Oracle Continues Acquisition SpreeOracle Continues Acquisition Spree

It's not just international giants like Sun that Oracle is interested in acquiring—Larry Ellison is also adding smaller outfits to his collection of tech firms in an effort to round out his company's offerings.

The latest is Convergin, which Oracle on Wednesday said it bought out for an undisclosed amount.

Convergin will broaden Oracle's presence in the telecom market, as it develops Service Broker and Service Capability Interaction Management (SCIM) offerings for both wireless and wireline network carriers.

"As communications service providers transition from legacy telephony networks to next-generation networks, the combination of Oracle and Convergin will accelerate new service innovation while reducing network complexity and cost," said Bhaskar Gorti, senior VP and general manager for Oracle's Communications group, in a statement.

On Monday, Oracle announced plans to buy AmberPoint, which provides Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) solutions designed to help businesses improve application performance and transaction speeds.

The deals come less than two weeks after Oracle completed its $7.4 billion take out of Sun Microsystems. Oracle is adding companies, large and small, in an effort to make good on Ellison's promise to build an IT vendor that can deliver an end-to-end line of business technology systems, "from applications to disk."

He's not alone. Other vendors are also looking to become one-stop IT shops, either on their own or through partnerships.

IBM on Monday rolled out a new line of Power7-based enterprise systems that, combined with IBM middleware like Websphere and Tivoli, will form the heart of integrated system and service offerings for businesses that need to deal with ever increasing amounts of data.

Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft, meanwhile, have teamed up and made a cloud computing pact. The two will spend $250 million over the next three years creating integrated systems based on HP hardware and Microsoft's Windows and SQL server software.

Oracle shares were off 1.7%, to $23.11, in late-morning trading Wednesday.