Oracle, SITA to build GenNext reservation system

Oracle and aviation IT specialist SITA have signed a unique 15-year agreement to develop the most 'open and agile airline reservations system' using service oriented architecture (SOA) and advanced computing techniques.

Francesco Violante, Sita CEO, said the company' s strategic technology partnership with Oracle was a major milestone in the development of its Horizon passenger management portfolio and will have a profound impact on the airline industry.

"It is putting the most advanced technology stack available at the service of our industry for the first time. Advanced technology is essential to the modernization of the airline reservations systems of our 138 airline customers and we expect many others will be attracted to Horizon by the success of the project."

The partnership is already set to bear fruit with the launch next month by Sita of Customer Journey, a Horizon feature providing real-time access to airline bookings for business intelligence applications and rapid retrieval of customer journey records across multiple search criteria.

Loic Le Guisquet, Oracle executive vice president for EMEA, said: "This is a tremendous opportunity for Oracle and Sita to work together on one of the biggest IT modernization projects ever, implementing top quality design on a state-of-the-art architecture."

"This project will demonstrate Oracle’s capacity to provide a full technology stack to modernise legacy applications in order to produce true SOA-enabled applications with very high transaction-processing capabilities, he noted.

“Sita is a strong strategic partner for Oracle and will be represented on the Oracle CIO advisory board and customer advisory board with access to Oracle Labs and the Oracle Excellence Centre for co-innovation programmes.”

Sita is making its largest-ever single project investment in the further development of its Horizon platform which involves a team of 400 software engineers and designers - including off-shore resources - spread across the globe.

The implementation approach favours gradual migration of standard industry processes and selected innovative enhancements.

Source: www.tradearabia.com

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THERESE POLETTI'S TECH TALES: Has Oracle run out of companies to buy?

Last week, Oracle Corp.'s first dividend payment in the company's nearly 30-year history was a signal to many on Wall Street that the software giant is slowing down its acquisition frenzy.

Either that, or Chief Executive Larry Ellison is trying to get some cash for a new sailboat. He could also be making improvements on his Japanese-style compound in tony Woodside, Calif. As one of the company's biggest shareholders, Ellison stands to earn $230 million if Oracle pays its 5-cent-per-share dividend every quarter for the next 12 months.

But let's set talk of that aside, and take a look at Oracle's track record for a minute. After completing its $8.9 billion acquisition of business software developer PeopleSoft in 2004, Oracle then embarked on a major spending spree, seeking to build a solid base to grow into new software arenas.

The company laid the groundwork by first buying large-scale, infrastructure-like software firms, like PeopleSoft for human resource systems. A year later, it bought Siebel Systems, a developer of customer-relationship software used by sales teams to keep track of customers.

Oracle's spree kicked into high gear in 2006, when the company bought 18 firms. However, it appears to be slowing down, with 13 deals in 2007 and 10 last year. The company's last major deal was BEA Systems in late 2007 for $6.8 billion. Since then, Oracle's last 12 purchases were considered too small or immaterial to require disclosure of the price.

Enough building blocks

Like a spoiled teenager who has gone on a major clothes-shopping spree, Oracle realizes it now has enough building blocks for a new wardrobe, and needs to enhance its purchases with some targeted shoes and accessories.
"The theme was to buy broad groups of technology applicable to numerous industries and now they are narrowing the focus," said Brenon Daly, analyst with tech-merger consultant The 451 Group in San Francisco. Oracle has focused on several areas where it can provide specific industries with software packages, tailored to their unique needs.

And it is a diverse group of industries. For instance, it bought Retek, 360Commerce, ProfitLogic and Advanced Visual Technology for retailing. In health-care systems, it announced a deal to buy Relsys. And for telecommunications, it bought Portal Software, Net4Call and HotSip.

"The large pieces are in place for Oracle," Daly said. "Now they are looking at the really nitty gritty things."

Daly says the company's strategy of getting into the applications business, and then selling other products on top of that is working.

"You take that incredibly efficient machine, and you slap a bunch more applications in there," he said. "You are selling to a pharmaceutical company. Do you need some content management stuff? What about HR stuff? We have this stuff from PeopleSoft. Maybe you might even sell a database license too."

Steadily integrated

So far, Oracle has steadily integrated all these companies, with the smaller ones obviously easier to meld into its growing operations.

And even though the climate for deals has withered on the vine, Oracle is a name that keeps coming up on the rumor mill. The company had nearly $11.3 billion in cash and marketable securities as of Feb. 28, and may still have the desire to keep buying, albeit at a slower, more targeted pace.

Take Red Hat Inc. Rumors surfaced again this week that Oracle was interested in the Linux distributor and services company. The reports sent Red Hat shares higher, but some on Wall Street quickly discounted the idea, at least for now.

"While we think an Oracle purchase of Red Hat is eventually highly likely, we think it's premature, in part because of IBM's highly publicized interest in Sun Microsystems Inc. and the pursuant uncertainty around whether IBM would continue to be an advocate for Red Hat," Jeffries & Co. Inc. analyst Katherine Egbert said in a note to clients.

In addition to its cash, Oracle also has about $11.2 billion in debt. So the company likely will proceed cautiously when it comes to doing any more big deals, as opposed to recent media reports suggesting the opposite. Right now in this economy, the longer one waits watching its prey, the better the deal that can be struck.

Author: Therese Poletti @ www.MarketWatch.com

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Oracle-Red Hat Acquisition Rumors Swirl After Reports Surface

Oracle might be eyeing additional acquisition, and some analysts suspect that the IT giant might have its sights set on Red Hat. This week, a report surfaced that claimed an Oracle-Red Hat merger might “[make] sense.” Even as the note cautioned that the acquisition wouldn’t happen “now,” other reports have Oracle and Hewlett-Packard recently in unsuccessful talks to snatch up Sun Microsystems.

Oraclemight be gearing up for another of highly public acquisitions and this time the IT giant might have its eyes set on open-source innovator Red Hat. This week, an analyst suggested that an Oracle acquisition of Red Hat is "eventually highly likely."

Although Oracle and Red Hat are not speaking about these reports, it generated enough buzz to warrant stories and additional speculation. Stories about a possible IBM-Sun Microsystems merger also helped push the Oracle-buys-Red Hat story line.

"It would make sense for Oracle to own Red Hat ultimately," Katherine Egbert, an analyst with Jefferies & Co., wrote in a March 23 research report, "but given IBM's potentially pending acquisition of OpenSolaris and Oracle's history as a value buyer, the time does not seem right."

"While we think an Oracle purchase of Red Hat is eventually highly likely, we think it's premature," Egbert added, "in part because of [IBM's] highly publicized interest in [Sun Microsystems] and the pursuant uncertainty around whether IBM would continue to be an advocate for RHEL once they owned both AIX and Open Solaris development, and in part because Oracle does not have a history of purchasing still-fast-growing competitors."

Shares of Red Hat rocketed upwards on March 23, at least partially thanks to the rumors, only to fall off slightly on March 24.

Oracle seems to have been a buying mood lately. According to eWeek’s Storage Station blog, which quoted two "excellent sources," Oracle was recently ready to make a joint move with Hewlett-Packard to purchase Sun Microsystems for a combined deal worth somewhere between $6 and $7 billion.

For $2 billion of that, Oracle supposedly wanted Sun’s software library, including Java, ZFS, Glassfish, Solaris, OpenSolaris, and OpenOffice.org (HP would have paid $4 to $5 billion for Sun’s hardware). Sun, however, declined the offer.

Oracle has circled Red Hat before. Way back in 2006, the acquisition rumor mill geared up to a furious pitch after Oracle CEO Larry Ellison started making comments about stepping in to provide Red Hat’s support. At the time, analysts suggested that such a move would be unlikely, given Red Hat’s relative expense.

Speculation has continued since then, along with the assumption that a robust Red Hat would be a bit too large for Oracle to comfortably acquire, monetarily speaking.

Oracle has been displaying some robust health itself, despite the global recession, with its third-quarter fiscal 2009 earnings per share up 3 percent over the same quarter last year.

On March 23, Oracle announced the acquisition of Relsys International, which provides drug safety and risk management solutions with advanced analytics. The purchase allows Oracle to bolster its suite of software applications targeted at the health care IT field.

Even before that, analyst Katherine Egbert suggested that Oracle could acquire SMB (small midsized business) server virtualization specialist Virtual Iron Software, as part of a play that would allow it to effectively compete with VMware and Citrix Systems in the virtualization products arena.

Oracle purchased mValent in its first acquisition of 2009, gaining that company’s configuration management solutions for potential use within Oracle Enterprise Manager.

Author: Nicholas Kolakowski @ www.eweek.com

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