As enterprise application consolidation continues and the big fish continue to gobble up the slightly smaller fish I’m wondering whether or not these companies are playing with monopoly money? Or is it real to them? Oracle is about to spend $8.5 billion to acquire BEA but no one thinks it is worth talking about the financial consequences of this move. That amount of money can’t be insignificant. Yet not one ana As enterprise application consolidation continues and the big fish continue to gobble up the slightly smaller fish I’m wondering whether or not these companies are playing with monopoly money? Or is it real to them? Oracle is about to spend $8.5 billion to acquire BEA but no one thinks it is worth talking about the financial consequences of this move. That amount of money can’t be insignificant. Yet not one analyst I spoke with in covering this story seemed to think it was worthy of consideration. How is Oracle going to pay for this? Will it be cash, check or charge?What are the consequences for Oracle? What if the integration effort fails and they don’t get their money back so to speak? What if we have a big recession and sales slow down to the extent that Oracle starts losing money? Did they, or anyone else consider this? On the other side I would like to know who at BEA gets very rich, very quickly.Someone once said in business you never use your own money. You borrow it from somebody else. Is that the case here? As an interesting sidelight, I wonder if the U.S. financial institutions now going hat in hand to the big banks in Asia and the oil sheiks in the Middle East to bail them out of the sub-prime lending mess, are really in need of the money or is this a case of just using OPM [Other People’s Money]?Maybe for all the criticism these U.S. banks are taking they are laughing behind closed doors.Any financial analysts out there care to weigh in on either the Oracle question or the sub-prime issue? Please respond in the comments section. Technology Industry