Oracle's Pretty Late Move

The long-expected PLM acquisition from Oracle came down today, as Agile Corp. fell into the arms of the Redwood Shores serial acquirer. Some good notes from MA's coverage:

• "over the past two years, Agile has had difficulty achieving consistent profitability"
• "Soon after taking over as CEO in January 2006, however, [CEO Jay] Fulcher also began searching for potential buyers for Agile"
• AMR's Jim Shepherd: "It's not really a surprise that Oracle ended up with Agile. The surprise is that it took this long."

Fulcher trots out the familiar canard of CEO's who decide a sale/payday is the best strategic option for a software company that misses its numbers: "Scale is such an imperative in the enterprise software space," he said. "We were at a run rate of $134 million, which is a very difficult size to be and still maintain all the things that are important about being a public company."