Continuous Integration

"Larry Ellison is borderline bat-shit crazy on a good day," the analyst Rob Enderle is quoted as saying in a piece last week by Sam Gustin - a senior writer at DailyFinance, an AOL Finance & Money site.

Enderle was prompted to utter this remark by speculation that perhaps the Oracle CEO is about to embark upon the acquisition of his life: of HP.

"I think his bet is that he can damage HP enough that it drops in value and he can wander in with an offer," Enderle is quoted as having added.



So is it possible that Ellison the Conqueror, CEO of Oracle Corporation since he founded the company in 1977, truly has the $90BN HP in the crosshairs of his acquisition rifle-sight? Can a $120BN company somehow buy and absorb a $90BN one?

Well certainly he now has on board the exact right man to tackle the integration of such a purchase: none other than HP's own former CEO, Mark Hurd. And, as Gustin expresses it:

'Ellison is a man with ambitions as big as his MIG-29 fighter jet is fast, and he's got a history of stating that the info-tech industry will further consolidate in the same way the auto industry consolidated into the Big Three in the U.S.'

"When your end goal is global dominance, difficulty is a mere distraction," Gustin notes.

Enderle was quick to highlight a revenge-is-sweet angle to, to the possible scenario.

"[W]hat could be sweeter revenge for Hurd than winding up running HP again - as a part of Oracle?"

Credit for first raising the possibility of an Oracle-HP bid goes not to Enderle or Gustin, btw, but to former FT journalist Tom Forenski, who was already writing speculatively about such a scenario back in mid-August - that's to say, before Mark Hurd had even been made Co-President of Oracle.

With cloud computing now driving a sea-change in how enterprise IT datacenters are put together, one thing is certain: more consolidation is right around the corner.

Only time will tell if an Oracle bid for HP will be next. This one, as they say, will run and run.

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• Hurd Goes To Work for Oracle
• Is Oracle About to Hire Ex-HP CEO?
• HP & IBM Vie over Next Billion-Dollar Acquisition: Radware