Just because Oracle
The $105 million cash spent on merger and acquisition activities this time is a tiny drop in comparison to the more than $5 billion bucket of buyout cash Oracle poured out over the past 12 months. And some of those deals are paying dividends of the sort CEO Larry Ellison likes best -- they're helping Oracle steal customers from its main rivals, SAP
President Charles Phillips said that performance-management expert Hyperion, which Oracle bought last April, was "key to getting into many, many SAP accounts" in Europe. He gloated a bit over one unnamed British megabank and a German one, where all-SAP financial management systems shuffled in some Hyperion components. "So all these accounts are becoming SAP and Oracle shops, not just SAP anymore. There's no such thing as an SAP account to us, anyway."
i-flex is a banking services provider that joined Oracle last winter, and is mainly landing deals with major banks in the Brazil, Russia, India, China (BRIC) bloc. Closer to home, Citigroup
Ellison concedes that Microsoft
Ellison's famed competitive streak is getting plenty of fuel right now. As always, we'll see within a few weeks whether SAP and IBM have any counterclaims to report. You can cherry-pick your disclosures to make anybody look like a winner. So far, Oracle's cherries look mighty tasty.
Further Foolishness:
As Foolanthropy enters its second decade, join us in working to bring financial education to the world's children. Learn more about Foolanthropy's new direction.