SiliconBeat

Would Oracle CEO Larry Ellison seriously contemplate a hostile takeover of Hewlett-Packard?

Oracle and HP escalated their feud in the courts of law and public opinion this week, after a judge made several rulings in a dispute between the two tech giants over Oracle’s decision to stop making new software for HP’s high-end servers that use Intel’s Itanium chips.

HP fired first on Monday, trumpeting the fact that a Santa Clara County judge had thrown out Oracle’s claim that HP somehow committed “fraud” when it was negotiating a settlement with former HP CEO Mark Hurd, after HP sued Hurd for going to work for Oracle.

Oracle had argued that HP obtained the settlement agreement under false pretenses because HP had not revealed that it planned to hire two of Oracle’s arch-enemies, former SAP chief Leo Apotheker and former Oracle president Ray Lane, as HP’s CEO and board chairman, respectively.

Judge James Kleinberg agreed with HP that this did not constitute fraud. He also denied Oracle’s motion to keep sealed an HP document that contains some examples of Oracle’s hardball efforts to go after HP’s customers by portraying Itanium as a product line that’s nearing its end of life.

Oracle fired back by noting that the judge also agreed with Oracle’s motion to unseal its cross-complaint against HP, which offers up some details of what Oracle contends was an HP effort to hide Intel’s intentions regarding Itanium’s future.

As an example, Oracle maintains that HP negotiated a secret agreement in 2008 to pay Intel a whopping $440 million to keep making Itanium for another three generations of chips, and an additional $250 million under a later agreement, in order to make customers think that HP’s servers had a long-term viable future. HP has not confirmed the numbers but says in court papers that it’s no secret that it agreed to contribute to the chip’s development costs.

And then there’s another point that neither company mentioned in its press releases. In his order, Judge Kleinberg also denied HP’s motion to keep secret some details of the confidential agreement that HP negotiated with Hurd after he went to work for Oracle.

That agreement contained an 18-month “standstill” provision, during which Oracle agreed not to launch a hostile takeover bid for HP, according to the judge. Kleinberg said HP apparently feared that Hurd’s intimate knowledge of HP’s business would give Oracle an unfair advantage should it attempt such a bid.

HP may have sought the standstill agreement out of an abundance of caution; a spokesman declined comment. Oracle spokeswoman Deborah Hellinger said: “We viewed HP’s insistence on a standstill as hilarious, so we gave it to them.”

The case continues in Santa Clara County Superior Court.

Brandon Bailey writes about enterprise IT and other tech subjects. Contact him at bbailey@mercurynews.com or 408-920-5022.

Cisco launched a new media advertising campaign this week, and this one doesn’t feature the quirky, indie actress Ellen Page.

Instead, the networking giant is using stories about some of its customers, in business and industry, and how they’re using Cisco technology to boost their operations.

That’s in keeping with Cisco’s s new focus, after CEO John Chambers took the company through a much-publicized reorganization last year. He pulled the plug on some ill-fated forays into consumer tech, including Cisco’s attempts to sell handheld Flip cameras and a home video-conferencing system that Page had demonstrated in some jokey television spots last year.

After acknowledging that Cisco had spread itself too thin with those efforts, among other things, Chambers is now vowing to stay focused on a shorter list of commercial tech priorities - where his company is competing with the likes of IBM, HP and Oracle.

The new ads don’t specifically mention Cisco’s internal overhaul, but the campaign “is a reflection of what we’re doing from a corporate strategy perspective,” Cisco Chief Marketing Officer Blair Christie told me last week. She added, “We’re a B to B company.”

The ads still use the “human network” catch-phrase that Cisco first began promoting in 2006. The company won’t say how much the campaign will cost, but Christie said the effort will extend to US and overseas markets and will include a sizeable online component - including “homepage takeovers” on several news sites and a LinkedIn blast to 140,000 C-level executives at companies with which Cisco hopes to do business.

The ads will appear in places where business leaders are likely to be tuning in, which means a heavy roster of televised sports events and finance-oriented sites like CNBC or the Wall Street Journal.

Last last year, in my annual prediction column, I included one far-out, wacky suggestion: Cisco Systems would buy Dell.

Though admittedly a long shot, my rationale was that Hewlett-Packard was moving into networking with its purchase of 3Com. That made it a direct competitor with Cisco. Both companies want to fight for big corporate customers, but HP has an advantage by simply being bigger. Though PCs are a dicey business, the best way for Cisco to level the playing field would be to buy Dell.

I’ve put that out of mind until the last few weeks when a series of events got me thinking that it could make sense. And now there’s a twist: Could Oracle be interested in Dell? I posted a short thought about this on Facebook yesterday after Oracle officially announced it was hiring Mark Hurd, the ousted CEO of HP. They now have a co-president with extensive experience running the largest PC maker in the world. Imagine what Hurd could do with Dell? And what delicious revenge it might be for him to take on HP in the PC business?

A year ago, I would have never thought about Oracle buying a PC company. But now that they’ve done the unthinkable and plunged headlong into hardware by buying Sun Microsystems, how much crazier would it be to see them buy Dell? In fact, yesterday, Quentin Hardy of Forbes also mused about the possibility of Oracle buying Dell:

“The last big Oracle buy was Sun Microsystems. At the time, people liked the software Oracle got from that deal, but wondered what to do with the hardware. Sure, it could sell high-performing Sun servers loaded with Oracle database and application software, but at what acquisition cost?

That deal makes more sense if Oracle adds to its hardware offerings with a comprehensive desktop and laptop offering. Dell has that, along with servers, storage, and a little network switching. More important, it has extensive corporate relations in selling to different parts of a corporate base than Oracle now touches.”

The company in the middle now is Dell. Following their loss in the 3PAR bidding, they are a wounded duck. They have a market cap of $24.4 billion, and annual revenue that fell last year to $52.9 billion.

By comparison:

• Cisco has a market cap of $117.4 billion and annual revenue of $36.1 billion.
• HP has  a market cap of $82.9 billion and annual revenue of $114.b5 billion in 2009.
• Oracle has a market cap of $120.4 billion and annual revenue of $26.8 billion.
• Microsoft has a market cap of $206.23 billion and annual revenue of $62.5 billion.
• IBM has a market cap of $158.5 billion and annual revenue of $95.8 billion.

I mention Microsoft only because of something Oracle founder Larry Ellison said a few years ago when he predicted the IT industry would consolidate. Ellison said there would be a handful of giants left at the end of the day, including Microsoft, HP, IBM, and a couple others. (I don’t remember the exact list, but I think there were five).

In any case, he wanted to make sure Oracle was one of the few giants left. And so he said Oracle needed to acquire large numbers of companies to boost its revenues and size to keep pace with companies like Microsoft. Being bigger would allow the company to spread costs such as R&D over a wider base, Ellison said.

That rationale remains as true today as it was then. Dell, first and foremost, needs to get much larger to remain competitive with HP. The fastest way to get there is acquisitions. But we’ve seen that Dell doesn’t have the resources to go toe-to-toe with HP. In fact, HP could simply starve Dell by outbidding them time and time again.

No, the best option for Dell at this point is to be acquired. But by which company?

HP probably couldn’t buy Dell without getting hung up on anti-trust issues. But if Cisco bought Dell, you would have a company with close to $90 billion in annual revenue, a number that significantly closes the gap with HP. And if Oracle bought Dell, you’d have a company with more than $60 billion in annual revenue, still only about half HP’s revenue, but closer.

Over at Silicon Valley Watcher, Tom Foremski wondered whether Oracle might buy HP:

“Yes, it is a big pill to swallow however, it would enable Larry Ellison, CEO and co-founder of Oracle to perform an end run in the massive global IT market and also leave a substantial legacy on his upcoming retirement.

If there is one thing we know about Larry Ellison is that he is motivated by big goals. Is this one too large for him?”

While I see Tom’s logic, I still find this scenario to be unlikely. Oracle has a lot of money, but it would probably need to make a hostile, all-cash bid for HP, which would be way too expensive. It would have to borrow massive amounts and take on big debt. Oracle’s stock wouldn’t be that attractive to HP shareholders, given that until the last couple months, Oracle and HP stock prices have tracked pretty close together:

However this plays out, expect lots of drama over the next few months. There’s no love lost between these companies. And with the economy stagnant, big players have clearly decided that acquisitions are the way to grow.

Larry Ellison doesn’t do a lot of interviews. But in a recent confab with the Reuters news service, the Oracle CEO offered up some typically unvarnished opinions about prior management at Sun Microsystems, the once-great computer-maker that had fallen on hard times when Oracle bought it for $7.4 billion earlier this year.

Though much of the interview covered familiar ground, it offered some interesting tidbits as Ellison described some of the inner workings of Sun’s operation – including what’s characterized as outdated manufacturing and distribution systems, inefficient sales commissions, wasteful spending and bad management at the very top levels.

“The underlying engineering teams are so good, but the direction they got was so astonishingly bad that even they couldn’t succeed,” Ellison said.

Ellison offered what appeared to be a sharp dig at Jonathan Schwartz, the pony-tailed CEO who ran Sun before the sale to Oracle and who was known for diligently blogging about the company’s strategy and products.

“Really great blogs do not take the place of great microprocessors. Great blogs do not replace great software,” Ellison said. “Lots and lots of blogs does not replace lots and lots of sales.”

Ellison also gave some hints about future acquisitions as he attempts to transform his hugely successful software company into a full-service purveyor of integrated data center systems. Short summary: Oracle may be looking to buy more hardware companies. “We’ll buy in all areas of our business,” Ellison said.

Perhaps not a surprise, but a sign of transition: James Gosling, the longtime Sun Microsystems software guru credited with developing the Java programming language, has resigned from Oracle just a few months after it acquired Sun.

In a blog post on Friday, Gosling wrote that he resigned on April 2. “As to why I left, it’s difficult to answer: Just about anything I could say that would be accurate and honest would do more harm than good.”

Gosling, 54, is a popular and respected computer scientist and, to many, an icon of the free-spirited early days of Silicon Valley. The bearded, long-haired Gosling favors t-shirts and jeans and always seemed to enjoy himself at Sun’s annual Java One conference, at least during the traditional opening rite in which he and other Sun execs used giant sling shots to loft souvenir t-shirts into the crowd.

Last year, when Sun was in talks to be acquired by IBM, Gosling told tech blogger Jason Stamper that there might be some interesting issues as IBM tried to integrate Sun’s free-wheeling culture with its own. “We’re definitely weirder than they are,” he said then.

As it turned out, the IBM deal fell through and Oracle swooped in. Many wondered if there might be a similar culture clash as Sun old-timers found themselves working for a company that’s definitely oriented to the bottom-line. Gosling didn’t say much more in his post. Instead he wrote:

“The hardest part is no longer being with all the great people I’ve had the privilege to work with over the years. I don’t know what I’m going to do next, other than take some time off before I start job hunting.”

One of the most significant trends I’ve been watching over the past decade is the dramatic drop in public companies in Silicon Valley. Naturally, that number was artificially inflated during the dot-com bubble when it reached 417 in 2000. For our purposes, Silicon Valley includes San Mateo and Santa Clara counties, and the southern half of Alameda County.

But the number of public companies has dropped for nine straight years now. Even when IPOs briefly reappeared in 2006 and 2007, they weren’t enough to overcome the net loss of public companies through acquisitions or bankruptcy.

In 2008, the number had fallen to 261. We just updated our records and the latest figure is 241.

That’s not just less than the dot-com era, that’s well below the 315 public companies the valley had in 1994 when the Mercury News started keeping track.

Here’s why I think this is a big deal.

Read the rest of this entry »

If you missed it, over the weekend we ran my look at Hewlett-Packard’s massive job cuts over the past decade: 75,505.

I have a few other stray thoughts that didn’t make it into the main story. And a few questions I want to follow up on in the coming weeks.

First, the stray thoughts.

Read the rest of this entry »

What is it with those demonic sheep?

IBM rolled out a new line of Unix server systems under the Power 7 nameplate on Monday. Analysts said IBM appears to be positioning the new machines as a counter to Oracle CEO Larry Ellison’s ambitious plans for selling high-end Sparc servers from newly acquired Sun Microsystems.

Both companies are angling to sell powerful (and expensive) systems that combine hardware and software, engineered and optimized for specific uses such as running complex financial operations. IBM’s press release lays out all their technical specs in detail.

But IBM didn’t stop there. Ellison has been trash-talking IBM for months now, and Big Blue answered back today with a feisty Facebook page (www.facebook.com/ServersForTruth) and a YouTube video that digs at Oracle on several points, including an episode last fall when an industry standards group fined Oracle $10,000 for using the group’s name in ads that didn’t meet its rules.

The video, which IBM says it produced in-house, is a fun spoof of a typically over-heated political campaign spot. Borrowing from former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina and her much-discussed ad attacking rival Senate candidate Tom Campbell,  IBM even threw in a cameo appearance by a sheep with glowing red eyes.

I may not always be the biggest fan of Oracle founder Larry Ellison when it comes to issues like executive pay. But I do appreciate his business savvy and ability to cut through the fog of marketing nonsense and get right to the heart of things. I thought about this when I read his remarks from his appearance at the Churchill Club with Ed Zander.

Ellison was asked about cloud computing, and Merc reporter Brandon Bailey wrote:

“Known for his strong ego and outspoken views, Ellison drew laughter when he ridiculed the industry trend known as “cloud computing,” saying as he has before that it’s nothing more than a faddish term for the established concept of computers linked by networks. “A cloud is water vapor,” he observed.

But what really struck me is that in his remarks this week, and other recent statements like the announcement of the configured Sun database product, that Ellison is actually going to do the unthinkable: He’s going to keep the hardware business.

This shocks me for a couple of reasons.

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Last year I wondered why Oracle CEO and founder Larry Ellison continued to receive additional stock options when he already had more than 1 billion:

“However, I do have a beef with Ellison’s compensation that should get a sympathetic ear from Oracle’s shareholders: Why is the company doling out more stock to a man who already owns 22.3 percen?”

It’s not like I expected Ellison or Oracle’ s board to listen to me. And guess what? They didn’t!

I came back from vacation today to find this nugget about Oracle’s board awarding Ellison another 7 million stock options for the fourth year in a row.   The four-page report, called “Larry Ellison Rides Again,”  comes from Graef Crystal, one of the most respected voices on executive compensation. In meticulous detail, Crystal breaks down the numbers, and in doing so, points out the absurdity of this latest award.

Perhaps there’s no more room for outrage when it comes to executive compensation, or Ellison continuing to rack up more options, but in any case, here are the highlights of Crystal’s analysis. Read the rest of this entry »