When I read this story just few moments ago in BBC feed, I said wow that's some development. As far as I know the company was looking for deal of buyout or merger since last few months and the talks with IBM was stopped who has offered $9.40 a share. However this comes to me as surprise that the news refers that Oracle has offered $9.50 per share and not higher. This move will no doubt put Oracle in straight competition with better than before compete with HP, Microsoft and IBM.
With this acquisition Oracle is now in to operating system market.
This is going to be exciting stuff and I see compete in making for SharePoint technologies.
Here is my source of this story http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8008246.stm