Larry Ellison Talks Dividend over Large Acquisitions for Oracle, for Now

CNBC’s Maria Bartoromo got a chance to interview Larry Ellison of Oracle Corp. (NASDAQ: ORCL) today after the close from the OpenWorld conference. You can of course have predicted that Mr. Ellison was going to talk up his business and his other companies invested in. What most investors may care about now is whether or not another large acquisition like a Sun Microsystems is coming down the pipe since Oracle has been a serial acquirer after having gobbled up Peoplesoft and a whole host of other companies.

Larry Ellison denied having any interest in any large acquisitions at this point. He told Maria Bartoromo that he wants to focus on organic growth and wants to focus on the areas of the cloud and within engineering systems. She specifically asked him about any interest in NetApp Inc. (NASDAQ: NTAP) and he said that NetApp would be a big acquisition and they are not interested in any large deals right now.

Clarifying that time frame for any big deals, he did say that he could look for a big acquisition a couple of years down the road. Ellison also said he thinks Oracle will allocate capital via higher dividends but with gradual increases rather than a rapid dividend hike.

NetSuite Inc. (NYSE: N) and Salesforce.com Inc. (NYSE: CRM) were listed as past investments of Ellison that he holds stakes in but these were not mentioned in any takeover scenario. On the Sun Microsystems business Ellison said that he does not care about some of the old hardware sales at all but they do care about the engineered systems.

JON C. OGG