CEO Larry Ellison has seen Oracle's future and its name is cloud.

That's the message he gave yesterday at a keynote speech in San Francisco in an event to promote Oracle's human resources cloud.

With that, he declared that his biggest competitor in the hardware market "used to be IBM, now I think it's Amazon," he said on stage. As PC World's James Niccolai reports, he also said:

“Our competitors are this whole new generation of cloud companies. We’re focused on the infrastructure companies like Amazon and the SaaS companies like Salesforce ...

“We just swapped a bunch of big guys—IBM and SAP—for a bunch of other guys; small but agile."

The focus on the cloud is understandable. All the giant enterprise IT companies are doing the same – HP, Dell, Cisco, VMware, etc. – because cloud promises to be a huge, fresh area of growth as enterprises buy more of their IT needs as a monthly service delivered over the Internet instead of buying software and hardware and building it all in-house themselves.

Enterprise spending on the type of cloud computing that Amazon offers is currently growing by 36% a year. This will be a $20 billion market by the end of 2016, the 451 Group Reports.

Oracle won't shake IBM off its tail that easily. IBM has also vowed to grab the cloud computing market away from Amazon and is gunning to turn cloud computing into a $7 billion business for itself by the end of 2015.

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Larry Ellison, the billionaire co-founder and CEO of Oracle, has a big decision to make.

Where will the next America's Cup sailing race be held?

As the winner of last year's race, through one of the most exciting comebacks in the race's 162-year history, he gets to choose such things.

Last year's race was held in the San Francisco Bay not far from Oracle's headquarters in Redwood City, Calif. Ellison even scheduled Oracle's annual customer conference to take place in San Francisco at the same time as the America's Cup finals. It's a huge 60,000-attendee trade show.

But there's a problem. The city of San Francisco's taxpayers spent $20.7 million to host the race, San Francisco Chronicle's John Coté reports, not including more than $180 million in already planned improvements near the waterfront. And the city wound up $5.5 million in the red.

The event drew 700,000 people to the city over the course of three months of racing. They spent some $364 million, according to report released by the Bay Area Council Economic Institute.

Unfortunately, that was less than the $902 million projected months before the race, and far less than $1.4 billion figured originally bandied about in 2010, Coté reports.

So, San Francisco's Mayor Ed Lee didn't offer the same deal to host the next race as the city offered for the last one.

And Ellison's race team has responded by hinting that he might move the Cup to another locale, like San Diego or Hawaii, near the Hawaiian island that Ellison owns, Lanai, the AP reports.

Meanwhile, some Bay Area bloggers wonder why the city's taxpayers need to pay for this race at all. As SFist.com's Jay Barmann writes:"Larry can afford to underwrite the whole thing, and he probably should."

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Larry Ellison has huge, impressive plans for the Hawaiian island of Lanai, which he bought in 2012.

It will become "a laboratory for building the next generation two-way power grid, which will be a mix of photo-tech (solar), with a little bit of wind with a backup of liquefied natural gas," he told attendees at an event in Las Vegas Thursday evening.

The island is a "special case" that can be used "to demonstrate that green energy can be economical," he explained.

Ellison is CEO of Oracle and the event was held to talk about the company's HR cloud software. But in the Q&A session, he invited the audience to ask him "anything," and that was a part of the evening that he clearly relished.

An Oracle employee and Hawaiian native stood up and asked about his long-term plans for Lanai. Since buying the island, Ellison, though his company Lanai Resorts LLC, has also bought two Lanai airlines, refurbished the hotels and invested in everything from wind farms to local businesses.

"I was just looking at the Lanai five-year budget and wow, it's expensive," Ellison joked. He's one of the world's richest men, worth $41 billion, Forbes estimates.

But his true motive has less to do with running a profitable resort than saving the planet.

Ellison says that North America is not running out of fossil fuels, especially a "transitional energy called liquefied natural gas."

In the past five years, North America has found 100 years worth of natural gas, he says, and we're sure to find more. In order to compete, the green energy industry needs someone to show that it can be just as affordable as traditional energy.

He explained his plan in detail:

We think we can demonstrate that green energy can be economical. Right now green energy is considerably more expensive than conventional fossil fuels.  The island of Lanai is small enough, it can serve.

One of the great things about Lanai is that the weather is always fabulous. Always 82 degrees and sunny. The problem is that, like California now, Lanai needs more water. It's in the rain shadow of Maui ...

We're going to use our solar power, our wind power grid to convert sea water to fresh water ... desalination. We think we can do that in a very effective way and use that fresh water to bring back commercial agriculture.

Lanai at one time grew 98% of the world's pineapples. But the world's pineapples are now grown in two places, Costa Rica and Panama, because no one wants to spend $45 for a pineapple from the United States.

We're using computers to distribute the water through drip irrigation. There's sensors in the drip irrigation heads so you know when to turn the head on and off. If part of the field is in shadow, you put less water on that part of the field. If part of the field has higher acidic content, you fertilize that part of the field differently. ...

We think this is what agriculture is going to look like 20-30 years from now. We're trying to model all of that and do it in a way where it can be very cost effective. ...

We're empowering the locals to start their own businesses, [whether that's] in agriculture or a juice bar in Lanai City. We're providing them with the appropriate mentoring and help.

If they are growing all these wonderful organic crops, we'll figure out how to get them to market.

We can fly the products from Lanai to Honolulu and then ship them to Japan. We have an airline that takes people around during the day and an airline that takes produce around in the evening. Fresh produce picked on Thursday can show up in a Japanese or Chinese restaurant on Friday.

We're also improving the schools and free public facilities for the people of Lanai. There are 3,200 people that live on the island. We've done a bunch of things in terms of building community pools, basketball courts and for the first time Lanai has a football field where the high school can have home games.

We think if we do a good job of taking care of the locals, the locals will do a good job of taking care of our visitors.

SEE ALSO: How 15 Tech Tycoons Spend Their Fortunes

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Last week, an enterprise company called Rimini Street filed for a $60 million IPO. 

This week, it's doing damage control thanks to an ongoing lawsuit with Oracle in which Oracle alleges that Rimini illegally installed Oracle software.

Rimini Street offers a service that helps businesses troubleshoot and fix problems when software glitches occur.  It's called "support" and it's like an extended warranty of sorts.

Normally, enterprises buy this kind of service from the software vendor directly. It's one of the most lucrative things software companies sell.

For instance, "software support margins during fiscal 2013 were 88% and accounted for 74% of our total margins over the same period," Oracle said in its last annual report. 

But instead of buying that support from Oracle, companies can buy it from Rimini at about half the cost, Rimini promises. Rimini Street offers the same for SAP software.

In 2010, Oracle sued Rimini, claiming, among other things, that Rimini didn't have the right to host Oracle software on behalf of Oracle's customers. The two have been battling it out in court ever since. The suit involves four specific customers.

In the midst of this, on Wednesday, Rimini filed for its IPO. On Thursday, the court issued a partial ruling and on Monday, and Oracle issued a press release proclaiming victory, "Court Rules That Rimini Street Infringed Oracle Copyrights."

While it's true that Oracle won part of the case, the court actually split its decision, finding in favor of Oracle for two customers, in favor of Rimini for the other two, and opting to send other legal questions to a jury trial.

Yet, this partial win still hurts Rimini. It fuels the idea that Oracle can sue it out of business. In fact, in Rimini's SEC documents, there's a long discussion of its cantankerous history with Oracle. It warns:

Oracle has a history of litigation against companies offering alternative support programs for Oracle products, and Oracle could pursue additional litigation with us. Such additional litigation could be costly, distract our management team and reduce client interest and sales revenues.

So, after Oracle's press release, Rimini sent a letter to all of its its customers telling them not to freak out. It sent that memo to Business Insider too. Here is part of it:

This case is NOT about the legality of independent enterprise software support. Oracle agrees that it is legal for third parties to offer independent enterprise software support to Oracle licensees, and Oracle licensees have a legal right to purchase Rimini Street support services instead of Oracle annual support services. Competitive motivations aside, this case is primarily about the specific processes Rimini Street used to support a portion of its clients.

Industry analyst Ray Wang offers a detailed analysis on the court rulings. The upshot is enterprise customers who want to hire Rimini need to sign carefully worded contracts. This litigation is still a dark cloud over Rimini Street's business, particularly as it looks to go public.

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Oracle has indeed made another acquisition: marketing tech startup BlueKai.

UPDATED: The company did not announce terms for the deal but a source tells us the purchase price was around $400 million.

BlueKai offers a cloud service that allows marketeers to understand who people are as they surf the web. That lets them find the right people to send their ads and offers to. BlueKai is one of the most established players in this field, known as a "data management platform."

Recently, BlueKai has been working on doing the same with smartphones, allowing marketeers to know that the person who visited a website with an iPhone is the same person who visited with a Mac. That's actually a tough technical problem to solve.

BlueKai has raised about $42 million in venture funds with its its biggest, $21 million round raised in 2010, according to Crunchbase.

It had $64 million in revenue in 2013, according to Forbes.

This deal adds to Oracle's growing arsenal of acquired companies that sell technology to chief marketing officers. Marketing tech is shaping up to be the next big trend in enterprise tech spending and Oracle CEO Larry Ellison wants to dominate it. Companies spend nearly $4 trillion a year on technology, mostly through their IT departments. But market researchers predict that by 2017, the CMO will have tech budgets as big or bigger than the chief information officer.

Oracle and rival Salesforce.com have been in a battle to own this new area.

Here's the press release announcing the deal this morning:

Oracle today announced that it has signed an agreement to acquire BlueKai, the industry’s leading cloud-based big data platform that enables companies to personalize online, offline and mobile marketing campaigns with richer and more actionable information about targeted audiences.

The BlueKai solution includes its Data Management Platform, which centrally organizes a company’s customer and audience data in the cloud to help implement personalized marketing campaigns across all channels and deliver better results and higher marketing ROI. BlueKai also runs the world’s largest third party data marketplace to augment a company’s proprietary customer data with actionable information on more than 700 million profiles.

BlueKai will be integrated with both Responsys for B2C marketing automation and Eloqua for B2B marketing automation in order to deliver orchestrated and personalized customer interactions across all marketing activities and channels.

BlueKai combined with Oracle’s Marketing and Social solutions provide customers with the ability to build the richest user profiles combining information from first party and third party sources including media, advertising, social, and mobile sources.

The combination will also allow both B2B and B2C organizations to build unmatched personalized cross-channel campaigns and customer interactions across e-mail, web, social, mobile, advertising and syndicated content channels.

The Oracle Marketing Cloud is an integral part of the Oracle Customer Experience Cloud which includes commerce, sales, service, social and marketing. Together, the Oracle Customer Experience Cloud enables a seamless and integrated exceptional customer experience from the first touch point through the entire customer lifecycle.

“Modern marketers require new ways of acquiring, centralizing, interpreting, and activating customer data across marketing channels so that they can enhance the customer experience and maximize the return on their marketing spend,” said Steve Miranda, Executive Vice President, Applications Development, Oracle. “The addition of BlueKai to the Oracle Marketing Cloud enables marketers to act on data across both known customers and new audiences and precisely target customers with a personalized message across all channels.”

“As a leader in marketing data management, BlueKai’s innovative products convert fragmented and disparate marketing data into high-performance results for companies,” said Omar Tawakol, CEO, BlueKai. “We are thrilled to join Oracle and extend Oracle’s Customer Experience portfolio to include the industry’s most effective big data cloud platform for marketers.”

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For months Oracle has been publically flogged for Oregon's poorly functioning Affordable Care Act website.

And now, long after the state stopped making payments to the company, Oracle may be ramping down its efforts to fix the website, even though it still won't let individuals sign up for health care, reports The Oregonian's Nick Budnick.

Over the past week, Oracle has yanked about 100 employees off the Cover Oregon project, sources told Budnick. That would leave about 65 people still working on it.

Sources told Budnick that the remaining Oracle employees appear to be working on maintenance, and not on finishing the site.

After the site missed its Oct. 1 launch date, Oracle executives promised to infuse the project with its best programmers and agreed to fix the most serious bugs for free. By December, Oracle had bulked up the effort from 40 people to 176, "each of them billing between $177 and $374 per hour," Budnick reported.

The site was supposed to cost $43 million and be completed by Feb. 15, 2013. Oracle delivered a website in May, 2013, that wasn't operational.

Oracle has also charged the state more than $90 million over the last two years, and Cover Oregon has refused to pay invoices since September, Budnick reported.

The state had been enrolling people into health care programs by using paper forms. Recently, agents began using a password-protected beta website and has enrolled more than 700 people that way, Budnick reports.

But the site still doesn't let citizens hop on the web and sign up for health care on their own.

Oracle has been taking heat for months. In December, Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley went on television and blasted the company during an interview with NBC's Chuck Todd. Merkley said the site was "in complete dysfunction."

It's actually extremely common for huge IT projects have problems, even in the private market. In 2012, McKinsey released a landmark study that found, on average, 66% of large software projects run over budget while being late and not delivering all of the promised functionality.

Last month Oregon Gov. John Kitzhaber commissioned an independent review to determine what went wrong in this case and if Oregon should sue Oracle, reports news site KGW.com.

We reached out to Oracle for comment and will update when we hear bck. Oracle declined comment on the story published by the Oregonian.

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Oracle reports its third-quarter earnings on Tuesday and analysts have hopes for a good quarter.

They are expecting 4% growth in revenue over the year-ago quarter, and EPS to be $0.70, up from $0.65.

If the company exceeds these targets, it will be a two-in-a-row beat.

Oracle could really use that. It missed revenue expectations for the prior three quarters in a row, an almost unheard of series of misses for the company as it struggled to stop its hardware business from shrinking.

With revenue soft, Oracle spent most of 2013 in cost-cutting mode. That meant that many Oracle employees didn't get their bonuses, Wall analyst analyst Steve Koenig, of Wedbush said in a research note published last week:

"Our checks suggest FY13 bonuses were trimmed or eliminated for many employees across the company , which augurs wells for cost control, but not so much for ORCL’s ability to attract and retain talent."

Koenig clarified to Business Insider, "It's anecdotal, but we heard from more employees that they are not getting their fiscal '13 bonuses, which ended [last] May. And it seems that that sort of thing is more frequent than it has been in the past. [This affects] people in marketing, internal development, etc."

The company has been beefing up its revenue numbers with cloud acquisitions. However Koenig says that once those acquisitions get absorbed, Oracle hasn't been making much hay with them.

"Some of the SaaS acquisitions they've done don't look they are generating a whole lot of growth. I've heard that RightNow is doing really well, but I conclude that Taleo is probably not growing well," he says. Oracle bought customer service cloud RightNow for $1.5 billion in 2011 and bought human resource cloud Taleo for $1.9 billion in 2012.

He says that if you strip out the revenue from whatever cloud acquisition Oracle has most recently completed, "cloud revenue out stays flat."

Still, Koenig isn't panning the stock altogether. He maintains a "neutral" rating and target price of $40. The stock is trading at about $38 now.

He thinks Oracle is going to beat consensus expectations tomorrow, and that it's doing an especially good job in selling its the latest version of its bread-and-butter product, the database. Oracle released a new version of its database, 12c, last summer. 12c is designed for cloud computing applications, an area where enterprises are investing heavily.

Oracle declined comment.

SEE ALSO: The Stress Of Being A Computer Programmer Is Literally Driving Many Of Them Crazy

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There's a big new trend when it comes to selling enterprise tech, a concept called "social selling." One of the gurus of social selling is former Eloqua star salesperson Jill Rowley.

Until last week, Rowley was leading an effort to train about 23,000 Oracle salespeople in the technique, which uses social networks like LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook to work with prospects and customers. Social selling is all about "social proximity," or degrees of separation based on social networking, she tells Business Insider.

But, Oracle fired her after she talked to a reporter at Advertising Age for a story about how Oracle is training its salespeople to use their Twitter accounts to interact with customers, Rowley told Business Insider. "Just because he was a reporter, I violated the social media participation policy and I was fired," Rowley told us.

Oracle declined to comment on the situation.

Rowley has developed a pretty good following in this new world of social selling and will instantly land on her feet. On Tuesday she'll launch her own consultant company, and she's not at all bitter. In fact, she says she's got Oracle to thank for her new company.

"I spent an amazing 10 months and 17 days there. I'm proud of what I was able to accomplish in terms of designing and deploying adoption of a global social selling program," she says. "At Eloqua I trained 100 reps. At Oracle, 23,000. What’s next is 200,000 and then maybe 2 million? I see a major revolution in the sales world and I get to be the forefront and I thank Oracle for that."

Rowley believes that social selling is "transforming the sleazy, slimy, slicked-back hairdo image of sales" into one where salespeople are there to help companies solve their IT problems.

It's the next big thing in the enterprise tech world because IT professionals lean heavily on social networks to research tech products and to work with vendors, research finds.

It's also really important to selling cloud-computing services. Traditional software contracts tend to be focused on closing a sale and then getting out. The opposite is needed for the cloud: Software-as-a-service is a long-term partnership thing, so sales incentives need to be structured around making customers happy so they stick around and keep paying for the service.

As we previously reported, Oracle isn't the only one trying to figure out this transition. Microsoft has got similar issues with its own salesforce.

We understand from a source that there are some people who might want to hire Rowley as a consultant for Oracle, even if she's no longer a full-timer.

SEE ALSO: Many of Oracle's employees are not getting their bonuses, says analyst

SEE ALSO: The stress of being a computer programmer is literally driving many of them crazy

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Oracle just reported quarterly earnings.

It reported revenues of $9.32 billion (a slight miss) and adjusted earnings per share of 68 cents (another miss).

Analysts on average expected Oracle's revenue to rise 4%, to about $9.36 billion. They were also expecting adjusted earnings of 70 cents a share, up from 65 cents in the year-earlier quarter.

Oracle posted a nice and much needed beat last quarter, after having a rough go of it for the previous three quarters, missing on revenue.

Despite falling short of what Wall Street wanted, there was some good news in here.

New software licenses and cloud software subscriptions revenues were up 4% to $2.4 billion. Oracle has been investing heavily in its cloud business, so analysts are looking for growth there.

Software license updates and product support revenues were up 5% to $4.6 billion. This is really Oracle's bread and butter business.

And finally, hardware systems products revenues were up. They rose 8% to $725 million. Maybe the promised turnaround for the hardware business has begun.

Oracle's Engineered Server Systems, including the high-end products called Exadata and SPARC SuperClusters, grew 30%, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison says in the press release.

This is important. Ellison has previously said that the reason Oracle bought Sun Microsystems was to create these "engineered systems," servers specifically designed to run Oracle software.

Since the purchase of Sun, Oracle has been letting sales decline on many of the lower-margin hardware products focusing instead on the more profitable engineered systems. Analysts have been waiting for evidence that this strategy will pay off for Oracle.

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Oracle's shares hit a 52-week high on Tuesday of $41.99, and at least two Wall Street analysts say they expect the stock to rise even further.

This is thanks to a report issued Monday from market researcher Gartner that proclaimed Oracle the second biggest software company in the world, after Microsoft, based on 2013 revenues.

Oracle inched ahead of IBM to clinch the No. 2 spot for the first time, Gartner research vice president Chad Eschinger said in the report.

Microsoft remained solidly in the No. 1 spot.

Oracle's good results were part of an overall good year for the enterprise software industry, where revenue grew 4.8% to $407.3 billion in 2013, from $388.5 billion in 2012, Gartner said.

Oracle is selling more software because it is selling more bundles where the hardware, software and cloud services are all combined, CEO Larry Ellison said to analysts when the company announced earnings in March:

Customers want us to integrate the hardware and software and make it work together, so they don't have to. As customers shift to pre-integrated hardware and cloud computing, in search of lower costs and more rapid implementations, Oracle is presented with new opportunities for leadership in a number of market categories.

Once the Gartner report was released, Wall Street analyst Stifel reiterated a buy rating on Oracle and a target price of $43 a share. BMO Capital maintained its outperform and raised its target price to $45 from $42.

The BMO report says:

While Oracle’s slowing growth has been the key issue on the stock, we see an improving outlook as much of the transitional work is now behind the company. Accelerating revenue growth and below-trend valuation leave us positive on the shares.

Salesforce.com also did well in 2013, growing the fastest, to land among the top 10 biggest software companies in the world for the first time. In 2012, Salesforce was No. 12.

IBM declined comment.

Table 1. Top10 Worldwide Software Vendors, Worldwide, 2012-2013 (Billions of Dollars) 

Source: Gartner (March 2014)

SEE ALSO: Analyst: Cisco's new $1 billion cloud computing plan is ingenious but risky

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For months, Oregon officials have publicly blasted software giant Oracle over the state's problematic health insurance exchange website.

Oracle was the state's primary contractor hired to build the website.

Oracle has so far refused to comment publicly. Now, a letter from Oracle's President Safra Catz to Cover Oregon has surfaced giving insight into what Oracle thinks about the whole thing, reports Jeff Manning at the Oregonian

The upshot: Oracle blames the state for mismanaging the project, particularly for its decision not to hire what's known as a systems integrator, or a tech consultant that builds computer systems by combining hardware and software from lots of different tech companies.

Catz has also offered an olive branch: "We encourage Cover Oregon to immediately hire a systems integrator to lead the project, as it represented it would do in the first place," she said in the letter.

Oregon's website was supposed to be the crown jewel of state health insurance exchanges. It was to be the model by which other states could build their own. Now it's the poster child of the awful technical rollout of Obamacare. It has been called "the worst disaster zone" of state exchanges by the Washington Post's Ezra Klein.

The site has cost $200 million so far, with more than $130 million going to Oracle. Oracle wants to charge still more reports Manning.

After missing deadline after deadline, the site is limping along today, requiring people to use paper forms for at least part of the application process. All told, about 217,000 Oregonians have enrolled in coverage through Cover Oregon, reports the Statesman Journal. Work on the website continues.

Like all massive IT projects that spiral out of control (and research shows that 66% of them do), the truth is there's plenty of blame to go around.

Oracle declined to comment.

SEE ALSO: The Stress Of Being A Computer Programmer Is Literally Driving Many Of Them Crazy

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After shelving its Oracle-led Obamacare website on Friday, Oregon is considering halting a second multimillion-dollar Oracle-led project.

An internal task force recommended that Oregon stop work on a $142 million project to upgrade the state's Department of Health Services, according to an internal review of the project, posted online by The Oregonian (PowerPoint).

This follows news on Friday that the state would scrap its $250 million Obamacare health-care exchange and use the federal exchange instead.

That decision came after months of delays, cost overruns, and finger-pointing, with state officials publicly blaming Oracle.

Today, the health-care exchange is still unable to sign people up for health insurance without a time-consuming, partially paper process.

The nonfunctional website hasn't stopped Oregon from successfully completing more than 200,000 enrollments for health insurance, with about 140,000 of them Medicaid customers, reports The Oregonian's Jeff Manning.

Oregonians aren't fully footing the bill for the failed project themselves. Most of the money comes from federal funds from the Affordable Care Act.

Still, a lot of money has been spent: Oregon has paid $134 million to Oracle and doled out another nearly $7 million on the paper-processing efforts, reports NPR.

Meanwhile, there was this second multimillion-dollar contract with Oracle. The state also hired Oracle to help it build a new system for its Department of Health Services. That system was supposed to let people electronically apply for food stamps and other benefits, and was supposed to go live in October 2013.

Work on the DHS system was halted to redirect all resources to fixing the troubled health-care exchange.

Now, an internal task force has reviewed the DHS project and discovered that only 11% of its features are completed, another 30% are partially done, and the remaining 60% aren't close to being completed.

The total budget for the project was $142 million from 2008 through 2015, with about $71 million spent and $48 million going to Oracle, reports The Oregonian's Manning.

The task force recommended stopping work on the project and to "research systems that would meet the needs."

Gov. John Kitzhaber, a Democrat and a former emergency-room doctor, once hailed these projects as a "defining moment" for how a state could save money on Medicare.

But the state has little to show for the millions it spent on these systems. 

The state has hired a Portland law firm to explore potential litigation against Oracle, a representative for Oregon's health-care exchange, Cover Oregon, confirmed to Business Insider.

For its part, an Oracle representative sent us this statement: 

"Oracle looks forward to providing any assistance the State needs in moving parts of Oregon's health care exchange to the Federal system if it ultimately decides to do so. Oracle will continue to support the State in providing long term solutions for Oregonians, and to assist with its ongoing health care modernization efforts."

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Larry Ellison is without a doubt one of the people who has influenced the tech industry the most. 

In fact, CNBC just named him No. 10 in its new list of the 25 business people who had the most profound impact on business and finance in the past 25 years.

Ellison, who is co-founder and CEO of Oracle, has influenced the tech industry, business world, and your daily lives in numerous ways, whether you realize it or not, CNBC pointed out in its profile of him.

College degree not required

Larry Ellison certainly isn't the only billionaire college dropout to find success in Silicon Valley but he was one of the first: Before Bill Gates, before his best friend Steve Jobs, before Michael Dell.

Ellison dropped out of college not just once, but twice, before moving to Northern California at age 22, in 1966.

He stayed in school long enough to learn about computer design and, a few years later,  invented a database by reading a paper about it written by an IBM scientist.

Today that database is run by all of the world's biggest companies. Just about every time you use a credit card, book an airline ticket, or get a prescription drug, Oracle has helped you do it.

Never retire

In just a couple of months, Larry Ellison will turn 70. He is the longest-running founder CEO the tech industry has ever seen. He's held the CEO role at Oracle since 1977.

Back then, a 70-year-old CEO would have been unheard of. Even today, IBM has a tradition where CEOs are asked to retire at age 60.

Ellison has never even publicly discussed retirement.

With Ellison as a role model, other CEOs are staying on longer, too, including Cisco's John Chambers and EMC's Joe Tucci.

A competitive spirit is the greatest motivator

Ask Ellison why he still comes to work every day — what drives him after all he's achieved — and he'll tell you the same answer: he loves to compete.

"I'm addicted to winning. The more you win, the more you want to win," he says.

More recently he described his motivation like this:

"What drives me is this constant testing of limits. Constant learning. ... How can you move the world just a bit, make a difference, change lives ... and how much can I help [while] discovering my own limits?"

Now that the NBA has banned Clippers owner Donald Sterling for life, and will try to force him out of the league, there's heavy speculation on who will buy the team. 

Brian Windhorst, one of the best NBA reporters in the world, said yesterday on Tony Kornheiser's radio show, "Larry Ellison is the guy who is dying to buy a team."

Over at ESPN, there's a report that Ellison could team up with media moguls David Geffen and Oprah Winfrey to buy the Clippers. (Ellison is the fifth richest man in the world with a net worth of ~$50 billion, so it's unclear what he needs Geffen and Winfrey for.)

Ellison has long wanted a basketball team.

He tried to buy the Golden State Warriors in 2010. 

At the time, he put out a release that said, "Although I was the highest bidder, Chris Cohan decided to sell to someone else. In my experience this is a bit unusual. Nonetheless, I wish the Warriors and their fans nothing but success under their new ownership."

That's one way of putting. Another way of putting it is that Ellison submitted his bid after the bidding was closed, and only bid a few million above the eventually winner, which is what Sal Galatioto, who brokered the sale told Sports Illustrated at the time. 

The winning bid was $450 million.

"We are in business to turn down the high bidder?"Galatioto told SI. "How long would I be in business if I turned down the high bidder? I don't think he believed we got a figure at 450 until it was too late."

Ellison tried again in 2012 to buy the Memphis Grizzlies, but didn't win that bid.

Now that the Clippers are potentially going to be on the market, Ellison is expected to make a run. 

However, the Clippers are going to be very, very expensive. The Milwaukee Bucks just went for $550 million, and they're the Milwaukee Bucks. Windhorst estimates the Clippers could go for $1.5-$2 billion. There are a lot of people interested in buying the team, and Los Angeles is a prime market. 

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Remember when Oracle was trying to sue Google for billions over Google's use of Android? Back in 2012, when the verdict of the suit came in, it looked like Google had won.

But Oracle vowed to keep fighting and just scored a major win in appeals court, reports Reuters. The appeals court said that Oracle could claim copyright protection on a part of Java known as an application programming interface (API). An API is some software code that allows two programs to talk to each other.

This overturned a ruling by a lower court that said Oracle could not claim copyright protection. It has major implications for the software industry. This is code that is by its nature designed to be used by others. If a company can charge royalties for it, saying another's APIs mimic its own, that could lead to even more lawsuits in an already litigious industry.

Still Oracle can't help grinning about the win. The company sent us this statement from Dorian Daley Oracle General Counsel:

"We are extremely pleased that the Federal Circuit denied Google's attempt to drastically limit copyright protection for computer code. The Federal Circuit's opinion is a win for Oracle and the entire software industry that relies on copyright protection to fuel innovation and ensure that developers are rewarded for their breakthroughs. We are confident that the district court will appropriately apply the fair use doctrine on remand, which is not intended to protect naked commercial exploitation of copyrighted material."

It's not clear how much money Oracle could extract from Google should this appeal hold.

We've reached out to Google for comment.

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The courts just handed Oracle a surprising win in its years-long lawsuit against Google and Android. And Google, to say the least, is not pleased.

Google sent Business Insider this statement:

We're disappointed by this ruling, which sets a damaging precedent for computer science and software development, and are considering our options.

It's unclear how much money Google could owe Oracle as a result of this new ruling. Oracle had originally been seeking a shocking $6 billion, but the courts didn't allow that huge amount to stick.

The fee Google winds up paying could be as low as $300,000, or even nothing. Then again, it could be $1 billion or more if Oracle gets the court to make Google pay it royalties based on the number of Android devices sold.

The courts still have to rule on Google's final defense: that the copyrighted material it used for Android is OK to use under the Fair Use Doctrine.

To recap: Oracle accused Google of copying some of its Java computer code when it wrote Android. Android itself wasn't the issue. Android is different than Java. But Google wanted developers who work with Java, a popular language for web apps, to jump to Android. So it incorporated Java's application programming interfaces (APIs) into Android. This allowed them to quickly convert their apps to Android and it meant that the millions of programmers trained on Java would be familiar with Android, too.

Oracle sued claiming that the APIs were copyrighted. But the judge ruled that APIs are not subject to copyright laws.

On Friday, an appellate court just overturned that loss, and said APIs are subject to copyright.

An API exists to allow two programs to talk to each other. Normally, APIs are freely given away. It's the tool that encourages developers to write apps for a tech company's products.

By saying APIs are copyrightable, the whole software industry has been put on alert. This ruling could be an epic mistake that leads to a lot of frivolous litigation, James Grimmelmann, a copyright scholar at the University of Maryland, told Vox's Timothy Lee.

In 2013, when the case was still pending, two developers weighed in, railing against Oracle: Sacha Labourey, CEO of CloudBees, and Steven Harris, senior vice president for CloudBees and formerly a SVP of Java Server Development at Oracle. In an article on TechCrunch they wrote:

Will our economy thrive and be more competitive because companies can easily switch from one service provider to the other by leveraging identical APIs? Or will our economy be throttled by allowing vendors to inhibit competition through API lock-in?

Interestingly, this win was largely due to the lawyer Oracle hired, known for helping Apple win cases against Motorola, notes patent blogger, Florian Mueller:

This reversal-in-part is a huge win for Oracle and its appellate counsel, a team of Orrick Herrington & Sutcliffe lawyers led by Joshua Rosenkranz and Mark Davies. Mr. Rosenkranz has previously been dubbed the "Defibrillator" for reviving lawsuits on appeal after losses in district court. He did it again.

Rosenkranz told Business Insider that the alarm in the software industry is unwarrented.

"Google copied 7,000 lines of code and the structure and organization of whole packages of highly creative software. To say that this is protected is not the same as saying that anything that might loosely be called an API is protectable under copyright law," he said.

He also said that many of the legal briefs (aka "Amicus Curiae") filed in support of Google are missing the point. For instance, a year ago, The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) along with 32 scientists filed such briefs.

"Most of the examples cited in Amicus Curiae briefs are not protect-able. Some of them are ways of doing things and not computer code at all," he said. "Others involve tiny snippets of code that are not at all creative, as compared to the entire structure of a complex program.”

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The founder of MuleSoft— a startup that specializes in technology that Oracle and Google are fighting over — thinks Oracle's copyright lawsuit over Android is terrible for the software industry.

Oracle claims Google's Android violates its copyright for "application programming interfaces" (APIs), computer language that lets two programs communicate with each other. (For instance, if a smartphone app lets you click on an address to see it on a Google Map, it used Google's Map API to do that.)

MuleSoft founder Ross Mason told Business Insider that companies would be better served if they were encouraged to use each other's APIs. His startup is valued at $800 million and provides an API service that allows cloud apps to talk to each other other.

"Not only does it make no sense to copyright APIs, we think it's bad for business because it would chill people interacting with your service," Mason told us. "Time and again, it's companies that embrace openness and interoperability that win."

On Friday, an appeals court handed Oracle a surprising win in its years-long lawsuit against Google and Android, overturning a lower judge's ruling that APIs could not be copyrighted.

Oracle had accused Google of copying the APIs of Java, a programming language Oracle owns, and putting them into Android. .

While a jury agreed with Oracle, a judge said it couldn't collect any monetary damages by ruling that APIs were not subject to copyright law. The ruling on Friday overturns that decision and sends it back to the lower court for further proceedings to determine whether Google's use of the APIs was "fair use,"Reuters reported.

Oracle's lawyer told Business Insider that this ruling won't harm, or really even change, the software industry because many APIs are so small and simple they wouldn't be subject to copyright protection. In this case, Google was using 7,000 lines of code, Oracle's lawyer, Joshua Rosenkranz, told us.

However, Google says the ruling "sets a damaging precedent for computer science and software development."

Many in the tech industry have sided with Google, including 32 scientists and The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) who filed opinions on the matter to the court about a year ago.

It's not clear if Google will wind up paying Oracle a lot of money. Google could ask the full appeals court to rehear the case and ultimately petition the Supreme Court to take on the issue.

Here's what Mason says will happen if the ruling stands:

Business Insider: The courts just ruled that copyrighting APIs is legal. This is totally your thing. Can you help people understand the situation?

Ross Mason: The first concept to understand is the term API (Application Programming Interface) refers to any mechanism of allowing one piece of software (code) to access another.

Think of an ATM machine. In our view, the software that makes the machine run should be subject to copyright. But the way you interact with the ATM — putting in your card, punching in your PIN, receiving cash — shouldn’t be.

Neither should the specifications for interacting with software systems. It's important to make distinction between code and APIs.

Unfortunately, the court saw APIs as like all other code ... just "shortcuts" and therefore an expression of how to do a function, not an idea/function itself. As a result, those APIs are copyrightable.

Not only does it make no sense to copyright APIs, we think it's bad for business because it would chill people interacting with your service. Time and again, it's companies that embrace openness and interoperability that win.

We’re on the verge of an explosion in new, revenue-generating services delivered by APIs. To make those services most useful, we should be encouraging more similarity in APIs, not less.

In fact, if the burgeoning API world needs anything right now, it's to formulate and converge on the most sensible API designs. The last thing we want is to force people to worry that the most sensible design is owned by one company or another.

BI: Will this be a problem where companies go after smaller companies trying to get them to license APIs?

RM: We don’t think so. We think most companies are seeking more parties to interact with their services, not fewer. APIs are how you do that, and we’re confident that the leading companies will focus on how they enable those revenue-generating services, not wall them off from the world.

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Quick, which company is more valuable: Microsoft or IBM?

Hewlett-Packard or Cisco?

Salesforce.com or VMware?

The following list of the biggest publicly traded companies, ranked by market cap, will tell you.

Today's enterprise tech companies are some of the biggest, most successful, profitable companies in the world. That's even made some consumer tech companies change gears and pursue the lucrative business user market.

(Note: To compile this list, we used market cap from May 28, from Google Finance. )

No. 20: Workday

Company: Workday

Market cap: ~$15 billion

Big opportunity:  Workday offers human resources and finance cloud software. It is one of the companies scaring the bejeebies out of the big established players like Oracle and SAP, and it's been doing well. It beat expectations last quarter and raised full-year expectations. Now, it's taking on recruiting software.

Big challenge: Naysayers worry about the company's lack of profitability, though most hot cloud companies are sacrificing profits for growth these days. Of bigger concern is that its classic competitors, particularly Oracle, have singled it out for competition. Oracle has hired a team of salespeople dedicated to winning accounts away from Workday.

No. 19: Seagate Technology

Company: Seagate Technology

Market cap: ~$17 billion

Big opportunity: Seagate Technology makes hard drives and computer storage systems. It's got a huge opportunity with enterprise and cloud storage, as the the big data trend causes the world to create and keep more information.

Big challenge: Consumer cloud storage means that consumers rarely buy hard drives or other storage gear anymore.

No. 18: LinkedIn

Company: LinkedIn

Market cap: ~$20 billion

Big opportunity:  LinkedIn is a social network for professional people and a recruiting tool for enterprises. Next up, it plans to become more of a blogging/publishing platform. In February, instead of limiting blogging to invited "influencers,"it opened it up to everyone.

Big challenge: Finding a way to reignite growth. Earlier this month is offered a sales forecast below what analysts wanted, marking six straight quarters of decelerating growth, Bloomberg reported.

Larry Ellison threw a press conference Tuesday to show off the new database he actually announced back in September 2013, called the In-Memory Option for the Oracle database.

The big news today was that this database will finally be available for purchase next month.

Ellison didn't have a choice but to spend the last nine months touting the new product, which will likely sell well once it's available. Ellison describes the "In-Memory Option" like it's a magic pill. Swallow it and all of your Oracle database applications will instantly run faster, with no mess, fuss, or recoding.

Arch rival SAP has now been selling a competing product, the HANA database, for years. Over the past three years, SAP has made HANA the centerpiece of its future, even though SAP's bread-and-butter product is really still its enterprise accounting applications, not databases.

But you wouldn't know that from SAP's annual customer conference held earlier this month. The HANA database was the star. The company trotted out huge HANA customers to give testimonials (Burberry, Bangkok Airways, ConAgra, John Deere, Mercedes), huge partnerships to sell HANA (Accenture, HP, Dell),  and announced upgrades to its HANA cloud service.

Having a winning database product that nips at Oracle's heels is clearly deeply satisfying for SAP founder Hasso Plattner. His rivalry with Ellison is one of the oldest and most epic in the tech industry. The two companies trash-talk each other in public; SAP has written songs making fun of Oracle; Plattner once even mooned Larry Ellison's boat on the high seas.

By itself HANA's success isn't a serious threat to Oracle's dominance in the database market. Oracle still owned 48% of the traditional database market by the end of 2013, according to Gartner. Databases are the lifeblood of a company's IT systems, and they don't lightly yank them out and replace them.

But in-memory databases are revolutionizing the database market and Oracle didn't have a credible answer to HANA; or to the in-memory database recently released by an even more important rival, Microsoft; or to hot up-and-coming startups like MemSQL, whose founders hail from Facebook and Microsoft.

Oracle has been selling an in-memory product called TimesTen, a company acquired in 2005. That database was built back in the day when computer memory was expensive.

What Oracle has done with this new in-memory database could and should be huge for the company because it works with all of a customer's existing apps. Oracle has some 300,000 database customers, any of whom can use it, vice president of product management Tim Shetler told ZDNet:

We would expect that within a year we would have more companies running on the Oracle in-memory option perhaps than all the others [competitors] combined.

If that proves even partially true, this product could also have a ripple effect across Oracle's other business units, which really need something to spark growth.

Enterprises who want the in-memory option will need to upgrade to Oracle's latest database, called the 12c. They may also choose to buy Oracle's special computer servers designed to run the new database, driving revenues for Oracle's hardware business, which has struggled since Oracle acquired it by buying Sun in 2010.

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Oracle is getting ready to buy a company called Micros Systems for more than $5 billion, sources told Bloomberg's Alex Sherman and Dina Bass.

Micros makes software and hardware for the hospitality industries.

This would be Oracle's largest acquisition since it bought Sun Microsystems for $7.4 billion in 2010 (which really cost Oracle $5.6 billion after it factored in Sun's cash).

Oracle is one of the most acquisitive companies in the tech industry, having spent $50 billion to acquire about 100 companies over the past 10 years, Bloomberg reports.

This year alone, it has already bought BlueKai (for around $400 million, sources told Business Insider), as well as Corente and GreenBytes.

Still, the Micros Systems deal, should it proceed as reported, would be a big one for Oracle for several reasons.

Obviously, the size of the deal, at $5 billion, makes it stand out. Micros Systems would also give Oracle a tablet. The company makes "point of sale" cash register software and hardware for the hospitality and retail industry. The latest wave in the POS industry is to replace these devices with tablets, and Micros offers a Windows tablet for this exact purpose.

Most importantly, it could give Oracle some much needed growth. Micros generated nearly $1.3 billion in revenue in 2013 and $171 million in net income. 

On rumors of this acquisition, Micros System's stock price has gone crazy. It's up 17% to about $67, when it had been trading near the $58 mark for the past few days and under $53 for most of April and much of May.

Oracle reports its fourth quarter earnings for fiscal 2014 on Thursday. If this acquisition is as close as it sounds, we will likely hear more about it then.

Oracle declined to comment on this story.

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