Ellison Is Coming to UA

Larry Ellison, the CEO of Oracle Corp., is scheduled to present a gift on Nov. 3 to the University of Arkansas’ Sam M. Walton College of Business. r

We hear Ellison plans to give a multimillion dollar suite of software to the Walton College’s Information Technology Research Center.r

Ellison is one of the most flamboyant and outspoken businessmen in the country. He refers to Bill Gates as the “PC Pope” and said he wouldn’t mind dropping a missile on Microsoft’s headquarters.

Ellison is a college dropout who as been divorced three times. He is also the ninth-richest person in America, with a net worth of $18 billion, according to Forbes magazine. That puts him behind Gates at No. 1 with $45 billion and five members of the Walton family of Bentonville, taking the No. 4 through No. 8 spots, with $20.5 billion each.r

Word is there’s work afoot to build the Walton College into a “business intelligence” mecca, where analysts could be groomed to converge the huge amounts of internal and external data that companies have into a usable form. It’s the kind of information, we’re told, that could help vendor’s to Wal-Mart Stores Inc. better interpret data got through the Bentonville chain’s RetailLink system.