A few weeks ago, when Oracle (ORCL) reported fine quarterly results, the company said it was no closer to persuading the board of BEA Systems (BEAS) to accept its earlier takeover offer. Clearly, Larry Ellison’s minions don’t quit easily. Instead, Oracle announced Wednesday it would acquire BEA for $8.5 billion, or about $7.2 billion when you subtract out the cash on BEA’s balance sheet.

A few lessons here. Pundits will say that business software increasingly is a game played only by the biggest of the big. That list that includes Oracle, Microsoft (MSFT), SAP (SAP) and three companies long known more for their hardware than software: IBM (IBM), Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) and Sun Microsystems (JAVA), which announced Wednesday a smaller acquisition of the Swedish database software maker MySQL. But, while the giants dominant the business software market, startups continue to flourish, especially of the Web variety. Salesforce.com (CRM) and NetSuite (N) are two good examples. (Though, what’s this? NetSuite’s IPO bubble appears to have sprung a bit of a leak.)

A second lesson: Silicon Valley companies that refuse to adhere to modern financial theory become takeover bait. BEA is a solid cash generator whose growth has slowed. That’s what attracted raider Carl Icahn, who saw value in BEA’s stalled shares. The fact that BEA had more than a billion dollars of cash and a mere $20 million in debt shows that it suffers from a common tech-company disease: a failure to use its balance sheet to reward shareholders. (BEA’s debt-to-equity ratio, according to Yahoo Finance, is a mere 1.4 percent; By comparison, Oracle’s is a far more aggressive 32 percent.)

Here’s the final lesson. Larry Ellison gets what he wants in the end. The seer of Silicon Valley has long been quickly dismissed for picking unneccessary fights with Microsoft earlier in his career and for his flamboyant lifestyle. While Microsoft has been battling Google (GOOG), Oracle trained its balance-sheet guns on the business it knows best, spending $25 billion in the process. The results have been impressive.

Fittingly for the day of the Iowa caucuses – a day when presidential wannabes pay obeisance for the last time of the year to the ethanol gods – a high-profile renewable energy company announced a setback.

Imperium Renewables, a Seattle company founded by a former executive at Microsoft (MSFT), the noted energy company, withdrew its plans for an IPO, citing poor “market conditions.” The company didn’t elaborate on just what market conditions it referred to. But clearly it’s not the market for IPOs. NetSuite (N), despite early criticism from ill-informed pundits, proved that the market always is receptive to the right kind of IPOs. No, the market conditions Imperium must mean are the markets for alternative fuels, like ethanol and biodiesel, Imperium’s particular blend of non-petroleum elixir.

Imperium had hoped to raise $345 million, which would add to the gusher of money flowing into ethanol and other alt-fuel projects. (Reuters has lots of good details in its dispatch on the withdrawal.)

It’s been clear for some time now that the renewable fuels investment craze is a classic bubble. That’s not to say ethanol and biodiesel make no sense. They do make sense at some scale and over some time period. But it means that not every project makes sense and that a whole lot of investors will lose plenty of money.

For Imperium’s part, it had intended to use $240 million for three additional biodiesel plants. One wonders if the market conditions will be right for those either.

A smallish software company called NetSuite filed papers Monday with the SEC to go public. If it weren’t for the fact that Larry Ellison controls 74% of the company and that the online software provider for businesses is a relentless press hound you’d probably never have heard of this company.

As NetSuite prepares to public it will be making a lot of comparisons between itself and other companies. For instance, because it will go public using the auction method, NetSuite will point out that it’s the first big tech IPO to do since Google (GOOG). Because the company delivers its services online, it will compare itself frequently to Salesforce.com (CRM), another company Ellison, the CEO of Oracle (ORCL), helped fund.

In the spirit of comparisons, here are some NetSuite probably won’t make. NetSuite, you see, was founded the year before Salesforce.com, 1998, the same year Google was founded. When Salesforce.com filed to go public in 2004, its last full year of revenues weighed in at $96 million. It made $3.5 million that year. Google, which also went public in 2004, had revenues the previous year of $1.5 billion and profits of $106 million. As for NetSuite, which started hyping its IPO last December, its last full year of revenues were $67 million, on which it managed to lose $23 million.

There’s also the comparison of spending. NetSuite spent $44 million on sales and marketing last year, 65% of its revenues. Even the hilariously freespending Salesforce.com spent “only” 57% of its revenues on sales and marketing in its last full year before going public — and it made a profit that year.

One wonders with numbers like this why NetSuite is rushing to go public at all. Valuing IPOs is all about what Wall Street types refer to as comps. Limelight Networks (LLNW), for example, went public largely by using competitor Akamai (AKAM) as a comp. In NetSuite’s case, however, the comps don’t look that great.