Relaxing off the Spanish coast on the deck of Rising Sun, his $200 million, 453-foot super yacht, Larry Ellison is a remarkably calm billionaire, all things considered. "Ask me anything," he implores Times Online.

Anything?

Just hours earlier, the software tycoon's BMW Oracle team has lost to Luna Rossa, the Italian boat, in the America's Cup, the yachting competition in which, famously, “there is no second place”.

The founder of Oracle, a business he started 30 years ago with $2,000 (it is now worth $100 billion), pumped an estimated $200 million – of his own money – into the team, only to see it becalmed in Valencia at the semi-final stage of the world’s oldest sporting competition.

Tellingly, Mr Ellison, a tall, tanned and fit 62-year-old, was the only team-owner to race on board his entry. He approached the event with characteristic largesse, commenting in the build-up that it was so cheap to enter, he was surprised more people didn’t give it a go. But then, he is worth an estimated $20 billion.

But if Mr Ellison really can shrug off losing to the Italians (and the way in which he effectively sacked his skipper just hours before his team's final race raises a very large question mark over this), it is because he has a bigger fight to pick.

“This is as high stakes as racing boats gets,” he says. “But there is still no question that the complexity and the stakes of running Oracle are greater than competing here.”

Mr Ellison likes big stakes and has steadily been increasing the business ante when it comes to Oracle. Over the past three years, the group has spent more on acquisitions than it has made in profits over the past decade. “It’s easier to write cheques than to write software,” he says with a smile.

Living by that maxim, a week ago Oracle agreed to acquire Agile Software, which specialises in technology that allows companies as diverse as MacDonald’s and Lockheed Martin track of the performance of their products. That $500 million deal was only the latest move in an ambitious drive to consolidate the business-software sector. In the past two years, Mr Ellison has more than $20 billion on buying more than 25 firms as Oracle extends itself beyond its prosaic historical speciality – databases.

In March, it agreed to buy Hyperion Solutions, which specialises in making software that allows companies to collect and analyse data, for $3.3 billion. The move was smoother than some of its predecessors, notably the $10.3 billion purchase of PeopleSoft in 2004, a deal clinched after a famously fraught 18-month hostile bid.

But despite Oracle’s push into business applications (the software tools used to run businesses) and "middleware" (the technological glue that holds them together), Mr Ellison is most excited about the potential of the databases that underpin them.

In his vision of the future, his is the company that keeps track and manipulates consumers’ digital data – their bank details, their medical records, even their genetic blueprints. Health companies, for instance, given the opportunity to “mine” this information using Oracle technology will be able to pinpoint the most effective drugs for individual patients.

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