Anyone with Internet access and a Yahoo! account could have seen an Oracle Corp. press release cross the business PR wire at 8:30 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time on Wednesday. But the software and database giant's mechanisms for delivering its news to reporters that track the company on a regular basis is a different matter. Oracle's three-sentence statement arrived in my in-box at 6:17 p.m. Being cynical, I might usually suspect something fishy about the delay in Oracle's disclosure that it had failed to get enough support from shareholders of Portal Software Inc. to acquire the company in a 'short-form merger' that dispenses with the customary meeting and shareholders' vote. Yet Oracle has been nothing if not consistent in sending me press releases more than eight hours after their release, regardless of their content. Bewildering, in a sense, given the trouble would seem to be technical, and Oracle is an IT company. — Kate Gibson

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