The maker of printer ink, which is more expensive than blood, could be taken over now that its leader is counting his golden handshake somewhere hot.
The strokers of beards and people in the know have been wondering if the departure of Mark Hurd from HP could make the outfit ripe for a take over.
OK you would need shedloads of cash to take over HP, but some like Tom Foremsk thinks that it is doable.
The name that keeps popping up is Oracle which should have enough cash to do it. The reason Oracle is being named is that it would help consolidation with Oracle’s Sun arm. HP would be able to beef up its services group and its troubled middleware and software businesses.
Oracle might like the idea because in one acquisition it would be IBM’s largest and ablest competitor. It would be able to match in every business groups across the globe.
OK, there would be a huge “anti-trust” yowl from Biggish Blue, but Oracle might just be able to pull it off.
Larry Ellison is a mate of Hurd. Buying HP and letting his chum rule over at the integration would be a damn fine way of putting his money where his mouth is about Hurd's abilities.
If it happened it would be a mess. There would be shedloads of jobs that would go. However many think that consolidation is a way forward for the IT industry.
We should point out that while ERP Market Analyst Stephen Jannise thinks Oracle will buy up lots more companies, HP was not on his list however Hurd's departure puts a new spin on things.
Normally a CEO would fight to the last bullet to stop his company being taken over. With HP leaderless it is a lot easier for the likes of Oracle to out-maneuver any caretaker.
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"Interestingly enough, my colleague and I discussed Oracle last night, when he came to help me sync my 1366x768 monitor/ATi gpu to any Linux OS (didn't work), and in the course of the evening, I compared Larry to Rockefeller and his quest for vertical integration - perhaps his ultimate goal is just one Standard product."
may be coming true sooner then expected. Or was it a conspiracy?
Seriously, I think that HP might be too big to swallow for Oracle.
Why don't you Xerox me a copy,
and I'll shop it around to Lenovo.