SAP Targets Salesforce.com, Oracle With SuccessFactors Buy

SAP is paying $3.4 billion, whichis a lot of money for SuccessFactors, in order to gain some real cloud computing clout versus rivals Salesforce.com and Oracle. Should SAP AG (NYSE:SAP) consummate its $3.4 billion offer to acquire Web-based human resources software maker SuccessFactors (NASDAQ:SFSF) , it will give the enterprise application giant some much needed credibility in cloud computing versus rivals Salesforce.com (NYSE:CRM) and Oracle (NASDAQ:ORCL).

SAP certainly showed that it needs the clout, paying $40 per share, or roughly a 52 percent premium over the company's Dec. 2 closing price of $26.25 and a multiple of 10 times the company's expected 2011 run rate of $300 to $330 million. That's a lot of money for an unprofitable company that provides performance management and other tools human resource managers use to keep companies humming along.
Forrester Research analyst Paul Hamerman said SAP inked the deal for a couple key reasons. For one, its cloud strategy, led by its Business ByDesign product, has been slow grow in the market. For another, while SAP's existing on-premise HR management software has over 13,000 customers, the company's learning and talent management applications are only used by a few thousand of those clients.

The apps just haven't been on par with rivals' products, which means fewer opportunities to on-board new and existing customers to its own human capital management software. That weakness has set up a scenario with big-time SAP customer Siemens AG uses SuccessFactors' talent management apps for its 400,000-plus employees.

"By acquiring SuccessFactors, SAP puts itself into a much stronger competitive position in human resources applications and reaffirms its commitment to software-as-a-service as a key business model," Hamerman wrote in a blog post Dec. 3.

Indeed, SAP will gain SuccessFactors 15 million active seats spread across not only Siemens AG, but 20th Century Fox and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, among its more than 3,500 customers.

SAP's bid for SuccessFactors advance the growing trend of larger companies snapping up smaller providers of enterprise application software delivered through a Web browser.
Earlier this year, Salesforce.com landed on Radian6, reconstituting the concern's social monitoring software into its Social Marketing Cloud just last week.

Oracle acquired Web-based customer relationship management (CRM) software provider RightNow Technologies in October to better compete with Salesforce.com. SAP's bid for SuccessFactors shows it wants to be an active participant in the burgeoning cloud market.

Global Equities Research analyst Trip Chowdry called SAP's bid for Success Factors timely in the wake of Oracle's bid for RightNow and the database software giant's impending Oracle Public Cloud suite.

"As we have said before, now that every company has a cloud strategy including products and services - cloud computing is not an industry but a necessary feature offering," Chowdry wrote in a Dec. 3 research note.

Chowdry believes Salesforce.com and SAP have much to fear from Oracle's Public Cloud, which Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff has described as virtualization software.

Source: Clint Boulton @ www.eweek.com

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UK Oracle user groups partner to build stronger network

Aims to grow influence on Oracle with combined membership of 38,000. The UK Oracle User Group (UKOUG) has announced a partnership with the UK Oracle Community Network (UKOCN), to build on the strength of the Oracle community in the UK.

The organisations will work together to ensure that their members have access to relevant resources, as well as forming a larger independent voice to have greater influence on Oracle at a strategic level. Established for more than 25 years, the UKOUG has more than 8,000 members, while UKOCN – a free-to-join, online community that started two years ago – has 30,000 subscribed members.

James Haslam, general manager of UKOUG, said: "UKOUG and UKOCN are very different Oracle community bodies. UKOUG focuses on face-to-face events, networking and lobby activities. "While we both operate in the Oracle space, we are not competing organisations." He added: "The Oracle community can only benefit from a partnership between the two organisations, which will inevitably lead to a louder, more vibrant, better informed community. The partnership will begin with UKOCN promoting UKOUG events to its membership and partners, starting with the UK OUG Conference in Birmingham next week. Meanwhile, UKOUG will promote UKOCN's online services and benefits to its membership base.

The annual UKOUG conference is taking place at the ICC in Birmingham from 5 to 7 December.

Source: http://www.computerworlduk.com

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Alight Planning Announces Oracle Gold Partnership

The developers of the first application that set the standard for Enterprise Planning software today announced that Alight has achieved Gold Partner status in the Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN). Alight is committed to delivering Agile Planning™ solutions to Oracle users, that add value at both the business unit and corporate levels. Alight LLC, developers of the industry-leading Alight Planning financial planning and reporting software, today announced that it has joined Oracle’s partnership program at the Gold level.

As the leader and industry spokesperson for budgeting and enterprise planning solutions, Rand Heer, Alight’s CEO was delighted to be selected as an Oracle Gold Partner. Rand, who founded Pillar, the first enterprise planning software package, reflects on some important history to frame this partnership, “In 1994, Hyperion acquired Pillar. With over 2,500 customers purchasing Hyperion Pillar, the deal proved to be one of the great cash cows of the decade. Ironically, though in 2007, Oracle acquired Hyperion and finally killed Pillar which was replaced with Hyperion Planning. Some Pillar users did not make the move to Hyperion Planning including Apple Computer which is still using Pillar at the time of our partnership because Pillar had some beautiful functionality especially around unit rate amounts.”
Jeffrey Walker who built Oracle's applications business and was also CFO at Oracle was pleased to learn of the partnership, “Looking back on it, it’s too bad we at Oracle didn’t pick up on Pillar and Rand’s vision before Hyperion. You can see the Pillar foundations for enterprise planning today in offerings from Oracle, IBM, and SAP. With Alight, Rand advances his vision to new heights and makes his planning tools accessible to companies of all sizes—not just big players with deep pockets. I expect the partnership with Oracle will lead to big things for both parties.”

The news of the partnership is quite exciting to finance and IT teams who are already working with both Alight and Oracle. Mark Brinkerhoff, VP Finance with Ultradent, is eager to reap the benefits of this new relationship, “Before Alight was selected as an Oracle Gold Partner, I have been able to get our financial data out of Oracle Financials and into Alight. We have a complex chart of accounts so we leverage Alight’s logfiles feature which gives us complete visibility if something slips during an import. While data integration from Oracle to our spreadsheet model often took several days, we can get our Oracle data integrated into Alight in about one business day. With Oracle Gold Partner status, Alight's import process with Oracle Financials is on track to get even better in 2012." In addition to Ultradent, dozens of companies who use both the Alight Planning solution and Oracle/Hyperion applications should benefit from this new partnership including mid-sized companies such as Atronix and larger organizations such as Siemens PLM Software.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com

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