Larry Ellison lands a smasher with the aquisition of Sun Microsystems. In early April IBM was in negotiations with Sun, but then left the table as Sun's board did not move forward. Now we know why. Sun most likely was already in talks back then with Oracle.
Oracle will acquire Sun common stock for $9.50 per share in cash. The transaction is valued at approximately $7.4 billion, or $5.6 billion net of Sun's cash and debt.

"The acquisition of Sun transforms the IT industry, combining best-in-class enterprise software and mission-critical computing systems," said Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. "Oracle will be the only company that can engineer an integrated system - applications to disk - where all the pieces fit and work together so customers do not have to do it themselves. Our customers benefit as their systems integration costs go down while system performance, reliability and security go up."

SAP is Oracle's biggest competitor. What OS is left to buy for them? It will be interesting how Oracle will play the enterprise market place now with Sun Solaris, Java and Sun hardware in the offering.
The Board of Directors of Sun Microsystems has unanimously approved the transaction. It is anticipated to close this summer, subject to Sun stockholder approval, certain regulatory approvals and customary closing conditions.
Via this Oracle press-release (Oracle's site is totally overloaded, guess they need some Solaris servers badly).