eWEEK content and product recommendations are editorially independent. We may make money when you click on links to our partners. Learn More.
“When Alexander saw the breadth of his domain, he wept for there were no more worlds to conquer.”
Now that Larry Ellison and Oracle have launched a $6.7 billion bid for BEA Systems, is Larry on the path to a weeping scene similar to Alexander once he buys up every enterprise software company in the known world? Armed with a big pile of cash, Ellison is well on his way to being the one who not only predicted the enterprise software (and in particular the application space) was due for a big rollup, but also the agent of fulfilling the prediction by doing the purchasing.
Despite some speculation that IBM or SAP may jump into the bidding war, I don’t think so. The BEA bid is a bid for software that occupies the middleware space where IBM already has a robust stack. SAP has its hands full right now with its bid for Business Objects.
Does Ellison’s ambitions have a weepy endpoint same as Alexander’s? Yes, for Alexander the known world ended somewhere in India. For Oracle the known world stops at the where the Redmond city limits begin.