Oracle Launches Exalytics Machine

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In a way, you could sort of see how the mishegas that has gone on between Oracle and Autonomy over the last few days was leading up to some larger purpose. For Oracle, that is. It’s not every day that Oracle CEO Larry Ellison deliberately provokes a very public fight with another company that results in back-and-forth press releases, leaked emails, publication of previously confidential PowerPoint slides and so on.

But apparently it all did lead up to something. For those just tuning in, here’s how it all went down.

About two weeks ago, on Oracle’s quarterly earnings conference call, Ellison was asked by an analyst about Oracle’s position in the market for analyzing and pulling useful intelligence unstructured data — transcripts of videos and contents of emails, and scores of other things that aren’t neatly arranged in databases. It’s kind of a big deal as companies grapple with the so-called “big data” problem, and the question was a natural jumping-off point to discussing Hewlett-Packard’s $11.7 billion acquisition of Autonomy. Ellison, by way of an answer, portrayed unstructured data as a feature of the existing Oracle database software, and “nothing new,” and then slammed HP for paying too much for Autonomy, the British software firm whose specialty happens to be — you guessed it — unstructured data. And, oh, by the way, Ellison said he took pass on Autonomy when it had been shopped to Oracle because he thought the price was too high.

Oracle buying Hewlett-Packard

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Amid all the recent drama that has unfolded at Hewlett-Packard — and the he-said she-said back and forth concerning Oracle and whether or not it was approached to buy Autonomybefore HP ponied up — lies a lingering meme that refuses to die: That somehow the software giant Oracle is going to make a bid for HP.

Given the recent feuds between the management teams at the two companies, Oracle’s acquisitive history and HP’s sudden weakness, it doesn’t take much for a popular narrative of Oracle buying HP to emerge. It would be a dramatic denouement to the events of the last year that have found HP and Oracle at increasingly caustic loggerheads. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison would take some kind of victory lap and mount HP on the wall like a of trophy.

The idea gained some currency with an Aug. 21 story in the New York Post (which, like this Web site, is owned by News Corp.) arguing that HP’s $11.7 billion bid for the British software firm Autonomy, having caused shareholders to knock $12 billion and change off HP’s market cap, would therefore make HP more attractive to Oracle.

The meme gained further currency with a Bloomberg News story saying that HP’s board was “concerned” that its weakened condition had left it vulnerable to Oracle.