European antitrust officials are taking their sweet time in evaluating Oracle's proposed $7.4 billion acquisition of Sun Microsystems, and this piece by Brenon Daly suggests it could take a lot longer if a decision isn't forthcoming by Sept. 3.

The channel and VAR customers want to know the real impact of the Oracle takeover of Sun in terms of product offerings, pricing, programs and R&D. Oracle and Sun executives, it appears, want to talk about it, too.

But nobody wants to annoy EU officials or give them any reason to ask more questions, so the information flow about what will happen with the proposed deal has all but stopped.  One of the worst enemies to the working solution provider is a lack of information, and the EU's slow process is hurting, not helping here.

VARs need to start having conversations with their customers about next year -- in fact, many of those conversations have already begun. Will an Oracle-Sun offering be the way to go? How about an IBM offering with DB2?  At the time Oracle and Sun executives announced the deal, they also announced that they believed the acquisition would close this summer. Well, summer is almost over, and so is budget planning for 2010 in many corners of the IT market.

Is the EU hurting the market, and solution providers, by dragging its feet on approving or rejecting the Oracle-Sun deal? From this angle, it doesn't appear to be helping.