Oracle’s got a brand new bag?

Amid the tons of hullabaloo generated by the big Oracle show in San Francisco this week, please allow The Chump to allow some semblance of “objectivity.”

Take a look at ZDNet for an interesting article by Martin LaMonica and Dawn Kawamoto regarding Oracle’s newer strategy moves entitled “Oracle’s new plan: Make friends, don’t buy them.” A gripping title, eh?

Great lead, too: “Its reputation as aggressor safely established, Oracle is now looking to make friends in an industry transformed by its own multibillion-dollar acquisition spree.”

The piece details the change in Oracle’s heart, the sudden warming to the smaller fish in the sea, apparently simply because many more huge acquisitions can literally not be in the big boy’s future. Morgan Stanley analyst Peter Kuper sees Oracle CEO Larry Ellison as a guy now “beginning to see he can’t own the world, or he’ll alienate customers. He’s finding it’s better to own 70 percent of a real large pie, than all of a smaller one.” And AMR Research analyst Bruce Richardson is quoted as stating that “Oracle always made the business case that you can’t buy a separate [database and middleware] stack from the application. Now they’re trying to be ‘Miss Congeniality.’”

There’s lots more in LaMonica and Kawamoto’s work, so The Chump urges you to check it out at ZDNet.