Rhymes with Cars

Now that I've had a few days to think about the Larry buying the HYSL, I'm really starting to understand why this is such a good move for ORCL.  While I still don't know what it means for me or what my future is, I get it from a shareholders perspective and want to see more like this.  My thoughts in no particular order:

1. I'm not rich.  I've only been at Hyperion for 5 months.  I wish stock brokers would stop calling me and wanting to invest my new found riches for me.  Seriously.
2. Most of our customers dig this acquisition.  Well, most of our customers that aren't SAP customers.  Those guys don't dig it too much.  For the most part, though, customers think that this makes a lot of sense and, long term, this will really be good for them.
3. While I don't think that they would say it outright, it seems like ORCL has given up with competing directly with MSFT.  It makes sense for them to focus on the major enterprise apps.  They've clearly got the market cornered there.
4. If and when I meet Larry, I have ask him about the NC.  I thought that this was a great idea and, essentially, we've gotten there, but it isn't all based on ORCL databases.  Perhaps I just dated myself.
5. This is the first acquisition I've gone through.  It is interesting.  One of the major challenges is trying to figure out how to motivate people who are 100% certain to be out of work in 45 days.  I believe that sales, for the most part, will be okay, but finance, IT, operations, etc.  They are redundant and not real keen on helping out sales guys doing a fire sale.
6. I'm amazed at how few blogs picked this up.  A quick search on IceRocket provides only 1,062 results.  Technorati has 1,316 results.   This was a $3.3 billion acquisition.   The largest technology acquisition that I can recall in sometime and it got an 1,316 blog posts?  Tim O'Reilly's investment into Wesabe got 706 blog posts.  This says to me that, despite the 55 million blogs registered with Technorati, blogs are still very much a Web 2.0 & paparazzi phenomenon in terms of content.

My initial reaction to this announcement was, truthfully, I wasn't too excited about going to work for ORCL.  I think that they are a great company, but I never envisioned myself working for a company with almost 70,000 employees.  I've always considered myself a small to mid-size guy.  I'm excited about the opportunity, though.  It seems like there are a ton of positions and a great chance to move around the organization.  No one knows what the future holds, but I'm very excited.