The statement summarizes the position of the EU finally clearing the merger between Oracle and Sun Microsystems after Oracle addressed competition concerns about its acquisition of the open-source database MySQL, which Sun bought in 2008. Oracle Chief Executive Officer Larry Ellison said in September that the delay was creating uncertainty, causing Sun to lose $100 million a month as companies held off purchases or defected to competitors.

The European antitrust commission had threatened to block the deal because of concerns that Oracle might be able to eliminate MySQL. While the investigation concluded that the database market is highly concentrated with Oracle, Microsoft and IBM with a combined market share of 85 percent, it said that open source alternatives such as PostgreSQL exist. The commission accepted Oracle's public promise to continue the MySQL database software development.

Oracle expects unconditional approval from China and Russia and intends to close the transaction shortly, according to a statement released today.

IBM’s offering is called "Smart Analytics Cloud," AT&T’s Synaptic Compute as a Service (CaaS) is the third in a series of AT&T Synaptic offerings, following the already launched hosting and storage services. AT&T says that CaaS will become commercially available before the end of 2009 in the U.S. and be rolled out globally in the future. IBM also plans to roll out its “Smart Analytics Cloud” globally.

AT&T has teamed up with VMware Inc. for virtualization technology and Sun Microsystems Inc. The carrier sees many uses for its cloud-based computing from disaster recovery, to support of seasonal projects, to the ability to launch applications quickly without having to invest capital.

"It's a service that has a differing kind of acquisition model and consumption model," says Roman Pacewicz, senior vice president of Strategy and Application Services at AT&T Business Solutions. "It's very much intended to be like our storage as a service, where you can buy it online, and the billing is based on what you use. It has the flexibility that a lot of our clients want."

AT&T intends to differentiate its offering from those of IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM) and other computing-centric companies by offering access to the AT&T Synaptic CaaS via its virtual private network (VPN), and enable its enterprise customers to unify and centrally manage their distributed network resources and applications. The combination of VMware’s technology will enable clients to create hybrid clouds that can be used seamlessly, because the resources will look like just another instance on the client VPN, says Roman. Enterprises will be able to move applications or data around to fit their changing needs or demands, turning cloud computing up or down as needed.

While we are still in the early days of cloud computing that will see sales of about $3.4 billion in 2009, competition in the heating up. Microsoft and Google just announced price cuts for certain cloud-based applications and Amazon is expanding into Asia.

The campaign states that Oracle intends to spent more money developing SPARC hardware and Solaris than Sun does now, have more than twice as many hardware specialists selling and servicing SPARC/Solaris systems, and dramatically improve Sun’s hardware performance by tightly integrating Oracle software.

The campaign clearly tries to stop Sun’s bleeding and counter fear-campaigns initiated by IBM and HP that target potential Sun hardware customers. “We’re in it to win it. IBM, we’re looking forward to competing with you in the hardware business,” so Oracle co-founder and CEO Larry Ellison in the ad-campaign.

Interestingly, there is no mentioning of MySQL, the open source database that prompted an EU regulatory investigation, no word about Java, GlassFish, OpenOffice, Netbeans, or sales support for these products.

Why would Oracle pledge to spend more money developing Sun SPARC and Solaris software products? Because Oracle needs these products to compete with IBM in particular! As far as MySQL and the rest of the open source software goes, Oracle already has competitive products in its existing portfolio. Clearly, saying nothing does say a lot in this case.

Furthermore, we have heard rumors that one of the issues the European Commission may have is related to MySQL. The rumors say that the anti-trust regulators feel that Oracle would gain too much power if it is allowed to combines the market share the two databases have. What’s the solution? Hopefully not a sale of MySQL to Microsoft!

Oracle did not disclose any financial terms of the transaction. GoldenGate Software offers software that helps businesses analyze large quantities of information in databases and programs that can, for example, help banks detect fraudulent activities.

Over the past 5 years, Oracle has spent more than $34 billion buying about three dozen companies, the bulk of them privately held companies.

The software giant is also getting ready to close its $7.4 billion acquisition of hardware maker Sun Microsystems, pending antitrust approval by regulators in the United States and Europe.