Following Sun Microsystems’ decline of around $7 billion from IBM, the company has accepted an acquisition offer of $7.4 billion from Oracle.

The deal was announced today between Sun and Oracle that Sun will be purchased at a premium price of $9.50 per share in cash, valuing Sun Microsystems at a grand total of $7.4 billion. It was speculated that IBM also offered Sun $9.50 per share a few weeks ago.

Safra Catz, the president of Oracle said the following in a statement regarding the takeover:

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.

The Sun-Oracle deal was unanimously agreed on by the Sun board, which means that Sun Microsystems is a lot more comfortable with the terms and agreements offered by Oracle. You may recall that the licensing agreements presented by IBM in their acquisition offer resulted in the deal falling apart at the last minute.

Oracle is planning to monetize Sun as much as possible in a bid to turn around the $209 million quarterly loss and 11% year over year drop in profits Sun has been suffering from. The acquisition boosted Sun’s shares by 35% to $9.07 per share.

With the Sun acquisition, Oracle has also managed to get its hands on both MySQL and Java in one move – something I’m sure their very pleased about. In 2007 Oracle reportedly offered Sun $850 million for MySQL, which Sun ultimately turned down. What’s worrying users is Oracle’s intent to make money from MySQL, which has been freely available (and has gained incredible popularity) as a web database, which powers the website you’re reading right now.