IBM-Sun Bottom Line: McNealy Had Oracle on Deck

Published: Apr 24, 2009
Updated: Feb 2, 2021
1 minute read
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The Station has been asked a few times from readers about what really went on behind the scenes during the IBM-Sun Microsystems acquisition talks in March and early April. Since we’re not on Sun’s board of directors, nor work at the Wilson Sonsini & Goodrich law firm that was doing the due diligence for IBM, we really do not know for certain. We kept in contact with reliable sources, and they were baffled along with everybody else when Oracle came out of the shadows to make the $7.4 billion deal on April 20.

However, for those of you who want some kind of closure on this deal, here it is, in the most succinct fashion we can provide. It’s not that complicated: Scott McNealy knew he had the extra $900 million from Larry Ellison and didn’t tell anybody but the board of directors. When IBM balked and offered $6.5 billion, he said no deal, the board backed him up, and Oracle nailed it down two weeks later.

Time to move on.

Chris Preimesberger

Chris J. Preimesberger is Editor Emeritus of eWEEK. In his 16 years and more than 5,000 articles at eWEEK, he distinguished himself in reporting and analysis of the business use of new-gen IT in a variety of sectors, including cloud computing, data center systems, storage, edge systems, security and others. In February 2017 and September 2018, Chris was named among the 250 most influential business journalists in the world (https://richtopia.com/inspirational-people/top-250-business-journalists/) by Richtopia, a UK research firm that used analytics to compile the ranking. He has won several national and regional awards for his work, including a 2011 Folio Award for a profile (https://www.eweek.com/cloud/marc-benioff-trend-seer-and-business-socialist/) of Salesforce founder/CEO Marc Benioff--the only time he has entered the competition. Previously, Chris was a founding editor of both IT Manager's Journal and DevX.com and was managing editor of Software Development magazine. He has been a stringer for the Associated Press since 1983 and resides in Silicon Valley.

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