Oracle buys another database
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Trying to snatch IBM's crown? Comment Oracle and IBM are both competitors and partners. In the case of databases they are certainly rivals, with Oracle 10g and DB2 going head-to-head at many sites. However, it has occurred to me to wonder if Oracle is seeking to rival IBM's crown as the owner of the most different databases.â¦
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(InfoWorld) - While most of Oracle's recent purchases have focused on growing its applications business, the vendor's latest proposed purchase will beef up its growing identity management operation. Oracle announced Wednesday that it has agreed to buyÂ Bharosa, a provider of software to help detect online identity theft and fraud. The companies didn't reveal the financial details of the acquisition, which is expected to close next month. "The transaction will extend Oracle's Identity Management capabilities by adding proactive real time risk-analysis, strong authentication and fraud prevention," Hasan Rizvi, vice president, identity management and security products at Oracle, wrote in a letter to customers. Identity Management is part of Oracle's Fusion middleware. Bharosa has two main products -- Tracker, antifraud software that works by verifying a variety of factors to confirm identity, and Authenticator, a suite of secure authentication software, which works with Web browsers to protect a range of sensitive information such as passwords from malicious attacks. Once the purchase is completed, Oracle plans to add some of Bharosa's Tracker and Authenticator software to its existing online single sign-on (SSO) and Web-based authorization security products. The intention is to expand the use of Oracle's identity management software outside of an enterprise to safely encompass external users. At the same time, Oracle committed to continue to make Bharosa's software available on a stand-alone basis and to offer integrations with non-Oracle databases and applications as well as its own products. Bharosa has more than 30 customers for its real-time fraud detection and multifactor online authentication enterprise security software. Consumer Web sites using Bharosa's technologies include Wells Fargo & Co. and National City Corp. In total, the company estimates its software protects 27 million users. Other Bharosa customers are AudioTel, a supplier of software to banks, and I-flex solutions, an Indian financial services software vendor and an majority owned Oracle subsidiary. Founded in 2003, privately held Bharosa has its headquarters in Santa Clara, California. The company's name means "trust" in Hindi. Oracle was previously busy on the identity management front in 2005 buying up three companies -- Oblix, OctetString, and Thor -- for their technologies which the vendor then integrated into its security offerings. Â
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Good news for whom? Comment Last week, Oracle, one of the industry giants, announced that it has agreed to buy Hyperion Solutions Corporation, by no means a small ISV, for $52 per share - thereby valuing the acquisition at approximately $3.3bn.â¦
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Oracle increased its lead over IBM in the relational database market last year, while third-place Microsoft gained ground on IBM, according to sales totals compiled by Gartner analysts.
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Oracle, the world's second largest software producer, saw profits jump 16% to $509m (Â£283m) in the first half of the year on strong sales of its core database products.
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PeopleSoft agreed today to be bought by Oracle for $10.3 billion, or $26.50 a share, ending a bitter 18-month acquisition battle. PeopleSoft&#39;s price was 10 percent above what Oracle previously called its &quot;best and final&quot; offer of $24 a share.
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(InfoWorld) - EnterpriseDB has notched up international florist FTD Group as a customer in a vote of confidence for the young database company, which is trying to poach customers from Oracle with the promise of lower license fees and compatibility with Oracle applications. EnterpriseDB, whose software is based on the open-source PostgreSQL database, remains tiny compared with Oracle with around 100 paying customers as of April. But the win with FTD Group, which follows deals withÂ Sony Computer EntertainmentÂ and Vonage, could help persuade other big companies to bet on its software. FTD hasn't pulled out any Oracle databases. But when it moved an external reporting tool from its main production system to a database server of its own, it decided Oracle was beyond its budget and chose EnterpriseDB, said Jason Weiss, software architect at FTD. The EnterpriseDB licenses were about one sixth of what FTD would have paid for Oracle software, he said. FTD, based near Chicago, processes orders through about 20,000 retail florists in the U.S. and through 200 distribution centers. The reporting tool, based on Oracle Reports, allows the distributors to generate reports about their orders automatically from FTD's ARGO shipping administration system. FTD updated the reporting tool in December, and it worked fine until Feb. 14, Valentine's Day, when the surge in requests from distributors turned up performance issues. The problem was significant because the reporting system runs on the main ARGO production servers, and it dragged their performance down too. The short term fix was to turn off the reporting tool and generate reports manually when distributors asked for them. Longer term, FTD decided to get the reporting environment onto a separate server. "We're an Oracle shop, so we went to them, got a quote, and laughed because it wasn't even close to being in the budget we were looking for," Weiss said. "We'd had the idea of EnterpriseDB put in our heads by our Sun rep six or nine months before. They said EnterpriseDB does all their PostgreSQL support and we should check them out." It took a month to rule out Oracle as an option, and by then FTD needed to act fast because Mother's Day was approaching on May 13. It preferred EnterpriseDB over other low-cost options because of its compatibility with Oracle applications, Weiss said. "I called and asked if there was any way at all we could make it work, they got engaged, and we had a full working prototype before we signed a contract," he said. Setting up Oracle Reports with an Oracle database would have been easy. "Oracle Reports requires you to pick a data store, and then normally you don't configure anything. [To use EnterpriseDB] we had to convert everything to a JDBC data source," he said. He had some problems with the data conversion -- Oracle Reports would request only 10 characters when a data field appeared to require 100, for example. But he persevered and got the transition done in about a month, he said. He's running the software on a four-processor Sun Fire v490 Solaris server. "I'm very pro-open source, I've used MySQL and PostgreSQL. The selling point with EnterpriseDB was the Oracle compatibility layer they have on top of it," Weiss said. Price was the other key factor. He estimated that FTD saved about $100,000 in license and support costs by going with EnterpriseDB. The Enterprise Edition of Oracle's database carries a list price of $40,000 per processor, while a Premium license for EnterpriseDB Advanced Server is $5,000 per processor. Weiss said he got no discount for being a public reference customer. "I'm definitely using this to put some leverage on Oracle to get them to knock their pricing down," he said. "We pay a ridiculous amount of money in just support contracts. I have a serious monetary motivation to kick them out of the door." EnterpriseDB doesn't have everything he'd like. "We're looking for multi-threaded replication capability, and I've been told it's coming. But aside from that the thing runs like a top. We've not had a single outage." His experience as an Oracle customer also made the decision to look at other vendors easier. "We run their application server throughout our environment, but they don't want to put any skin in the game. When I call customer service I get the same response as anybody else. When I called EnterpriseDB, they jumped."
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Oracle has signed a definitive agreement to acquire PeopleSoft for $26.50 (Â£13.79) per share, or about $10.3bn. The transaction has been approved by both companies&#39; boards of directors and is expected to close by early January.
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REDWOOD SHORES, Calif. -- Business software maker Oracle Corp. said Wednesday it agreed to buy BEA Systems Inc. for about $7.85 billion, a compromise price that ends a months-long dispute over the value of the software company.
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Business software maker Oracle Corp. said Wednesday it agreed to buy BEA Systems Inc. for about $7.85 billion, a compromise price that ends a months-long dispute over the value of the software company.
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Oracle is taking the wraps off the next generation of its database and business application products at the Oracle OpenWorld 2004 user conference this week, even as it continues its quest to buy out rival PeopleSoft.
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Business software maker Oracle Corp. will buy Hyperion Solutions Corp. for $3.3 billion in cash, renewing a shopping spree aimed at toppling rival SAP AG.
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â¢ 2004-11-22 â¢ Oracle has won a key victory in its battle to acquire PeopleSoft, with PeopleSoft&#39;s investors agreeing to sell Oracle 60 per cent of PeopleSoft&#39;s outstanding shares.
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Oracle has agreed to buy BEA Systems for about $8.5 billion, or $19.375 per share, the companies announced.
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By paying $1 billion to purchase MySQL, Sun seems to be giving a pretty clear signal about the centrality of the popular open-source database to the company's planned open-source software stack. But users and vendors of the many other databases Sun supports and sells insist that they're just fine, thank you, with the new sibling. Really.
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Continuing its buying spree, Oracle has acquired a maker of employee role-mapping software.
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PeopleSoft Inc. agreed to be bought by Oracle Corp. for $10.3 billion, giving up an 18-month battle that pitted PeopleSoft against its shareholders, drove away customers and led to the ouster of its chief executive.