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Predicting the Oracle's Next Move


By SD Times News Team
October 15, 2005 — 
If the estimated 35,000 attendees at Oracle OpenWorld weren’t enough of an indicator, then the stream of checks flowing out of Redwood Shores, Calif., made it definite: Oracle is the hot technology company of 2005.

Last year, Oracle made headlines with its high-profile hostile acquisition of PeopleSoft. This year, Larry Ellison & Co. are grabbing up just about everything that isn’t nailed down, including CRM giant Siebel Systems, Indian banking software company I-Flex, logistics provider G-Log, business analytics maker ProfitLogic, real-time data management tools maker TimesTen, security manager Oblix, retail software maker Retek…the list goes on.

Meanwhile, even as Oracle struggles to present a unified strategy around its many families of enterprise software—including the Oracle Applications, PeopleSoft and JD Edwards product lines—it’s busy unveiling new releases of its core database and infrastructure products. The past few weeks have seen the release of Application Server 10g Release 3 and HTML DB 2.0, a flurry of benchmark records, a new branding strategy around the catchy phrase “Powered by Oracle,” a set of management dashboards, expanded partnership announcements with Dell, HP and IBM, and impressive initiatives around its Fusion middleware.

It’s enough to leave even a technology newspaper breathless. Indeed, there’s arguably more going on at Oracle than at any other company. By comparison, the other software giants, Microsoft, IBM and SAP, seem sleepy. Even the recent Microsoft Professional Developers Conference didn’t have a fraction of the frenetic energy of Oracle OpenWorld. And while it’s too soon to be certain, it appears the integration of the JD Edwards and PeopleSoft customer bases is going smoothly. And, Oracle president Charles Phillips’ pledge of lifetime application support was surely a welcome message to nervous CEOs, CFOs and CIOs.

While Oracle is demonstrating tremendous energy and creativity—and a seemingly bottomless checkbook—the next year will be more difficult. Developing a unified strategy and message that embraces all of its now-overlapping software lines will be a challenge. So, too, will be finding ways of integrating those offerings, something that Oracle’s new customers will certainly be demanding.

The company also will need to look toward developers. While there’s no doubt that its middleware, core applications and enterprise software product lines are strong, Oracle is not generally seen as a leader in software development tools; it has no equivalent of Visual Studio or the IBM Software Development Platform to bolster its offerings and drive innovation. While JDeveloper 10g is respected, Oracle needs a top-rated application life-cycle management solution.

Microsoft taught the industry that if you embrace developers, you’ll win; that’s why it pours so much money into Visual Studio, MSDN and training. IBM, through Rational and developerWorks, shows that it has learned this essential lesson, and tools are driving its SOA initiatives. Oracle has managed to sew up the applications and database markets, and is coming on strong in infrastructure. An obvious next step is to buy a tools company. Hmm. How about Borland?


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