Oracle Starts Two New Centres In India

Located at Gurgaon, the two centres will be a part of the 19 R&D and solution centres network spread across Asia Pacific.

Thursday, October 25, 2007: Oracle has launched two new centres – the Oracle Asia Research and Development Center (OARDC) and Partner Solution Center (PSC) – in India. The Gurgaon-based centres will focus on delivering Oracle and partner solutions to the Indian market and also to the Asia Pacific region. The hardware infrastructure at the Oracle PSC has been sponsored by SUN Microsystems and AMD. With today’s launch of the OARDC and PSC, Oracle now has seven development and solution centres in India. Oracle’s investment in India over the past five years has crossed $3 billion.

Oracle Partner Solution Centre will enable strategic partners to build, port, enable and test their solutions on Oracle technologies. With this, independent software vendors (ISVs), system integrators (SIs), value added distributors and resellers (VADs & VARs) can leverage Oracle’s product expertise and tools at PSC to build their industry-specific solutions on top of Oracle’s technology and applications platforms.

OARDC India will engage in research, requirements analysis, prototyping and architecture design with the aim of solving a specific problem through the delivery of a product. OARDCs focus on four main areas: product development, solution development, strategic projects and partner enablement. OARDC India will aim to innovate in the areas of m-governance, inclusive computing and ubiquitous computing.

"The Oracle Asia Research and Development Center and Partner Solution Center will undertake India-specific projects to enhance our capabilities in our E-Governance Center of Excellence, which was established in Gurgaon in 2003," said Krishan Dhawan, managing director, Oracle India. "We expect these three centres which are co-located in Gurgaon, to work towards increasing the scope and usage for Oracle technology and applications amongst Indian industries and governments."

Source: efytimes.com

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Oracle says no to BEA's $8.2 bln pricetag

BEA Systems Inc (BEAS.O) said on Thursday it is willing to sell itself for $8.2 billion, but the price was rejected as "impossibly high" by Oracle Corp (ORCL.O), the only company that has publicly expressed interest in the software maker.

BEA, which is under pressure from billionaire investor Carl Icahn to find a buyer, said it was worth $21 per share, which is a 24 percent premium to the $17-per-share bid that Oracle offered on October 12.

Oracle said BEA's price represented an 80 percent premium to its shares before activist shareholders started pushing for a sale of the company, and nearly 11 times BEA's revenue from software maintenance services in the last 12 months.

"Nobody would seriously consider paying that kind of multiple for a software company with shrinking new license sales," Oracle President Charles Phillips said in a letter to BEA's board.

He said Oracle was standing by its $6.7 billion bid which expires at 5 p.m. California time on Sunday, adding "at which time Oracle will move on and evaluate other potential acquisitions."

When asked to respond to the letter from Phillips, a BEA spokesperson referred to a statement issued earlier in the day in which the BEA's board said "We continue to believe that Oracle's unsolicited proposal to acquire BEA at $17 per share significantly undervalues BEA, and is therefore not in the best interests of BEA shareholders."

Shares of BEA had closed at $17.53 on the Nasdaq, down 2 cents as investors appeared to also believe that the $21 price set by the business software maker may be too optimistic.

Some analysts still thought a deal was possible as BEA's software, called middleware because it helps connect business computer systems, could be added to Oracle's database programs to help it better compete with SAP AG (SAPG.DE)

"Nobody is more interested in this than Oracle," said Bart Narter, an analyst with financial research and consulting firm Celent. "I think there is a lot of posturing. Maybe they'll get a little higher price. Maybe."

The $21 price had marked the first time BEA gave a price point for negotiations with Oracle, the world's third largest software company with a market value of about $100 billion.

"Over the last several weeks, Oracle has repeatedly asked us for the price at which we would be willing to begin negotiations," BEA's board said earlier on Thursday. BEA is "prepared to authorize negotiations with third parties including Oracle at a price of $21.00 per share," it said.

Talk of a buyout for BEA began in August when Icahn said he had begun acquiring shares in the business software maker and called on its board to put the company up for sale. Chief Executive Alfred Chuang had rebuffed the billionaire activist investor, who boosted his stake to about 13 percent, making him the company's biggest shareholder.

Besides Oracle, other companies that have been touted as possible buyers of BEA include International Business Machines (IBM.N), Hewlett-Packard (HPQ.N) and SAP.

An SAP spokesman said the company was not interested in buying BEA, while representatives for Hewlett-Packard and IBM declined comment. Icahn could not be reached for comment.

Jefferies & Co. analyst Katherine Egbert said earlier on Thursday another suitor may be talking to BEA behind the scenes. "For the BEA board to make the claim that they are worth $21 (per share) without any detailed supporting analysis could mean that they have another interested party," she said.

BEA said that after consulting with its investment bank, Goldman Sachs, it believes Oracle or another company would still see earnings benefit if it paid $21 per share or higher.

But Phillips said in his letter, "We believe that your counterproposal at $21 per share price is an impossibly high price for Oracle or any other potential acquirer."

Author: Jim Finkle @ washingtonpost.com

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Oracle buys operational planning firm

In a move designed to beef-up its enterprise performance management offerings, Oracle yesterday agreed to buy privately held operational planning software maker Interlace Systems for an undisclosed sum.

San Mateo, California-based Interlace develops a suite of software called Integrated Business Planning that integrates data from planning and operational systems to uncover gaps between financial and operational plans. The software works by allowing business planners to change operational assumptions and assess the business impact on operations. It uses a "change-based data modeling server" that pulls together data from disparate operational plans into an integrated model to allow multiple users to run what-if scenarios by changing operational assumptions and then see the outcome of the changes on business plans.

Interlace's product is used for a variety of operational planning processes such as sales and operational planning or demand plan creation and is applicable for both mid-market and large enterprises, Oracle said. The software has also gained a strong following in the high-tech and industrial manufacturing sectors, with disk drive maker Seagate Technologies and electrical systems firm Eaton among its customers.

Oracle said that technology combined with its own Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) system will provide an integrated framework for financial and strategic operational planning.

"The combination of Interlace Systems and Oracle will help enable business planners to rapidly evaluate the impact of changes to business assumptions across all plans...and [also allow them to] benefit from flexibility, speed and accuracy not found in traditional spreadsheet-based and function-specific planning tools," said Thomas Kurian, senior vice president of server technologies at Redwood Shores, California-based Oracle.

The deal is expected to close in November and represents Oracle's second acquisition in the performance management space this year. In April it gobbled up Hyperion Solutions for $3.3bn which laid the foundation for its EPM product strategy.

Oracle is likely to absorb Interlace's technology into that core EPM system, which sits as a hot-pluggable component of Oracle's Fusion middleware stack, to provide a common perspective across financial and strategic planning.

"In today's global economy, organizations need a streamlined planning process that links strategic operational plans to the financial plan of record," Kurian said.

Oracle said it will provide details on specific product roadmap of integration timelines after the merger closes next month.

Oracle did however say it will continue to offer Interlace's products as standalone applications and also pledged to continue to work with databases and application servers from other vendors, including Microsoft's SQL Server, IBM's WebSphere, and SAP's NetWeaver.

Interlace is venture backed by Accel and NEA. Oracle said that it would only retain Interlace staff with "significant domain expertise" in its products, meaning that some layoffs are imminent.

Oracle's shopping spree shows no sign of abating. The company continues to snap up smaller companies like Interlace while at the same time fishing for larger ones. Interlace is Oracle's 10th acquisition this year, and its 36th since 2005. It also comes just a day after Oracle re-iterated its $17 per share offer for middleware vendor BEA Systems. Earlier this month BEA had rejected an initial $6.7bn from Oracle as too low and has until Sunday to accept it.

Author: Maden Sheina @ www.cbronline.com

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