Oracle Corporation has announced that it now controls approximately 94 percent of the outstanding stock of Retek Inc. The company plans to complete its acquisition of Retek "immediately." The merger became official today.

"With our acquisition of Retek complete, Oracle is poised to provide retailers with an unparalleled partner for information technology solutions," said Charles Phillips, Oracle's President in an official statement. Oracle will form a separate Retail Global Business Unit "to maintain the specialization of Retek's employee base and quickly go to market in the retail sector," stated Phillips. To address any concerns, the company said it will hold a "Customer Town Hall" meeting on Friday, April 15, 11am Pacific time. The webcast will be available through the Oracle website.

The Oracle/Retek acquisition, with a final valuation of $670 million, is neither particularly large or small by industry standards. Its significance may lie more in light of Oracle's nascent, burgeoning battle with German enterprise IT giant SAP. Oracle's still-recent and difficult acquisition of PeopleSoft was cast as part of a larger competitive battle with SAP, and SAP originally thought it would be able to acquire Retek.

Although Oracle's Larry Ellison resolutely defends Oracle's strategy as centering around shareholder value and competitive advantage, there is always an undercurrent of personality and ego behind his company's moves. Ellison has never allowed key executives to amass too much power, his dismissal of influential and industry super-heavyweight Ray Lane a couple of years back being a prime example.

Former PeopleSoft CEO Craig Conway is also among a group of people who were high-level Oracle executives at one time. One source close to the recent PeopleSoft acquisition crisis expressed a belief that this battle was "quite personal, to quite a degree." This source also said that "Tom Siebel and Marc Benioff had better watch it," referring to two other high-profile ex-Oracle execs who went on to lead their own companies, Siebel Systems and salesforce.com, respectively.

Tom Siebel is out of the day-to-day loop at his eponymous software company. And it's interesting to note that he and Benioff can be assumed not to be golfing buddies, given their companies' head-to-head competition and that Benioff has had some rude things to say about Tom Siebel in the past. So they hardly represent a unifed front, or a personal affront to Larry Ellison in the way that Conway's aggressive leadership at PeopleSoft may have as the company increasingly impinged on what Oracle viewed as its core business.

That said, adding the established CRM capability of either of these two companies might be viewed as a key bit of strategy for Oracle, particularly as the acquisition of one would most likely weaken the prospects of the other. Payback is doubly sweet when it makes perfect business sense. One can only wonder whether this plays any role within the thought processes of Oracle's undisputed leader.