Oracle buys compliance vendor LogicalApps

Oracle sees a growing market for compliance monitoring and has bought LogicalApps, whose compliance software is already optimized for use with Oracle apps. Oracle plans to expand its governance and compliance offering with the acquisition of LogicalApps, announced on Tuesday.

LogicalApps' software helps companies manage compliance with complex regulations. Its technology enables real-time detection, prevention, monitoring, and reporting of financial and operational risk. The software is embedded in enterprise applications and can prevent the misuse of customer data or financial fraud by, for example, preventing employees from processing unsigned requisitions or ensuring they don't inappropriately change financial information.

According to Oracle, a growing range of companies must comply with an increasing number of regulations, in addition to the financial requirements of Sarbanes-Oxley, creating demand for compliance products.

LogialApps' software is already optimized for use with Oracle applications, and the company has made "hundreds" of deployments of the software, it said.

The companies did not disclose financial details of the deal, which is expected to close next month.

Oracle will continue to support LogicalApps' customers after the acquisition and plans to continue to invest in development of the software, Oracle said.

The acquisition is in line with a strategy Oracle discussed when it released financial results in September. At the time, Oracle's CEO Larry Ellison said the company plans to look for continued growth in its applications business by selling a wider array of products mainly to existing large customers. The strategy is different than that of some of Oracle's competitors, which instead appear to be chasing smaller businesses with scaled-down versions of existing products, he said.

Author: Nancy Gohring @ IDG News Service

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Oracle rival SAP to pay $6.8 billion for Business Objects

SAP, the big German software company that competes with Oracle, has agreed to buy Business Objects, a leader in the fast-growing market for business intelligence software, for $6.8 billion.

The move underlines the appeal of companies that make software used to cull through the huge stores of data that corporations accumulate on their own and over the Web to search for insights to help them cut costs, spot sales opportunities and outwit rivals.

Makers of business intelligence software have become takeover targets in recent months. The largest previous deal came in May when Redwood City software maker Oracle bought Hyperion Solutions, a Santa Clara business intelligence software company, for $3.3 billion.

The deal is a departure from SAP's longtime approach of shunning big acquisitions. But in a conference call Sunday, SAP Chief Executive Henning Kagermann said the purchase of Business Objects, which has dual headquarters in Paris and San Jose, was an exceptional case.

"It's a fast-growing market - business intelligence," Kagermann said.

Thomas Hofmann, an analyst at Landesbank Baden-Wuerttemberg in Stuttgart, Germany, said the deal is "a dramatic shift in strategy" for SAP. "They're really moving toward the direction of Oracle and maybe that's because they're feeling Oracle is coming closer."

Business Objects had been rumored to be a takeover target for more than a month. Its share price had risen about 15 percent in the last few weeks, as SAP, Oracle and IBM were all said to be interested in buying the company.

The SAP offer of 42 euros a share in cash is roughly 20 percent above last week's closing price for Business Objects and places a value of more than 4.8 billion euros ($6.8 billion) on the company.

In its most recent quarter, Business Objects reported a 23 percent increase in sales, to $363 million, while profit rose 68 percent to $66 million.

Business Objects CEO John Schwarz said in the conference call that 40 percent of his company's customers are SAP customers. "We have a tremendous opportunity to align and package solutions together," he said.

SAP, analysts say, needs to add more capabilities to its business software to increase sales and prompt customers to buy new versions. The promise that business intelligence software might be able to glean insights from the data flowing through SAP's enterprise software could justify the price of the Business Objects purchase, analysts say.

The goal, Kagermann said, was to put "better analytics" into "our end-to-end business process software." He said he did not anticipate cutting Business Objects' workforce.

The $18-billion-a-year business intelligence market is increasingly moving into the hands of larger companies. Microsoft has made a big push into business intelligence in the last two years.

Author: Steve Lohr @ New York Times

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Oracle Raises Retention Profile

Proactive enterprise CIOs might have Oracle to thank for saving their companies millions, and even billions, of dollars in the event their called to task during civil or criminal litigation.

On Monday, the database software company rolled out Universal Records Management 10g Release 3. The platform includes enhanced retention and management features for e-mail and other files hanging out in corporate datacenters.

Increased regulatory oversight mandated by Sarbanes-Oxley and the like requires records-management software systems to cull data not only from content repositories but also from file stores, archives and a slew of business applications.

"The key thing we look at is organizations have information they need to keep as a matter of record," Brian Dirking, product director for Oracle's universal records management group, told InternetNews.com. "We're offering something that not only manages the retention and disposition of these records but broadly manages it throughout all of a company's applications, archives and content management systems."

Oracle's new platform allows companies to access content, set the parameters for deleting or archiving files and obtain information using the crawling, indexing and search functionality.

The software can also enforce records-management policies in the background to determine what data to keep or delete while users continue using the various applications rather than requiring them to launch a separate records management application.

Another, and perhaps most important feature of Oracle's platform is that it helps save companies money. Companies embroiled in litigation or regulatory reviews are painfully aware of the cost of data recovery.

"Anything electronic is recoverable and admissible in court," Dirking said. "It gets very expensive when you have firms charging more than $1,800 per gigabyte for paralegals to review all your documents in the discovery process "

Gartner expects 50 percent of Global 2000 companies to implement records-management software by 2010, up from about 25 percent in 2005.

"Litigation and e-discovery will drive demand for records management over the next four or five years," Kenneth Chin, an analyst at Gartner, told InternetNews.com. "In the past, records management was mainly targeted at managing physical documents. Now the focus is on electronic documents like e-mail."

Gartner said worldwide spending for enterprise records management software licenses and maintenance totaled $350 million in 2006 and is projected to increase about 30 percent a year through 2011.

This expected demand is music to the ears of established content management software providers like EMC, IBM and Open Text, as well as emerging players, such as Mimosa Systems and Autonomy, which bought content archiving pioneer Zantaz in July.

Oracle Universal Records Management, a component of its Fusion middleware platform, is priced at $100,000 per processor and includes new adapters for out-of-the-box integration with third-party archiving and storage applications.

Author: Larry Barrett @ internetnews.com

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