Oracle has got a penchant for
surprising pundits when they
expect none. The Redwood Shores, California-based company
was at it again when on April 20 it announced the acquisition of
embattled Sun Microsystems in a deal worth $7.4 bn. The move, no doubt, took the
Wall Street by surprise, as Oracle was nowhere on the radar, even though it
was not hidden that McNealy's yesteryear star (Sun was the darling of stock
market during the heydays of technology boom during the late 1990s) was
neck-deep in trouble and that IBM (and to some extent Cisco also) was
expectedly the main suitor. This was based on the logic that only a
hardware-hardware marriage was possible; Sun being
a hardware manufacturer, no one would have expected a pure software
maker like Oracle to take the plunge. But sidelining such concerns, Oracle
pressed ahead with a deal that, many say, would either make or mar its prospect.
Oracle's appetite for deal-making, however, is not unknown though. In the
last few years, the company has acquired some prized catch like
PeopleSoft (2005), i-flex (2005), Siebel (2006),
and BEA (2008). The ferocity with which it pursues its prey too has all the stuff
the technology industry folklores are made of. Who would forget its
protracted battle with PeopleSoft which dragged
for 18 long months? Or its daredevilry in integrating almost three mergers all at
a time (PeopleSoft-JD Edwards-Siebel)? In fact, in less than five years, since
its January 2005 acquisition of PeopleSoft, Oracle has gone on to gobble up
more than 50 companies, with the Sun being its
52nd acquisition, spending around a whopping $30 bn in the process.
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