What Larry Ellison wants, Larry Ellison, more often than not, gets. It just may take a while.

Ellison's Oracle has reached a deal to acquire BEA Systems for $19.38 per share in cash, or $8.5 billion, a 14 percent increase from Oracle's original proposal of $17 per share in October.

Still, the road to a deal was anything but smooth.

BEA said the $17 price was too low, holding out for $21 per share. Ellison then claimed that, in hindsight, even $17 was too high and that Oracle was no longer interested. "It looks like no one's going to buy BEA," Oracle's chief executive told analysts in November. "If their goal was to stay independent, I think they're doing a good job."

"A strange, months-long kabuki dance," says the New York Times' DealBook in describing the negotiations.

But Ellison and Oracle seemed to care little about what their tactics looked like to the public, as long as they got their deal.

Recall, for example, the histrionics when Oracle pursued PeopleSoft in a bitter 18-month-long takeover battle. Craig Conway, then the chief executive of PeopleSoft, said that selling his company to Oracle would be like selling his dog to Ellison so that he could shoot it.

Ellison replied that if Conway and his dog were standing next to each other, "trust me, if I had one bullet, it wouldn't be for the dog."

Dealmaking is what Oracle has used to fend off rivals such as SAP of Germany. In the last several years, Oracle has spent more than $25 billion on more than 30 acquisition, including deals for Hyperion Solutions, PeopleSoft, and Siebel Systems.

BEA, based in San Jose, California, makes middleware software, which supports corporate technological processes from billing to securities trading. Its WebLogic software is used to operate between an enterprise's databases and its Web-browser-equipped networked computers.

"The addition of BEA products and technology will significantly enhance and extend Oracle's Fusion middleware software suite," said Ellison. "Oracle Fusion middleware has an open 'hot-pluggable' architecture that allows customers the option of coupling BEA's WebLogic Java Server to virtually all the components of the Fusion software suite."

Also on Portfolio.com
One Billion Laptops
Spy vs. Spy
Me and My Bodyguard
The Longevity Industry