Oracle says it's broadening, not ending, its dispute with SAP
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Settlement is the furthest thing from the mind of Oracle, which now contends that the wounds it suffered through SAP's alleged IP infringement cut deeper than at the time it filed its lawsuit.
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Blog: SAP said it plans to formally respond by midnight (PST) Monday to Oracle's lawsuit, which claims SAP's wholly owned subsidiary TomorrowNow accessed Oracle's proprietary support and maintenance information beyond contractually allowed levels.
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(InfoWorld) - Oracle's lawsuit against rival SAP will move finally to trial on February 9, 2009 -- almost two years after the suit was initially filed, SAP said Tuesday. After a case management conference with the two sides that had been postponed from September 4, Judge Martin Jenkins of the Northern District Court in San Francisco set the date for the four-week trial, along with a deadline for motions of November 13, 2008. A further case management conference will be held February 12, 2009. Jenkins is expected to issue a more detailed order, with limits on discovery and the possible use of mediation toÂ resolve the dispute, SAP said. In March,Â Oracle sued SAPÂ for illegally downloading customer support materials from an Oracle Web site, via its TomorrowNow subsidiary. SAP acquired TomorrowNow, which provides support for products from Oracle acquisitions PeopleSoft and J.D. Edwards, in January 2005. TomorrowNow may use some materials from Oracle's Customer Connection Web site, but only for certain customers covered under particular agreements.Â SAP admittedÂ that TomorrowNow did make some "inappropriate" downloads, but maintains that the information was not passed to the parent company, nor did it approve such downloads. Both companies maintain Web sites relating to the case. Oracle's can be found here, and SAP's here. Oracle had not issued a statement on the case management conference at time of writing. Â
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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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LONDON -- Enterprise software giant Oracle may be known for big plans and bold moves, but the Redwood Shores, California, company has realized it also has to think small.
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San Francisco, December 7: Oracle Corp on Monday said it believes its business software applications, an area that has lagged the rest of the company, are gaining ground against market leader SAP AG of Germany.
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(InfoWorld) - When it comes to Oracle Corp.'s on-demand software business, the normally outspoken vendor has tended to be somewhat reticent about how it defines both the scope and focus of its operation. Recently, however, the company has begun to talk more openly about software-as-a-service (SaaS), an approach that it sees as applicable to all Oracle offerings. Earlier this month, Oracle revealed it had more than 2,200 on-demand customers, representingÂ more thanÂ 1.7 million users. In its most recent financial quarter ended Aug. 31, 2006, the vendor reported that its on-demand revenue rose 48.8 percent to $125 million, compared with the year-ago quarter. IDG News Service talked this week to the man who heads up Oracle's on-demand operations, Juergen Rottler, the company's executive vice president of Oracle Customer Services. An edited transcript of that conversation follows. IDGNS: What's Oracle's take on on-demand software? Rottler: There's a lot of interest and hype in the marketplace around on-demand, particularly in the salesforce automation space, whether it's RightNow [Technologies Inc.] or Salesforce.com Inc. or our Siebel CRM On Demand. Oracle is the only company that can offer an overarching on-demand platform for all applications and for all business processes and for different technologies -- database and middleware -- it doesn't have to just be applications. IDGNS: At last month's OpenWorld conference, Oracle Chief Executive Officer Larry Ellison described the company's on-demand business as the same size as Salesforce.com's; is that correct? Rottler: It's very hard to compare our businesses; it's a bit like an apples-to-oranges comparison. We have so many different deployment options and we don't count software licenses and support as part of on-demand revenue. I'll stick with Larry's statement from OpenWorld. We're a very large company. As a part of Oracle, on-demand isn't a huge business, but we have a very significant interest in it. IDGNS: How does your approach differ from that of, say, SAP AG, which appears to be adopting a more cautious approach to on-demand? Rottler: SAP is struggling in this space. They see it more as an on-ramp as driving users to more traditional [on-premise] software. We've been in the on-demand business for nearly seven years. It's influenced our development priorities, how we run our business and it's influenced our data centers. We really have an on-demand platform. We see partners take that platform for applications across the entire enterprise. We have on-demand versions for all of our applications including the ones we acquired. We've a revamped release of PeopleSoft Enterprise On Demand and we have Oracle On Demand for Siebel CRM as well as Siebel CRM On Demand. We have all our retail 'on-demanded' -- Retek and ProfitLogic -- and our G-Log logistics. We're working on a Portal solution. IDGNS: Who does the bulk of the hosting of your on-demand software -- Oracle or your partners -- in percentage terms? Rottler: In most cases where partners are hosting, it's because the customer already has someone to outsource their software. Depending on the geography, it's in the 20 to 30 percent range. The majority of our business is hosted out of our data centers. IDGNS: Where are your data centers and do you expect to open more outside the U.S. as your on-demand operation grows? Rottler: Our most well-known data center is in Austin, Texas. Our other data centers serve as disaster recovery or back-up sites. We don't talk about them or their location a lot of time for security reasons. For local capabilities, we tend to partner. We're fortunate that we can look at all options, but we'll most likely go with partners. IDGNS: How does your on-demand business look on a regional basis, is it dominated by the U.S.? Rottler: It mirrors the regional themes for broader [IT] outsourcing adoption. North America today is sort of ahead, but Europe is definitely not lagging. It's fast catching up to North America and is led by the U.K. We have a very strong business in Latin America and lots of success in Asia-Pacific anchored in Australia. Our four strongest markets are North America, the U.K., Latin America and Australia. IDGNS: Is there an average size for your on-demand customers? Rottler: It ranges from a few individuals to thousands of users. In general, our on-demand customers and the number of users are growing bigger, quite a bit bigger. We're seeing great interest among Fortune 100 companies. On-demand isn't just for small to midsize businesses. IDGNS: Larry Ellison is an investor in both Salesforce.com and NetSuite Inc. Has it been useful for Oracle to observe what those on-demand companies have been doing? Rottler: Larry's been a believer in this new way of doing business for many years. He's made significant investments in us and in other on-demand companies. We believe this is a market worth developing to create a broader ecosystem. We're also a very important platform provider. Salesforce.com runs on our databases and middleware. They're a customer, NetSuite similarly. We're in competition; in other areas, but they're also customers of ours. We participate in the market in multiple ways. IDGNS: Who do you see as your primary competition both now and in future? Rottler: Ultimately, it will be the same people we compete against today. SAP has been a bit unfocused and haphazard and it'll take them some years to come up to scratch. We're waiting to see if Microsoft [Corp.] can successfully enter the market. The rest of the competition are niche players. The challenge for them is can they broaden their products and be relevant in a broader context? We're a huge company that can provide an individual on-demand service or a multitenant solution securely; others don't have those options. Some players won't be around in future. IDGNS: Oracle has yet to really talk up its on-demand business, is that likely to change? Rottler: You will see us continue to raise the noise level a little. We've had a lot of other Oracle news to cover in the past quarters. On-demand is picking up, there's a lot of activity. IDGNS: What about Oracle's own internal on-demand deployments? Does the company's fondness for eating its own dog food extend to hosted software? Rottler: We look at Oracle as one big on-demand customer. There are many parts of our business running the same platform and products as our on-demand customers.
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Oracle's  search for a  smoking gun to prove the truth of its allegations that rival  SAP  stole its software is likely to be long and  arduous, making an out-of-court settlement attractive for both  parties.
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It was down to the wire, but it appears that SAP has responded to a strongly worded legal complaint from Oracle concerning the alleged theft of trade secrets.
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Oracle Corp.&#39;s hostile bid to acquire rival enterprise software maker PeopleSoft Inc. for $7.7 billion is set to continue for a bit longer.
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Business software group Oracle Corp. said it had extended a hostile takeover offer for PeopleSoft by two weeks to November 5.
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MOUNTAIN VIEW, California  - Oracle Corp.  will likely keep targeting smaller companies as it seeks to keep up a quick pace of takeovers, although bigger deals are still on the table, an Oracle executive said on Thursday.
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Oracle Relevant Products/Services from Oracle, backed by what the company views as a favorable response from PeopleSoft Latest News about PeopleSoft stockholders, is applying more pressure in an effort to complete its proposed US$9.2 billion hostile
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Integration is a key factor with any large ERP implementation and ongoing maintenance, and Oracle Corp. is catching on. At its London-based OpenWorld event this week Oracle announced better integration between
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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.
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(InfoWorld) - Oracle Tuesday announced plans to extend the capability of its system management software to offer monitoring and management for SAP AG applications through a partnership with Nimsoft. The company also unveiled Release 3 of Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g and new plug-ins for the product that enable it to manage third-party software. Additionally, Senior Vice President Richard Sarwal made his debut as the executive in charge of stepping up efforts to promote the product as a management system for heterogenous environments. Oracle and Nimsoft are working jointly to integrate the NimBUS SAP R/3 plug-in with Oracle Enterprise Manager 10G so that customers can monitor and manage SAP applications. The plug-in should be available in the second quarter of 2007, according to Nimsoft. Through new plug-ins for BMC Remedy Service Desk and IBM WebSphere MQ versions 5.3 and 6.0 introduced Tuesday, Oracle also added performance monitoring of those third-party products in Oracle Enterprise Manager 10G. All of this is part of Oracle's plan to focus on making enterprise management one of its core product offerings not just for Oracle environments, but across IT systems with products from multiple vendors, said Oracle president Charles Phillips on a conference call Tuesday. "We've undersold this product," he said of Oracle's system management suite. Phillips acknowledged that in the past, Oracle Enterprise Manager 10G has primarily been useful for managing environments that run Oracle software and has been sold along with more popular Oracle products such as its database and applications. However, now that it can support more third-party products, such as JBoss Application Server and IBM WebSphere Application Server along with those unveiled Tuesday, it is a more viable option to compete with rivals such as IBM's Tivoli suite and Hewlett-Packard's OpenView suite. "We were narrowly focused in the past," Phillips said. "Now we have become more complete and more open." To promote this new attitude toward enterprise management, Oracle now has a dedicated sales force paid to sell only Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g, and the company also is training its database and application-server sales representatives so that they can push the product in the marketplace, he said. During the conference call, Sarwal pointed to Oracle's expertise across multiple software infrastructure products, such as database, application server, and business applications, as a strength the company has to offer comprehensive systems management. "We have a unique view of how to manage all of that stack," he said. In addition to its new plug-ins, Oracle Enterprise Manager 10G Release 3 also includes enhanced provisioning capabilities across Oracle's various application offerings and the ability to bring to the surface business metrics from Oracle applications to perform business diagnostics, Sarwal said. Oracle Enterprise Manager 10G Release 3 is available on Linux and Windows. Business customers can evaluate the product for free by downloading it from Oracle's Web site. The new plug-ins also are available now for use only with Release 3.
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Â Oracle Corp.'s hostile bid to acquire rival enterprise software maker PeopleSoft Inc. for $7.7 billion is set to continue for a bit longer.