At university I read The Overreacher, a book about the works of Christopher Marlowe, the English dramatist who was the nearest rival to Shakespeare’s crown.
Its main argument was that Marlowe’s heroes tended to be “overreachers”, that is, characters who laughed in the faces of the gods. Think of Doctor Faustus swapping a life with infinite knowledge for eternity in hell, or of Tamburlaine, born a shepherd, caging his rival and using him as a footstool while scratching around the map to seek out new kingdoms to conquer.

You don’t see too many of that kind of overreacher anymore but the nearest personality conforming to a modern version of the Marlowe-type is surely Oracle chief Larry Ellison. Indeed, with suave good looks and svelte build persisting into his seventh decade, Ellison sometimes appears likely to have signed off a Faustian pact at breakfast before rushing off to win yacht races in the afternoon and flying home in his jet to the Japanese-style house in the evening.

Not content with running the dominant database supplier, Ellison has long had
his eye on a bigger slice of the enterprise resource planning (ERP) pie and, this being Larry Ellison, we’re not talking about eating just a little bit more.
That vaulting ambition has seen Oracle pursue one of the most audacious merger-and-acquisition sprees in business history. Like Tamburlaine, Ellison would appear to want it all.

To succeed in his aim of winning leadership in enterprise applications, Ellison and his lieutenants conceived to bring multifarious purchases ­ Siebel, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards et al ­ together in a plan referred to as Project Fusion. To succeed in this mother and father of development plans, Ellison committed to throwing thousands of coders at the problem.

So far, the billions spent in acquisitions would appear to have been money well spent, but is Fusion a bridge too far for the great software overreacher?
In announcing its Application Infrastructure Architecture last week, Oracle was at pains to stress that this latest project did not have any impact on the roadmap for Fusion, but it has been a long time since the company offered a public update on the state of its masterplan and at least a few natives are getting restless. Also, despite very public knocks, such as the exit of CEO-in-waiting Shai Agassi, SAP is showing no signs of shedding customers in the saturated Western economies.

However, one ray of hope remains for Ellison in the prospect of fast-growing economies such as China. A new target with billions of dollars in revenue to chase? You can see the great man now, running his finger over a map and preparing himself for one last big push into the unknown, heading towards the ultimate destiny of eternal revenue streams.