Larry Elllison

The gap between America's super-wealthy and the rest of us has grown so vast it's hard to even comprehend the sums they spend on their luxuries. But if you measure, say, a $200 million luxury yacht in terms of the average U.S. family's household income, the picture comes back into focus.

Oracle, one of the world's biggest software companies, on Thursday posted fiscal second-quarter earnings that grew 28% year over year. It's the latest sign that companies are spending more on technology.

Before taking over the top spot at Hewlett-Packard, Leo Apotheker was CEO of SAP, the German business-software maker now on trial over corporate espionage allegations from Oracle. But HP says Apotheker won't testify at the trial.

German software company SAP has agreed to pay its larger competitor, Oracle, $120 million to partially settle allegations of intellectual-property theft. But it's only the first part of the settlement; you can expect more to come.

Jury selection for a major copyright case involving Oracle and its smaller competitor SAP started in Oakland, Calif., on Monday, marking the beginning of a trial between the two software rivals that's been more than two years in the making

In a trial that starts Monday, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison says he intends to prove that incoming Hewlett-Packard chief executive Leo Apotheker stole ideas from Oracle in his previous position as head of European competitor SAP.

Oracle Corp. Co-President Mark Hurd, who was brought aboard by the software giant after leaving his CEO post at Hewlett-Packard Co. last month amid controversy, unveiled four new versions of the company's Exadata storage servers at Oracle's annual customer conference in San Francisco today, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Larry Ellison, the founder and CEO of Oracle (ORCL), would claim he has been patient while regulators work through his company's deal to buy Sun Microsystems (JAVA), which is probably a fair assessment. Oracle cut a deal to purchase Sun in late April for a price of $9.50 a share, or $7.4 billion....