Oracle buys Bridgestream for employee role mapping
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Oracle has acquired Bridgestream, a maker of software that helps companies map employee responsibilities, Oracle said Wednesday.
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(InfoWorld) - PM (performance management) vendors appear to be universal in their delight at the news that Oracle will buy Hyperion for $3.3 billion. Their pleasure comes mainly from believing that enterprise-level companies do not want to buy a PM solution from an application or database vendor, preferring instead to purchase mission-critical applications like PM from an independent company with domain expertise and a unique understanding of the space. "A Goldman Sachs survey said that over 65 percent of CIOs prefer to purchase their BI and PM applications from an independent vendor," said Michelle Mollot, vice president of market strategy at Cognos. First and foremost, Oracle will have to convince customers that the Hyperion application will not be optimized for the Oracle database environment and rather that it will be optimized for applications that are important to their company, especially because most large companies have a heterogeneous database and application environment that requires a high level of open and ERP-independent software. The last thing a customer wants is performance management to be an accessory to a database or an application, adds Piet Loubser, senior vice president and director of market intelligence at Business Objects. There appears to be universal agreement from Hyperion competitors that performance management must live transversely across all systems in a heterogeneous environment. "You cant afford to have any bias to other applications that might exist in an infrastructure," said Loubser. Trevor Walker, vice president of marketing at Cartesis, a financial consolidation vendor, said that in the foreseeable future, there will be a lack of clarity on applications from Oracle and where they sit on the application roadmap. "It opens up a lot of opportunities," he said. Craig Schiff, president of BPM partners, a vendor-neutral consulting firm that helps companies launch BPM initiatives, says the acquisition will be a significant challenge for Oracle. "No transactional vendor has been able to sell PM applications. Nobody buys SAPs PM apps," Schiff said. Â The only value Oracle may offer to its customers is integration with its underlying data structure. But Schiff says Hyperion itself is still struggling with integration issues between its own applications, such as financial management, planning, and BI tools. Schiff may know a thing or two about Hyperion as he was the second hire at the company back in the 1980s. While Oracle is spending R&D dollars on integration with ERP, most large companies see the major benefit from single-solution providers in the fact that all of their research and development dollars are focused on PM. "Because PM is a strategic front-office solution with high visibility, it is not an area you compromise on," said Schiff. Not all analysts agree, however. Despite the delight expressed by vendors spoken to for this report, Josh Greenberg, principal at Enterprise Applications Consulting has a different point of view: "Competitors should be worried." According to Greenberg, Hyperion lets Oracle have a conversation with the financial management of a company, the C-level executives. Hyperion plus a big ERP suite can be potentially a lucrative and competitive combination if it can make sense in the context of what Oracle already has. "The trick is integration and assimilation," said Greenberg. Schiff also sees another side to the acquisition, saying it could be a preemptive move before Microsoft unveils Performance Point Server, its PM solution. Schiff says that Microsoft is going to be a big player in the performance space and that IBM may enter the fray as well, picking up Cognos next It is the conclusion of all analysts and vendors in this space that performance management as a separate niche has become extremely mission-critical ever since Sarbanes-Oxley. Up until Sarbanes, the systems for financial management were not effective, and the budget process was too loose, many say.Â  PM is the discipline companies need to apply to reign in risk, notes Cognos' Mollot. It has by default become the new battleground for the hearts and minds of enterprise customers, and that may explain why Oracle made its move. "Application vendors have been able to automate the transaction system phase and now PM becomes the next competitive advantage," said Mollot.
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As OracleÂ begins mapping out its plans for integrating PeopleSoft's applications business into its own, PeopleSoft's channel of reseller and integration partners are waiting to see how they'll fit into Oracle's strategy.ADVERTISEMENTReducing the Total Cost of OwnershipLearn how to reduce the total coast of ownership in enterprise data management in this case study.
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Business software company Oracle Corp   said it agreed to buy Netsure Telecom Ltd, a maker of  network related software, for an undisclosed sum.
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The acquisition will boost Oracle's telecom offerings with Netsure's communications applications suite.
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PeopleSoft will bundle its future business applications with IBM&#39;s infrastructure software as part of a billion-dollar technology and marketing agreement between the two companies.
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OracleÂ has taken over control of PeopleSoftÂ by buying 75 percent of the PeopleSoft's outstanding shares from its stockholders, Oracle announced Wednesday.
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The deal is the latest in a stream of takeovers for Oracle as it seeks to surpass SAP of Germany in the market for business analysis software.
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Oracle continues to snap up smaller software companies even while it battles to acquire middleware vendor BEA. On Wednesday Oracle said it had agreed to buy Interlace Systems, which makes operations planning software, for an undisclosed price.
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Oracle (Nasdaq: ORCL) finally has won control of PeopleSoft (Nasdaq: PSFT) after an 18-month takeover battle, making the Redwood Shores, California-based company the world's second-largest vendor of business management applications software.
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(InfoWorld) - Oracle Corp. has released the first major new version of its demand management softwareÂ a year after acquiring the technology through the purchase of Demantra. The database, middleware and applications vendor acquired privately held Demantra in June 2006 for an undisclosed sum to beef up its demand chain planning capabilities. The Demantra software helps companies accurately predict the likely demand for their products so they can better manage worldwide supply chains. Available Monday, Oracle's Demantra 7.1.1 software features prebuilt integration with the advanced planning applications for both the vendor's E-Business Suite and its JD Edwards EnterpriseOne software, according to Jon Chorley, vice president of supply chain management strategy at Oracle. Oracle will continue to sell Demantra as a stand-alone product, but the software will also be available as part of E-Business Suite or JD Edwards EnterpriseOne, he said. The new release also supports Oracle's Fusion middleware and includes improved demand analysis and forecasting capabilities. The vendor is working on further integration between Demantra and Oracle's Siebel CRM (customer relationship management) software to enable, for example, a user to preview the likely effects of a particular promotional campaign on demand for a specific product. There had been a pre-existing long-term relationship between Demantra and JD Edwards, an ERP (enterprise resource planning) software vendor, which Oracle acquired when it purchased PeopleSoft in January 2005. Chorley estimated that about 50 percent to 60 percent of the Demantra customer base is running JD Edwards or other Oracle applications, with most of the rest on SAP AG's rival applications. Among its many acquisitions, Oracle has made two other forays into the linked areas of demand, supply and product management, withÂ the November 2005 purchase of transportation management software vendor Global Logistics Technologies (G-Log) and the pending US$495 millionÂ acquisition of product lifecycle management company Agile Software, due to close next month. Key to all of these purchases is Oracle's aim to compete aggressively against its main rival SAP. In terms of Demantra's competitors, Chorley named SAP and a host of more niche players including i2, JDA, Logility and CAS. Oracle's acquisition strategy continues to be a mix of tight integration with its own applications while retaining links into third-party alternatives, he said. Unlike the G-Log acquisition where Oracle rebranded the software it bought as Oracle Transportation Management, the vendor has so far opted to retain the Demantra name, which is a contraction of "Demand is our mantra." It's a decision the company may rethink in the future, Chorley said, adding, "We've been a little inconsistent on naming." While Demantra is a well-known brand, the danger of sticking with the name is that some customers may not realize that the software is well integrated with Oracle's software, he said. Like its application competitors, Oracle is considering which of its many applications it would make sense to make available as hosted software. "We could do Demantra on-demand; it's certainly a possibility," Chorley said. Oracle could host the software or enable other companies to do so. Oracle is likely to begin using Demantra internally, Chorley said. Tools like Demantra are becoming increasingly relevant to software and services vendors as they look to ensure that their demand and supply chains include customer feedback and meet regulatory standards. Â
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For the first time since closing a deal to purchase PeopleSoft for $10.3 billion, Oracle has begun offering a glimpse of how it plans to digest its acquisition and handle what will represent four different product lines.
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Oracle Corp  said it agreed to acquire  privately held Interlace Systems, a provider of operational  planning software, for an undisclosed sum.
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Oracle Corp. is finally bringing to the North American market its Oracle E-Business Suite Special Edition, a midmarket-aimed package of pre-installed, preconfigured software from its 11i suite of business applications.
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(InfoWorld) - With Web 2.0, SaaS (software as a service), and open source grabbing all of the headlines, launches of enterprise infrastructure software that were once major IT events now sometimes seem like forgotten affairs. Certainly the new millennium marked a downturn in interest for traditional, monolithic back-end software. Yet, boosted by virtualization, there appears to be plenty of life in old-school offerings. According to its 2007 global IT market forecast, IDC predicts that spending on infrastructure software will grow 9 percent this year, faster than any other software category. In this 'diminished' environment, Oracle's pending release of its upgraded 11g database may not grab the imagination of the technorati, but it remains significant to a vastly underestimated group of IT users. The global database market grew 14.2 percent last year to total $15.2 billion, according to Gartner. Oracle, which released its last major database upgrade, 10g, four years ago, already holds almost half the market. That's more than double the share of second-place IBM. The official launch of 11g is set for next Wednesday, July 11, in a New York City ceremony overseen by Oracle President Charles Philips. Publicly, Oracle has for the most part avoided specifics, saying that 11g will offer improvements in high availability, performance, scalability, and manageability. Tidbits it has revealed include free migration and management tools that will let administrators oversee non-Oracle databases at the same time they manage their Oracle ones. Oracle has also said that 11g will have new compression technology that could potentially reduce customers' storage demands by two-thirds, the ability to store unstructured data faster than traditional file systems, and better partitioning. Fleshing out the details Web accounts by beta testers and others are now confirming those reports. According to what appears to be a presentation by Oracle Vice President of Technology Mark Townsend, many of the new features are in the area of "change assurance." These help companies save money and testing time when migrating to new hardware or making configuration changes. For instance, features like database replay and SQL replay let DBAs view how changes in the database or SQL code affect performance. 11g will also let users set up test environments using snapshot standbys and help automate rolling database upgrades. Other features include online table and index redefinition, support for online hot patching and continuous availability of online applications even when they are in the midst of an upgrade, and automatic diagnostic workflow to fix problems faster. In the area of information lifecycle management, 11g will allow DBAs for the first time to partition by interval, ref, or virtual column. It also adds a new composite way to partition. According to an article by Jim Czuprynski, an Oracle senior instructor at Fujitsu Consulting who beta-tested 11g, some of the best new features include in-memory caches for retaining widely used, slow-changing data; better diagnosis and repair features; and enhancements to Oracle's flashback tools for data recovery. Longtime Oracle watcher Donald Burleson notes in his list of 11g features support for schema-based Document Type Definitions for describing the internal structure of XML documents as well as more scalable Java for faster performance. On security, an area for which Oracle has been criticized of late, Burleson says 11g will include improvements such as case-sensitive passwords and an inviolable audit vault that protects against insider threats. Iggy Fernandez, editor of the NoCOUG Journal, the official newsletter for the Northern California Oracle Users Group, praises what he says is 11g's unheralded "learning optimizer" feature. "When relational databases replaced hierarchical and network databases in the 1980s, the promise was that programmers would no longer need to optimize their queries by hand," said Fernandez. While no database has "completely realized" that vision, 11g, says Fernandez, is a "great step -- the query optimizer simply learns from its mistakes -- in fact, it can stop a query that is already in progress and try a different approach!" "Performance tuning is the biggest component of database administration effort today, and the learning optimizer could produce tremendous labor savings if it works as advertised," Fernandez said. But will users upgrade? With 11g, will Oracle be able to extend its lead over IBM -- whose release of DB2 9 "Viper" last summer did not lead to mass early uptake, according to the Gartner figures -- by convincing users to rush and upgrade? Kevin Closson, chief software architect for clustering vendor Polyserve, says yes, based on how stable this release already is known to be. "From everything I've seen in this release, there should be no technical reasons holding back customers' adoption," Closson wrote in his blog. But Amy Stuemky, database administrator for travel tour operator Globus, says her organization is just starting to move its 50 Oracle databases to 10g. "Our philosophy with Oracle is that it is too bleeding-edge with any first release," Stuemky said. And the company is only moving now because Oracle's regular support, called Premier Support, is about to end. "Oracle almost pushes you [to upgrade] by desupporting its stuff," she said. Fernandez agrees that expecting users to rush to 11g any faster than they did with prior versions would be unrealistic. "There is just too much effort involved in testing and upgrading critical business systems and new releases can be plagued with software bugs," he wrote. "Speaking for myself, I would prefer Oracle to fix the bugs that still remain in the previous version instead of give us a feature-packed new version!" Oracle will go slow with one aspect of 11g. For its free Express Edition aimed at students and developers, which Oracle debuted in 2005, the company won't release an upgrade until the more stable 11g R2 comes out, according to an Austrian developer, Slavojub Krishan, who cited conversations with Oracle executives at a recent developer conference.
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Recognizing the increasing importance of mobility in the enterprise, Oracle (Nasdaq: ORCL) has unveiled a database product that promises to extend the company's grid computing platform to workers on the move.
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Oracle has starting shipping a suite of tools for linking Web 2.0 apps with data sources and business processes.