main face
and voice of Sun throughout its 28-year history, told employees Jan. 26 he is
stepping down and exiting the company he helped start up during the Reagan
administration.
McNealy told his employees and former employees in a long, rambling e-mailed
memo obtained by eWEEK that he is proud of the work his company has done and
the contributions it has made to IT in general, and that he has few regrets
about doing it "my way."
Several other Sun executives, including CEO
Jonathan Schwartz and Chief Financial Officer Michael Lehman, will not be
offered positions in the combined Oracle-Sun company, people with knowledge of
the situation told eWEEK.
Word of the changes leaked out a day before Oracle
was set to introduce its "Oracle+Sun" strategy. The moves were
not a surprise to anyone closely following the Oracle-Sun story; only the
timing of the announcement was not known.
Oracle doesn't make a practice of keeping CEOs of large companies it has
acquired. For example, the chief executives of Siebel Systems, PeopleSoft, and
BEA Systems were not kept on board to work with Oracle CEO
Larry Ellison following those transactions.
Back on June 8, in a regulatory filing with the Securities and Exchange
Commission, Sun reported that Schwartz was to receive $12 million as part of his
severance package, McNealy would get $9.53 million and Lehman $4.03 million.
These were all described as base severance packages, meaning that they did not
include other possible bonuses.
European
Commission antitrust regulators Jan. 21 officially approved the sale,
enabling Oracle to do business as a full-service IT vendor in the 27 countries
that constitute the European Union. The U.S. Department of Justice approved the
deal in August 2009.
With the assets of Sun now in-house, Oracle will be entering new IT sectors
that include data storage, processors, server hardware and networking.
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