26.5.09

With Virtual Iron, Oracle Bought a Big Loss

Did Oracle recently buy Virtual Iron, a maker of virtualization software, for its talent? Perhaps so, because the company certainly hasn’t been selling a lot of software, according to financial documents obtained by The Times.

The documents indicate that Virtual Iron had just $3.4 million in revenue last year. That’s a big rise over $1.5 million in 2007. But Virtual Iron sure spent a lot of money to get that revenue.

Its sales, marketing, research, development and administrative costs were $17.7 million last year, up from $13.6 million in 2007. So, in 2008, Virtual Iron posted a loss of $15.3 million.

Last January, Virtual Iron raised $20 million, hiking its total funding up to $65 million. Highland Capital Partners, Matrix Partners, Goldman Sachs, Intel Capital and SAP Ventures all funded the company.

Oracle has declined to reveal how much it paid for Virtual Iron, but with the revenue in 2008 sitting so low, it seems pretty clear that the investors lost out on this start-up — that is, unless Oracle was willing to pay many, many times Virtual Iron’s revenue. (The company did report $17 million in cash and equivalents in 2008.)

With the addition of Virtual Iron, Oracle has a crowded stable of virtualization products. Virtual Iron’s software will join Oracle’s own virtualization software, and soon enough Oracle will inherit even more virtualization software when it completes the purchase of Sun Microsystems.

The funny thing about these various software products is that they’re all based on the open source Xen project. So Oracle will own three products with the same guts.

Each company has made its own tweaks to Xen, leading to some differences among the products. Wim Coekaerts, Oracle’s vice president of Linux and virtualization engineering, said last week that the addition of Virtual Iron would let Oracle’s customers “more dynamically manage their server capacity and optimize their power consumption.”

Even with three sets of virtualization software on its side, Oracle has a long way to go to catch up with the market leader, VMware. Last year, VMware posted revenue of $1.9 billion.

Author: Ashlee Vance @ bits.blogs.nytimes.com


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13.5.09

Swiss America’s Cup Team Says Oracle Employed a Spy in Europe

The tradition of spying in the America’s Cup is apparently alive and well. Jean Antoine Bonnaveau, an employee of the American team BMW Oracle Racing, is under investigation by the Swiss and French police for taking photographs last month at Alinghi’s base in Villeneuve, Switzerland.

The investigation became public when the Swiss yacht club that Alinghi represents, the Société Nautique de Genève, included a copy of a police report concerning Bonnaveau with an affidavit it filed this week. The affidavit was submitted for a hearing on Thursday at the Supreme Court of the State of New York related to the still-unresolved terms of the next Cup.

“A spy from BMW Oracle was spotted trying to gather illegal information from the Alinghi boatyard in Villeneuve,” Paco Latorre, a spokesman for Alinghi, said in a telephone interview.

The BMW Oracle spokesman Tom Ehman played down the incident and accused the Swiss team of engaging in diversionary tactics.

“Société Nautique de Genève (S.N.G.) is once again trying to avoid the Court’s clear judgment by making trumped-up allegations that have nothing to do with the matter at hand,” Ehman said in a statement. “Legal observation of competitors is common practice in the America’s Cup and other major sporting events.”

The Cup, the most visible event in sailing, has long generated controversy and legal fees. Spying and claims of nautical espionage are not new. During the 1992 Cup in San Diego, Bill Koch, the owner of the victorious America, employed scuba divers to examine competitors’ hull designs. During the 2003 edition, the American challenger OneWorld was penalized for being in possession of proprietary design information that belonged to rival syndicates.

Syndicates routinely use chase boats to examine other teams’ yachts and tactics during training. When BMW Oracle launched its new 90-foot trimaran last year in Anacortes, Wash., Ehman said there were Alinghi employees on site observing and analyzing the yacht. He added that Alinghi representatives were also present when the trimaran was based in San Diego.

But Latorre said Bonnaveau’s behavior was of a more invasive nature than usual in Villeneuve, the Lake Geneva town where Alinghi is building its new multihull yacht behind closed doors. Bonnaveau is suspected of violating Swiss privacy laws.

“It should not be confused with what Alinghi did in San Diego,” Latorre said. “Observing and watching a boat that is public and that has been launched in front of everybody cannot be put in the same category as illegal espionage.”

Alinghi and BMW Oracle, the team based in San Francisco and owned by the American billionaire Larry Ellison, have been engaged in a protracted legal dispute since shortly after Alinghi successfully defended the Cup in June 2007 in Valencia, Spain.

Last month, after a series of appeals, BMW Oracle won the right to become the challenger of record for the next Cup. The decision dislodged the Spanish yacht club Club Nautico de Vela, which had been Alinghi’s initial choice to be its principal challenger.

But Alinghi and BMW Oracle officials are still haggling over the particulars of the competition, including the dates, which is the reason for Thursday’s hearing in New York.

After BMW Oracle’s victory in court last month, negotiations between the teams about the possibility of staging a traditional multiple-challenger event using monohulls off Valencia quickly broke down. They are now all but certain to face each other in massive multihull yachts in a best-of-three series next year.

BMW Oracle officials say that the next Cup should respect the latest court ruling and be held in February 2010, 10 months after the final appeal was resolved. But Alinghi officials have insisted on May 2010, arguing that the Cup’s governing document, the Deed of Gift, does not permit racing in the Northern Hemisphere before May 1.

Bonnaveau, a 50-year-old Frenchman, is suspected of beingin Villeneuve on April 28 and 29 attempting to gather information on Alinghi’s multihull in progress. Alinghi officials videotaped him and his vehicle when they spotted him, and he was later questioned by the French and Swiss police in the southern French city of Nîmes.

In the police report — a transcript of a hearing May 1 — Bonnaveau said that he worked as a sail analyst for BMW Oracle at a salary of $13,600 per month. He said that he had been sent to Villeneuve by BMW Oracle’s racing team designer, Manolo Ruiz de Elvira, and that such information-gathering missions were “routine” in the Cup world.

“I was officially authorized by my company to carry out this reconnaissance,” Bonnaveau said in the transcript. “In fact, I am part of the design team, but the entire staff can provide useful information, particularly on opposing teams. We call that a ‘recon cell’ for reconnaissance.”

Author: CHRISTOPHER CLAREY @ www.nytimes.com


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12.5.09

Oracle Aims to Be the Apple of Data Center Hardware

Oracle's recent US$7.4 billion bid for Sun Microsystems could turn Sun's ailing hardware business into a boon for data-center managers. But industry analysts question whether the software firm can turn Sun's hardware platform back into gold.

Oracle has done well in past acquisitions, buying and quickly integrating large software companies such as BEA Systems, PeopleSoft, and Siebel Systems. But the purchase of Sun, and its large hardware business and SPARC processor platform, is a whole different beast, says George Weiss, VP of server and operating system trends at Gartner.

"The nature of this acquisition (for Oracle) is different than anything that has preceded it," Weiss says. "Oracle has to carve out an opportunity in a market where Sun was pretty vulnerable and threatened."

In statements posted online, Oracle argues that its planned purchase of Sun Microsystems will give IT managers better, more integrated enterprise appliances for the data center. But Weiss worries that the acquisition could leave Oracle facing the same quandary as Sun: Decreasing hardware revenues for a minority SPARC platform.

Sun's revenues for its servers and storage products have fallen quickly in the past year. In 2008, the company made $153 million less on its computer system and storage products as compared to the prior year.

And, in its most recent quarter, which ended on March 29, Sun's product revenue fell even further, down $434 million compared to the same quarter in 2008, according to its filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Companies that compete against Sun's SPARC architecture question whether Oracle would be better served staying with the proprietary platform or increasing its adoption of Intel's Nehalem architecture. Intel announced the Xeon 5500, its first enterprise processor family which uses Nehalem, in March.

"Do they really need to stay on a SPARC-based system and what are the advantages of cost?" asks Jeff Hudgins, VP of marketing for NEI, which builds designs and builds enterprise products for other companies based on Intel's architecture. "Sun is leveraging a lot of x86 technology already. They have a Nehalem strategy as well."

When Oracle announced the acquisition on April 20, the company immediately tried to assuage the fears of Sun hardware users by committing itself to increasing its support of the SPARC processor architecture. "After the closing, Oracle plans to be the only company that can engineer an integrated system where all the pieces fit and work together so customers do not have to do it themselves," the company states in a FAQ posted on its Web site. "Our customers benefit as their systems integration costs go down while system performance, reliability and security go up."

Oracle declined to comment on the acquisition beyond the statements posted on its Web site, but in a posted interview, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison likens his strategy to Apple's creation of the iPhone.

"If a company designs both hardware and software, it can build much better systems than if they only design the software," Ellison said in the interview. "That's why Apple's iPhone is so much better than Microsoft phones."

If Oracle can deliver on the promise, data-center managers would stand to benefit. And an Oracle-Sun combination could threaten giants such as IBM, says James Kobielus, senior analyst for data warehousing and advanced analytics at Forrester Research.

"IT managers will have a one-stop shop of hardware and and software needs in the data center, in terms of both the servers and the storage, the databases and the business intelligence," Kobielus says. "This is clearly a shot across the bow of IBM, who long offered one-stop shop advantages."

IBM declined to be interviewed for this article.

Creating well-tuned appliances for the data center will not be anything new for Oracle, Kobielus adds. The software company already does just that for its data warehousing product line.

"Oracle will be able to scale economies, which will give everyone else in this area a run for their money, which will lead to an era when data managers can get a cheap out-of-the-box experience," Kobielus says.

Author: Robert Lemos @ www.computerworld.com


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11.5.09

Sun shareholders look to block Oracle sale

Sun shareholders are fiercely resisting the company's projected sale to Oracle. In the last month. there have been three separate lawsuits attempting to stop the sale, according to a filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission from Sun.

The suits, filed in California, name Sun, some of its officials and Oracle as defendants. All three actions are aimed at blocking the US$7.4(£4.9) billion sale, alleging the price tag is "unfair and inadequate." They also allege "claims for breach of fiduciary duty against the individual defendants and for aiding and abetting a breach of fiduciary duty against the corporate defendants," the filing states. The defendants have yet to file answers to the complaints.

Sun also said in the filing that it may have broken the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act during fiscal 2009. The law is meant to stop companies from bribing foreign officials. Sun said it has started an independent probe into suspect activities in a "certain foreign country" and "took remedial action," as well as made a voluntary disclosure to US authorities.

Meanwhile, Sun has decided to put the brakes on an effort to consolidate its database infrastructure into a single global ERP system.

Sun has "experienced a number of challenges" during the project that have affected operations, according to the filing.

"During the next six months, we have decided to delay the implementation of the remaining phases of the project while we evaluate alternatives," Sun said.
A Sun spokeswoman said the company "intends to respond appropriately to the lawsuits" but otherwise declined comment.

An Oracle spokeswoman declined to comment on the suits, but provided a statementsaying that Sun had disclosed its potential violations of the FCPA prior to the acquisition agreement.

Author: Chris Kanaracus, IDG news service


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7.5.09

Oracle upgrades BI offering

Oracle has launched Business Intelligence Applications Release 7.9.6, which includes improvements and integrations with other Oracle software, as well as a pair of new tools, Project Analytics and Loyalty Analytics.

The release adds a number of new human-resources dashboards, such as for talent management, recruiting and absenteeism. The vendor's procurement and spend-analytics BI module gets a number of updates, including a new employee-expenses dashboard and a "spend analyser."

In addition, Oracle has integrated its JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Financial Management application with its financial analytics BI software.

Meanwhile, the new Project Analytics module is aimed at governments, construction companies and services companies that want to analyse the costs of their projects. It includes a number of pre-built dashboards tuned for both private and public-sector organizations. Loyalty Analytics enables users to determine the success of marketing campaigns at both the customer and partner level.

Oracle's announcements reflect the fact that it's getting tougher for vendors to further evolve their underlying BI platform's capabilities, since the technologies have matured, according to Forrester Research analyst Boris Evelson.
"All the core functions have really been addressed," he said. "The real difference is in the applications."

The pre-built tooling in applications like Loyalty Analytics will likely have more appeal for smaller enterprises, which are interested in getting software up and running quickly or may not have a core competency in a particular area, Evelson said. A customer might say, "'We're a small bank, we know everything about banking, but not CRM. We're going to trust Oracle."

But large enterprises tend to shy away from such an approach, preferring to build out specialized BI applications themselves to gain a competitive advantage, he said. "There's no way anybody there is going to say, 'I'm going to trust Oracle to lead the way of how I should analyze my customers.'"

Meanwhile, the new project-analytics module could prove attractive to companies as the world attempts to emerge from an economic recession and government stimulus spending ramps up infrastructure projects and related activities.

There have always been plenty of choices for project portfolio management software, including the technology Oracle acquired last year by buying Primavera. But there is probably room in the market for advanced analytics that ride on top of such applications, Evelson said.

Author: Chris Kanaracus, IDG news service


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6.5.09

Coca-Cola, Oracle, Intel use Cayman Islands to avoid US taxes

Seagate Technology, the world’s largest maker of hard disk drives, is headquartered in Scotts Valley, California. Yet the documents it files with the Securities and Exchange Commission list its address on South Church Street in George Town, the capital of the Cayman Islands.

Seagate is just one of the companies that may be affected by President Barack Obama’s proposal Monday to raise about $190 billion over the next decade by outlawing techniques used by US companies in offshore locations to avoid paying taxes. While the US corporate tax rate is 35 percent, Seagate paid an effective tax rate of 5 percent in the year ended June 2008, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

The Caymans have no corporate income tax for companies incorporated there. The Caribbean island has helped scores of US companies, including Coca-Cola Co. and Oracle Corp., to legally avoid billions in tax payments to the US government, says US Senator Byron Dorgan.

“Our Main Street businesses are working hard during this economic downturn to pay their fair share of taxes,” says Dorgan, 66, a North Dakota Democrat. “Some of the country’s largest corporations are using these loopholes to avoid paying their fair share of taxes. It is my hope that the Congress will quickly take action to pull the plug on tax breaks that subsidize runaway plants that move US jobs overseas.”

One quarter of the 100 largest contractors with the US federal government, including Altria Group Inc. and Tyco International Ltd have had subsidiaries in the Caymans, according to a study by the Government Accountability Office. At least 10 of the 30 companies listed in the Dow Jones Industrial Average have had units with addresses in the Caymans.

As of November 2007, 378 US publicly traded companies had at least one significant subsidiary in the Cayman Islands, a GAO study found. Altria, Tyco, Coke and Oracle still have subsidiaries in the Caymans, according to their most recent SEC filings. Seagate lists its headquarters in Grand Cayman.
One of the Dow 30 companies using offshore sites to reduce its US taxes is Santa Clara, California-based Intel Corp., the world’s largest chipmaker.

Intel’s then vice president of tax, licensing and customs, Robert Perlman told the US Senate Finance Committee in March 1999 that Intel would have been better off incorporating in the Cayman Islands when it was founded in 1968.

“Our tax code competitively disadvantages multinationals simply because the parent is a US corporation,” Perlman testified.

Intel spokesman Chuck Mulloy said Monday his company is rethinking its tax strategy. “We’re studying the Obama proposal,” Mulloy said. “Particularly with taxes, the devil’s in the details.”

Seagate spokesman Brian Ziel said Monday that his company incorporated in the Caymans to reduce its taxes. “The competitive benefits relate both to taxes saved on certain income earned outside of the United States and the ability to efficiently deploy assets around the globe to remain competitive,” he said.

Eighty-five percent of Seagate’s employees work outside the US and more than 70 percent of the company’s revenue comes from sales overseas, Ziel said.

“Officially, our administrative headquarters is in the Caymans,” Ziel said. “That’s how it’s listed in our annual report.”

Altria spokesman Bill Phelps said his company is in the process of dissolving its Cayman subsidiary. Coke spokeswoman Kerry Kerr said, “We don’t comment on tax strategies, for competitive purposes.”

Tyco’s Paul Fitzhenry and Oracle spokeswoman Karen Tillman didn’t return calls requesting comment.

A five-story office building on South Church Street in the Caymans serves as the official address for 18,857 corporations. That building, called Ugland House, is listed in SEC filings as Seagate’s headquarters. About half those Cayman companies had billing addresses in the US, according to a 2008 GAO study.

President Obama referred to Ugland House Monday.

“On the campaign, I used to talk about the outrage of a building in the Cayman Islands that had over 12,000 businesses claim this building as their headquarters,” Obama said. “And I’ve said before, either this is the largest building in the world or the largest tax scam. And I think the American people know which it is: The kind of tax scam that we need to end.”

Maples and Calder, the law firm that occupies all of Ugland House in Grand Cayman, said Obama is mistaken.

“I’m sorry to disappoint anyone, but our office is neither the largest building in the world nor a center of financial misconduct,” said Charles Jennings, joint managing partner of Maples and Calder.

“Having a registered office address in the Cayman Islands is driven by commercial considerations, not by tax avoidance,” Jennings said. “It allows companies to raise capital and conduct global business.”

The firm, which provides services for the corporations that use its address, has incorporated more than 6,000 new companies over the past five years. Back in 2004, the building served as home to 12,748 companies using the same address in the Caymans, a British crown colony 150 miles south of Cuba.

Del Monte Fresh Produce Inc., whose corporate headquarters is in Coral Gables, Florida, lists another address -- Walker House on Mary Street in George Town, Grand Cayman -- in its SEC filings. That’s around the corner from Ugland House.

Del Monte’s effective tax rate for 2008 was 3 percent, up from 1 percent the year before. Del Monte spokeswoman Vidya Samsundar had no immediate comment on why the company is incorporated in the Caymans.

Author: David Evans @ http://www.caribbeannetnews.com


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5.5.09

Oracle upgrades collaboration tool to take on Microsoft

Oracle has announced enhancements to its recently launched Beehive collaboration software. The company has also slashed its entry-level price for Beehive by more than half, while announcing prices for a cloud-based version.

Oracle announced Beehive at last September's OpenWorld conference. It replaces the Oracle Collaboration Suite.

According to independent analyst Peter O'Kelly, Beehive represents Oracle's fourth attempt to crack the collaboration market, which has been long dominated by Microsoft and its Exchange and SharePoint products, and IBM with its Lotus Notes and Domino software.

Last updated in 2005, Collaboration Suite "failed to put a dent in the universe," O'Kelly wrote in a blog at Beehive's launch. SharePoint, meanwhile, has 100 million licensed users, according to Microsoft.

Despite its late entrance to the market, Oracle's senior vice president of collaboration technologies David Gilmour asserts that things will be different for Beehive.

"The market leaders are groupware products that have grown up," he said. "Collaboration was layered on after the fact, not designed that way in the beginning. Beehive is almost the complete inverse of that."

Gilmour was CEO of collaboration vendor Tacit Software. Tacit offered a cutting-edge "expertise location" platform that tracked employees' usage to build a profile of their expertise that could be found by other employees. Tacit was acquired by Oracle in November.

Oracle did not mentione an expertise location feature today. However, new features announced include "web-based team workspaces," which include wikis, team calendaring, file sharing and others built with enterprise-grade security and compliance, enhanced web and teleconferencing, and expanded compatibility with non-Oracle desktop tools, such as Microsoft Outlook email.

Not only can end users employ existing mail or IM clients of their choice with Beehive, but IT managers can continue to use Microsoft Exchange in conjunction with Beehive, Gilmour said. That can smooth over one of the difficulties associated with persuading large enterprises that have invested years and millions of dollars in Microsoft or IBM to migrate to Beehive.

Also, while "people hate switching, there are immediate hard dollar savings," Gilmour said. He reitierated that Beehive, which stores all data in an Oracle database, is more scalable than competitors.

"It is just way better when you're living in a real database," he said. "Everything is pretty complicated and brittle in Exchange. With Beehive, there are no hidden, strange 1GB store limitations."

SharePoint uses Microsoft's SQL Server, while Exchange uses the Jet database, which some users have criticized for not scaling well.

Oracle previously set Beehive's price for a one-time licence at $120(£80) per user, plus an additional 18 percent of that license per year for maintenance. In its announcement, Oracle cut the entry-level price to $50 per user. Components such as messaging and team collaboration, however, cost an additional $30 per user.

Companies can also deploy Beehive as a cloud-based service for $15 per user per month with as many features as they want, Gilmour said.

Author: Eric Lai, Computerworld (US) @ http://www.techworld.com


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