Following an investigation into the MySQL database owned by Sun, the European Commission has approved Oracle’s proposed acquisition of Sun Microsystems.

The investigation was to determine whether Oracle’s acquisition of the open source MySQL database would limit the database market. The investigation identified PostgreSQL as an alternative open source database. Also, since the MySQL was open source, developers could create alternate versions, or “forks” which could become viable alternatives to Oracle’s version of the code.

Neelie Kroes, European competition commissioner said, “I am now satisfied that competition and innovation will be preserved on all the markets concerned. Oracle’s acquisition of Sun has the potential to revitalize important assets and create new and innovative products.”

Now that the investigation is over, Oracle is planning to run a live webcast on 27 January, to outline their stragegy for the combined companies. They said the webcast will cover product roadmaps and how users will benefit from having hardware, operating system, database, middleware and applications engineered to work together.

Oracle acquired Sun common stock at $9.50 a share. The transaction is valued at approximately $7.4 billion.
“We expect this acquisition to be accretive to Oracle’s earnings by at least 15 cents on a non-GAAP basis in the first full year after closing. We estimate that the acquired business will contribute over $1.5 billion to Oracle’s non-GAAP operating profit in the first year, increasing to over $2 billion in the second year. This would make the Sun acquisition more profitable in per share contribution in the first year than we had planned for the acquisitions of BEA, PeopleSoft and Siebel combined,” said Oracle President Safra Catz.

“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.”

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The London Stock Exchange faces a year of IT challenges. How they deal with this will determine whether it becomes one of the world’s top five trading venues.

Xavier Rolet, CEO, knew the Stock Exchange had to change in the face of fierce competition from rival exchanges. He took over a year ago and it took little time to identify IT both as the problem and the possible answer. It was determined that its much-hyped core trading system, Tradelect, was no longer up to the job.

The LSE made acquisitions to gain the technology needed to be a world league trading venue, buying platform supplier MillenniumIT in September 2009. In December, it also agreed to take over the operations of competitor Turquoise in a share deal. In 2007, Minlan based Exchange Borasa Italiana was purchased.

Then they set about with ambitious goals to integrate their acquisitions. They plan to replace Tradelect with the MillenniumIT platform, move the Turquoise exchange to Millennium, and decommission trading platform Connober, another highly customized platform used by Turquoise.

The London Stock Exchange is also attempting to become a top European clearing firm, and is close to finalizing a deal to buy Dutch clearer EMCF.

LSE CIO David Lester realizes that in the highly competitive trading sector, technology is probably the most important competitive differentiator between exchanges. He says that IT is key to the exchange’s plans.

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Mozilla has updated its free open source Firefox browser to version 3.6 which they claim is the fasted yet in processing JavaScript.

Mozilla says their new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine brings “screaming fast” performance to Firefox 3.6, which is three times faster than Firefox 3 and 20% faster than Firefox 3.5.

There are also new features in Firefox 3.6, and additional support for the latest HATML 5 specifications, including open video and audio.

The new features include personalized browser themes called Personas and a Plugin Uploader that helps make sure computers are safe from potential security vulnerabilities by keeping plugins up-to-date.

Mozilla also claims Firefox 3.6 includes stability improvements, resulting in better performance for everyday web tasks such as email, uploading photos and social networking.

Firefox 3.6 features thousands of add-ons to customize your browser and private browsing which they say doesn’t leave a trace. It also has a feature so that if you are shut down unexpectedly, you are instantly returned to where you left off. It also includes an Awesome Bar to help you get to sites, even if you don’t remember the exact name.

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