Where does Oracle go from here?

Joshua Greenbaum has an interesting piece in Datamation regarding Oracle's future, where its greatest threat is IBM:

The blowing wind that Ellison worries about most, in my opinion, comes from IBM. Sure, Microsoft is out there too, but IBM is the one that understands the enterprise market and can give Oracle a genuine run for its money. The triple threat that IBM presents -- high-end business consulting, database and systems software, loss-leader hardware sales -- has to keep Ellison up at night. Other companies, like SAP, compete directly with Oracle. But only IBM threatens to dominate.

In response, Greenbaum expects Oracle to attempt an acquisition of a high end services business, similar to IBM's acquisition of PriceWaterhouseCoopers, and even an acquisition of a weakened Sun Microsystems, to answer IBM's hardware bundling.

In Josh's view, an acquisition of PeopleSoft by Oracle does nothing to solve the IBM problem. Many or most PeopleSoft clients are already running Oracle's database, so the cross-selling opportunities are not so great.