Stockpickr: Who's Next on Oracle's Buy List?

Oracle(ORCL Quote - Cramer on ORCL - Stock Picks) has been buying companies like crazy lately. What's next? I've identified the stocks I believe to be likely targets and compiled them in a portfolio, Who Will Oracle Buy Next?, on Stockpickr.

There was a time I loathed Oracle. Not the stock -- back when I hated Oracle, I barely had a clue what a "stock" was. It was 1994, and I was programming what eventually became the Full Service Network, an interactive TV setup in Orlando, Fla.

The digital project was an expensive experiment for Time Warner, which was testing to see if it could roll out the network across the country. I asked my boss at the time why it was we didn't just perform all the network and interface work through the Internet by using Mosaic as the interface. (Mosaic was the precursor to Netscape.) He said to me, wisely, "James, the Internet might be good for academic types and nerdy types, but these cable guys are smart. Just let them do their thing."

In any case, the experiment was a disaster, but at least I did my part, which was plowing through what felt like hundreds of manuals about Oracle in order to write the slightest pieces of code.

It was such an immensely complicated process that it felt to me as if Oracle made it complex so it could charge more. I had just left grad school in computer science at the time, but I still had a hard time making heads or tails of the manuals.

This is why it doesn't surprise me that Oracle has been on an acquisition spree over the past several years. It needs to basically bolt on every enterprise application it can find, so if the need for its core database product ever wavers, it has other products it can hang on to.

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