U.S. government seeks more data on Oracle-Sun deal

By Jim Finkle and Diane Bartz

BOSTON/WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. antitrust regulators have asked for more information on Oracle Corp's (ORCL.O) plan to buy Sun Microsystems Inc (JAVA.O) and need a little more time to review the $7 billion deal, an attorney for Oracle said.

This means that Oracle has failed to get approval for the deal as quickly as some had hoped, as Friday had marked the expiration of an initial 30-day review period in which antitrust officials could have approved the deal quickly by letting the deadline pass without asking any questions.

The Department of Justice asked both companies for information related to the licensing of Sun's Java software language, said Daniel Wall, a partner with Latham & Watkins and an attorney for Oracle.

The request was related to a narrow, technical matter, according to Wall, who said he expected the DOJ to soon approve the deal and allow Oracle to complete the acquisition during its current fiscal quarter, which ends on August 31.

"We've had a very good dialogue with the Department of Justice and we were almost able to resolve everything before the Second Request deadline. All that's left is one narrow issue about the way rights to Java are licensed that is never going to get in the way of the deal," Wall said in an interview. "I fully expect that the investigation will end soon and not delay the closing of the deal this summer."

Investors have been waiting to see if regulators would raise any serious objections to Oracle, the world's No. 3 software maker, buying Sun, the No. 2 maker of Unix servers used in corporate data centers.

Cowen & Co analyst Peter Goldmacher said he was surprised that the deal did not win early clearance.

"Maybe the regulators are bored. I don't think there is any risk of this thing not getting approved. Maybe the regulators are bored," he said.

A spokeswoman for the DOJ declined to comment.

Oracle agreed to buy Sun in April after the collapse of weeks of talks between the struggling hardware and software maker and International Business Machines Corp (IBM.N).

The deal gives Oracle's outspoken billionaire CEO, Larry Ellison, control of Sun's Java software, one of the world's most widely used computer languages, and the Solaris operating system for Unix servers.

Ellison has said he wants to build and sell Sun computers preloaded with Oracle software and also tweak Java software so that it is easier to use on smartphones and netbook computers.

Regulators do not have a problem with Oracle acquiring Sun's MySQL database or its middleware software, Wall said. Their concern about Java is very narrow, he added.

"It involves licensing issues and things that are just very technical by their very nature. That just slowed the discussion down," Wall said.

IBM, one of Oracle's major competitors, uses Java in some of its top-selling software products under an arrangement it made several years ago with Sun.