Self-made billionaire Larry Ellison has built Oracle Corp into one of the world's most powerful technology companies through a series of ambitious acquisitions.
In a recent interview with Reuters, Oracle CEO Ellison talked about competing against IBM and EMC Corp, plans for more acquisitions, how Salesforce.com is too expensive, litigation against SAP and possible succession plans at Oracle.
Q. Now that you're selling both software and hardware, what is your acquisition strategy?
A. You will see us make acquisitions in almost every area. Maybe not so much database anymore, though even around the peripheries of the database. You will see us make acquisitions in storage, networking, all sorts of low-level software management tools and applications in a great variety of industries.
Q. You didn't mention semiconductors.
A. I think you could see us buying into additional silicon for a variety of things, like security, for example. I really can't outline all of that, but you'll see us deep into silicon. I think you'll see a lot of the things that Oracle builds in software right now, you'll see finding its way down into silicon.
Q. Oracle is no longer just a software company. What is Oracle?
A. Oracle is a systems company. We're not a hardware company. We're not a software company. We are a systems company. We want to deliver compete working systems. Now, of course we are a software company. If you just want to buy our database, God bless you.
We sell system components like database and middleware and operating systems and chips and all that other jazz. We even sell tape heads. We sell tape heads to HP. So we are definitely in the system component business. Where we think we'll make our money. Where we think we're able to differentiate ourselves from IBM and everybody else is by building complete and integrated systems from silicon all the way up through the software, all prepackaged together.
You don't have to hire a systems integrator to put all these pieces together. A lot of this stuff is preintegrated, which should make it much more reliable much, more lower cost. Get it up and running much faster. That is our goal. Not to sell smaller and smaller parts, but to sell larger and larger parts to data centers.
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