ERP Software

Oracle to purchase Hyperion

 

Oracle today agreed to purchase Hyperion Solutions  for $3.3 billion which will make Oracle the No. 1 in the business intelligence market, according to Charles Phillips, Oracle president.

The transaction is subject to customary closing conditions and is expected to finalized in April 2007.

"This extends our business intelligence strategy of a year ago, when we launched Oracle business intelligence. That's been one of our highest growth product lines," Phillips said in a conference call this morning. "We now have the most comprehensive BI product line."

This purchase will most  likely start a round of consolidation within the BI area.

"IBM may buy Cognos, HP might end up buying Business Objects or Business Objects may buy another competitor. There will be a lot of pressure on these vendors to react to this acquisition," according to Mr Wang the senior analyst at forester.

What is interesting is SAP has partnership with Hyperion and might make a bid for Hyperion with Oracle having Hyperion it will give them another route into the SAP customer base ,"Now Oracle's Hyperion software will be the lens through which SAP's most important customers view and analyze their underlying SAP ERP data.

Oracle number one player now

Oracle to buy SAP?

The rumour mill is on overdrive at the moment with Oracle putting in a bid for SAP.

The financial experts think there is not much substance to the rumour and might be done to prove to the public that Oracle is large enough to make a bid for SAP.

The timing is perfect to deflect attention away form Sap’s news on releasing a SaaS version for the mid market plus the competition authorities would not allow this deal to go through.

update

31.05.2007 :The story is doing the rounds again with SAP stock up ,the feedback is that  oracle has bought 8% of SAP.

Zdnet Link

Where there is smoke there is fire ,SAP is involved in all the rumours and is getting bad press at the moment for their future strategy.

Everybody Loves Larry

Oracle Fusion Middleware

Oracle‘s new Fusion Middleware helps customers build business processes for several different applications using APIs or other integration points such as WSDLs. The middleware products are then used to help create SOA using Web services, an Enterprise Services Bus and Oracle BPEL Process Manager.

Oracle's Fusion Middleware Stack includes

Oracle Application Server 10g,

Security Developer Tools (to support WS-Security and SAML),

Oracle Identity Management,

Oracle Data Hubs,

Oracle Collaboration Suite,

Oracle process manager,

Oracle web services manger,

JDeveloper tools,

Oracle WBPEL, and

Native support for EJB 3.0 and Hibernate.

All these features hot-pluggable, allowing Oracle users to mix-and-match Fusion Middleware with their existing infrastructure software. “With this approach, we can provide customers a complete SOA environment, or we can let customers use what they already have and simply add added functionality, such as end-to-end security or [BPEL] process management, where they might need it,” MacNeil said.

Oracle ERP fusion

Larry on ERP consolidation

Larry chatting to forbes and his thoughts on the ERP consolidation.

"You have to take a broader view and realize this is an industry like any other--telecom, railroads. They went through consolidation. Why shouldn't the computer industry be any different?"

"This shouldn't have been a surprise to anybody. But it seemed to be, and a lot of people thought I was nuts when I said these things. And that's why we're out there alone as a consolidator. "

Larry also mentioned that Oracle could buy BEA Systems  or buy BusinessObjects, the largest business intelligence vendor.

Forbes

IBM hardware for JD Edwards

IBM is offering a i 520 Solution Edition for Oracle's JD Edwards EnterpriseOne for customers with under a hundred seats.

The package will offer as asset lifecycle, customer relationship, financial, human capital, project, supplier and supply chain management (RFID support)

Hardware costing about $21,000

You can get performance data at IBMERP.

Oracle Fusion upgrade path ,costs

Migration to Fusion may require multiple upgrades of each oracle fusion application package. For the majority of applications, Oracle will issue an upgrade to Fusion from only the two latest oracle versions If you’re using an older release, you’ll have to upgrade to one of the newer versions first.

Fusion is a complete rewrite. New product releases  have more problems than normal upgrades. It’s often better to upgrade after the software has been in the field long enough for the initial bugs to be identified by some other company.

There will be a shortage of Fusion specialist expertise after the initial product release. individuals with Fusion experience or even Fusion training will be in  demand and very expensive.

According to Ronald Schmelzer, analyst at  Zapthink (a SOA consultancy), SOA promises tremendous benefits for manufacturers because 70 to 80 percent of their IT costs are for just maintaining their systems. However, even if a manufacturer chooses not to go down the SOA route ,adopting SOA will not be optional because in the next few years, says Schmelzer, “the major ERP vendors, SAP and Oracle, are making their customers adopt their latest platforms … both of which are SOA to the core, and basically providing no other upgrade path.” These are indispensable ERP applications for any manufacturer.  he claims, “By 2010 80% of manufacturers will have adopted SOA because they had no other choice.”

Oracle Fusion resources

Oracle Fusion road map and transition costs

Oracle applications up 56%

Oracle shares  jumped after the ERP company said fourth- quarter profit and revenue beat its own forecast because of high sales.

The growth in new database licenses shows Chief Executive Officer Larry Ellison's acquisition strategy is spurring customers to buy an array of programs. Redwood City, California- based Oracle has spent about $19 billion to buy 17 companies since January 2005, mostly for software to manage backoffice tasks.

New license sales of applications gained 83 percent, including the results from Retek  and Siebel Systems , bought in the past year. Excluding those, new application licenses gained 56 %  a sign that sales picked up for PeopleSoft, which Oracle bought for $10.6 billion in January 2005.

Companies are looking for stability and Oracle's results show big is better.

Oracle Middleware on course

Oracle has announced that 26,000 customers are now using Oracle middleware which will help the transition to Oracle Fusion. They have been hacking away since 2001 and claim to be the fastest growing middleware players.

Project Fusion is Oracle's plan to create an integrated suite of the best components of all the ERP (enterprise resource planning) applications it has acquired over the past year. These won't be just mixed and matched components cherry-picked from the PeopleSoft, J.D. Edwards or Siebel Systems product lines. They will be replications of the best features and technologies from those products reproduced in entirely new applications developed in Java all will have lifetime warranties?

Oracle has certified these packages to work with Fusion Middleware

Oracle eBusiness Suite,

PeopleSoft

J.D. Edwards

Retek retail software

Oracle vs SAP |open source threat?

Oracle has just bought Sleepycat a supplier of open source database software for developers of embedded applications.

Larry Ellison quote is, "We are moving aggressively into open source. We are embracing it. We are not going to fight this trend. We think if we're clever, we can make it work to our advantage." Which if you compare against Peter Graf, SAP's executive vice president of marketing, "We believe that open-source business applications do not have enough time to mature before this huge consolidation wave matures,"

Oracle and SAP have very different views about the threat/opportunity that open source has within the ERP software market .For Oracle it could be a way to manage Open Source within ERP and trying to make sure the tiger does not bite you in the arse .SAP has a reputation of being a bit arrogant and they will tell you how to manage your business process the SAP way. I can see their point about Open Source being great for non critical business functions but there is one way to get a financial director to pucker up and that is to tell him that his core back office system does not have a strong reliable roadmap.

It will be interesting to see what impact open source has within the ERP software industry.