First, he outlasted the European Commission (EC) which held up his attempt to acquire Sun Microsystems for over four months. Now he has followed that triumph with another by winning the America’s Cup, one of the most valued trophies in all of sports.

Ellison’s BMW Oracle Racing team won the Cup over this past weekend sweeping the two-time defending champion Alinghi 2-0, just off the coast of Valencia, Spain. Naturally, with Ellison involved, so was technology. His trimaran, aided by the largest wing sail ever built, simply overpowered Alinghi’s catamaran in the two races.

Larry Ellison may be brash and boastful, but he is also patient and focused. This year’s win ended Ellison’s 10-year mission to win the America’s Cup, marking the first time an American challenger has claimed the trophy in 23 years.  This is the same sort of dedication he applied in acquiring PeopleSoft after years of pursuit and this latest battle with the EC.

Speaking of the technology used by BMW Oracle Racing, it’s funny Larry didn’t give any props to NetSuite’s cloud computing based business management software. Apparently the team uses that business suite for a range of accounting, reporting and international tax compliance functions. He probably would have mentioned it, if it wasn’t cloud computing based.

If he decides the NetSuite product would be instrumental in bringing him another America’s Cup he can always buy it and grid enable it. I mean, what’s one more acquisition? In the first five weeks of the year Oracle completed its $7.4 billion acquisition of Sun and acquired two more companies, AmberPoint and Convergin. I am beginning to wonder if Larry made some sort of New Year’s resolution to buy a company a week in 2010.

But it is this display of steely resolve that Ellison’s major archrivals, particularly IBM, have to look forward to as he puts all the moving parts of Oracle and Sun together over the next year. It will take all of Ellison’s resolve and patience to ensure the long-term success for the newly combined company, along with maybe more than a little showmanship.

The first thing he has to do is to stop the steady migration of Sun customers over to IBM and HP’s hardware platforms. Sun has lost a significant number of accounts to its archrivals since the deal was first proposed on April 20, 2009.

A good way to start is to be straight forward with Sun’s remaining top accounts about exactly what hardware lines he is going to keep and what he is going to jettison. By selling a range of products and services directly to Sun’s top 4,000 accounts, Larry must treat these accounts more like strategic business partners, and do away with some of the overly aggressive, nickel-and-diming strategies some users accuse them of to win product and maintenance support deals.

Another way to hold on to skeptical Sun accounts is winning them over to Oracle’s still-not-quite-defined stack computing strategy. While the company made an appetizing pitch to its customers and the press at its Jan. 27 rollout, buying stacks of mission critical hardware and software is just not in the blood of large heterogeneous IT shops. This is where Larry’s showmanship will come in handy.

A third approach, and maybe the most difficult, would be to come up with an attractive and innovative licensing strategy for their various stacks and individual software and hardware offerings.

Lord knows there are legions of existing Oracle customers unhappy with the 22% maintenance fees the company charges, especially given the quality of service they get in return. And some Sun customers have one foot out of the boat anticipating Oracle will find a way to jack up licensing fees on a per processor or per box basis for hardware.

I have yet to hear of any such licensing program(s) being proposed that would convince Sun users to stay put. But if you have, or you have one of your own, let me know.

In his hour-long Q&A session following the Oracle + Sun press briefing, Oracle chairman Larry Ellison addressed a wide range of topics both seriously and playfully from his brazen confidence about the newly combined company fundamentally changing the way IT will buy products to trash talking competitors to lambasting the press. Some moments of the performance will certainly find their way onto “The Best of Larry Being Larry” DVD.

Much of the trash talking focused on IBM, a competitor Larry continues to have a curious love-hate relationship with. He again said he believes the Sun acquisition will allow him to recreate the IBM of 1960s, a company that delivered seamless hardware-software solutions bundled with great technical support.

But apparently a lot of things Big Blue has done since the 1960s has caused it to drift away from the “IT gold standard” it came to represent, which Larry now believes he can resurrect with Sun’s help.

With one hand Larry gives the old IBM a pat on the back: “Our vision for 2010 is the same as IBM’s in 1960 – deliver seamless systems. That strategy made IBM the most successful company in the history of the world. We like that model.”

And with the other hand Larry gives the present day IBM a backhander: “How many servers can IBM put together for OLTP applications? Umm, one. Just one server attacking really big jobs. They can’t scale out, do clouds or clusters. It fascinates me why IBM didn’t come out years ago with something like our Exadata Database Machine. We have huge advantages over them.”

Or completely dismissing their chances to succeed in the database business: “IBM is so far behind, they don’t have any chance at all. In databases, they are a decade or so behind us. I’m serious.”

Boldly, he believes the Oracle-Sun approach to selling stacks of integrated systems along with support directly to the largest customers will significantly alter IT industry’s approach to how it receives, installs and supports mission critical components:

“At the heart of what we are trying to do, and what customers are really looking for, is to completely change the experience of buying systems from databases to middleware to development tools. No one has ever had all that inside one company and did so with open technologies.”

Some other quotes for the The Best of DVD:

On press reports just prior to this week’s event speculating that Oracle would lay off half of Sun’s workforce:

“The people who reported that should be ashamed of themselves. The truth is we are hiring 2,000 people over the next few months and that will be twice as many people as we are laying off. We will make $1.5 billion (in profit from Sun products) in the first full year. Sun has a fabulous installed base and pipeline of technology.”

On Oracle’s plans for Sun’s MySQL open source database, the product that caused the European Commission to hold up the deal for almost four extra months:

“MySQL will be made better. We will do a better job at improving at it than has been done for the past five years. For instance, we have our own version of Linux that we have added new features to. We also want to make both Solaris and Linux better. Our goal is to make all these systems better technologically because we can make more money for products and support.”

On what he valued more, wining the America’s Cup or winning a deal against IBM:

“I don’t have to choose.”

On whether he plans to buy the Golden State Warriors:

“I’m trying, I’m trying, but unfortunately you can’t have a hostile takeover of a basketball team.”

On whether Oracle is missing out by not competing in the consumer electronics market ala Apple:

“We are not good at a hundred different things, but we are good at a small number of things and that is what we need to do. I am not sure Oracle is the right company to take on Apple in telephones. Instead of making phones we’ll make Java that goes into those phones. It would be very dangerous for us to go into consumer electronics.”

On plans for going after the high end of the market with Solaris-based solutions as opposed to focusing on opportunities at the lower end:

“Unix still does well at the high end, which is where Solaris is going. We won’t be making it for single systems though, but for a cluster of computers. The high end to me is not Intel vs. SPARC, it is more like a cloud of SPARC machines in the data center. It will be a long time before Linux catches up there. I am a Linux fan, but I don’t think the high end is in danger for us at all.”

On whether the acquisition of Sun now makes Oracle too big a company to consistently deliver innovative products:

“Everyone said IBM was in trouble because of its size and that was just nonsensical. This idea that you are too big to innovate is just insane. A long as you have quality people – and we have quality people in quantity – I will never hear me tell you Oracle is too big to innovate.”

I had mentioned in a blog last week that with its newfound power and position in the IT industry thanks to the Sun deal, Oracle might display a bit more humility than hubris. Larry and company might be more humble eventually, but not this week.

But Larry didn’t have all the best one liners. In his opening remarks Oracle President Charles Phillips, under siege from jilted mistress YaVaughnie Wilkins’ billboard campaign highlighting their once romantic relationship said, “welcome to this important day in the history of enterprise computing. Hopefully you have had a smoother week than I did. But on to bigger and better things.”