• San Jose Mercury News, Los Angeles Times, Tuesday, April 21, 2009 10:45 AM

Oracle's Larry Ellison, at 64, is one of the last larger-than-life figures in Silicon Valley, Scott Duke Harris reports, famous for his swagger as much as his swag. He may be the valley's ultimate competitor, known for acquiring companies along with homes, yachts, female companions and, most recently it appears, Sun Microsystems.

Oracle will pay $7.4 billion in cash for Sun, pushing the total value of all acquisitions Monday to $16 billion, Jerry Hirsch and Alex Pham reports in the L.A. Times, raising hopes that companies are cranking up their acquisition engines. Sensing that the economic slide may be bottoming out, they are jumping into deals that plug holes in their operations or expand their businesses, says Wes Walraven, the Western region mergers chief for Citigroup.

Although the bulk of Sun's revenue comes from server and storage hardware, it was Sun's software that drew Oracle. Sun owns Solaris, an operating system that powers many large corporate servers, as well as Java, a platform that runs software applications on 4.5 billion devices. Many analysts expect Oracle to jettison Sun's hardware business after the deal closes this summer. Potential buyers include Hewlett-Packard, Dell, EMC and NetApp, says James Staten, an analyst with Forrester Research.

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