Sun Micro losing $100 Million a month: Oracle Chief

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Bangalore: Announcing that Sun Microsystems is losing $100 million a month, Oracle Chief Executive Larry Ellison expressed his frustration over an extended European anti-trust review that delayed his plans to acquire the struggling computer-maker. On Monday evening during a dinner at one of Silicon Valley's most prominent speaker's forums, the Churchill Club, Ellison said, "The longer this review takes, the more money Sun is going to lose. We want to get this done to save as many jobs as we can." Analysts have predicted that Oracle will have to make major cuts in Sun's workforce and spending to achieve its goal of increasing operating profit from Sun's business. Some analysts have said that an extended delay could lead Oracle to cut more deeply, since uncertainty over Sun's future may be driving more customers to rivals such as Hewlett-Packard and IBM. In his interview to Former Sun President Ed Zander, Ellison vowed that he would not sell off Sun's open-source database program, known as MySQL. Oracle's own database program doesn't compete with MySQL. Oracle sells its database software to big corporations and government organizations that need to crunch massive amounts of data. MySQL is widely used as an open-source program and often downloaded for free by programmers, who use it for web-based functions and less 'mission-critical' operations. The European Commission is conducting an in-depth probe into whether the competition would be stifled by the combination of Oracle's database and Sun's MySQL database, which is widely used to run popular websites. Ellison expects the deal to be cleared by European regulators as it was in the U.S. without any conditions. European regulators have until January 19, 2010, the deadline set by the commission, the competition watchdog of the 27-country European Union. This deadline may put Oracle months behind its original plan for closing the deal by the end of August.