Adding to Sun Microsystems' rather unsteady performance over the last decade - leading to its $7.4 billion likely takeover by Oracle Crop -, its third-quarter fiscal 2009 financial results were also quite dismal.

Posting its results for the quarter that ended March 29, Sun reported a disquieting $201 million loss, as against the earlier year loss figures of $34 million. The loss can be largely attributed to the recent restructuring charges undertaken by the company, as well as a 20 percent plunge in its sales.

The $2.6 billion third-quarter revenue figures also indicated a 20 percent drop from the same fiscal earlier year figures of $3.3 billion. The fall in revenue also includes the company's 17 percent drop in North American revenue during the year.

However, there was one bright streak in the results posted by Sun - that of a $178 million positive cash flow from its quarterly operations, and a 4 percent increase in billing across its software, Open Storage, Solaris-based SPARC CMT servers, and x64 servers.

Since Sun refrained from holding a conference call for discussing its third-quarter results, there is no official statement about either its outlook for the current fiscal, or its anticipated acquisition by Oracle. Nonetheless, Oracle announced last week that it had put across its acquisition deal shortly after IBM's bid for acquiring Sun went amiss!