Global CIO: Larry Ellison's Acquisition List: Who's #1?

Here's how Jannise assesses those results: "The favorites were two of our "fairly straightforward ideas," Informatica and Teradata, each with 14% of the votes. This suggests that 28% of our voters believe Oracle will play it safe the next time around and strengthen their already formidable data warehousing and business intelligence offerings.

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"However, more than a few of you were a little bolder with your predictions, arguing that Oracle is going to make one or two "pricey buys in hot markets." With VMWare getting 143 votes and Salesforce.com getting 115, 20% of our readers feel that the Sun deal is merely the first in a series of game-changing buys for Oracle."

But the Sun acquisition, of course, changed all the rules as Ellison made it unequivocally clear to the world that he intends to turn Oracle into world's leading systems company. For those scratching their heads over why Ellison would want to wander from the higher-margin software industry to the lower-margin hardware business, Ellison has bluntly stated that he has "no interest" in hardware but that does have a huge amount of interest in the systems:

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