Oracle has increased its offer price for an additional stake in i-Flex

Oracle has increased the price it is willing to pay for an additional stake in i-Flex solutions, a vendor of financial software in Mumbai, India.

The move follows a period of sharp increases in company valuations on India's stock market, and Oracle may have felt that increasing its offer was necessary to make its offer more attractive for i-flex shareholders, analysts said.

Oracle, of California, said Thursday said it has increased its offer price to 2,100 Indian rupees (AU$60) per share, including interest. The company also said that it has raised by about 35 percent the number of shares it has agreed to buy in the pending open offer to i-flex shareholders.

The new open offer price is a 42 percent premium to the 1,475 rupees per share that Oracle first offered, and a 20 per cent premium to i-flex's closing stock price on Thursday of 1,751 rupees.

Indian stock markets are booming, and investor expectations are high, said a financial analyst who declined to be named. Oracle may have not found sufficient support for the offer at its earlier price, he said. The price of i-flex's shares has risen by over 52 percent in the last six months. Oracle informed the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) in September that it intended to acquire an additional 20 percent of the equity of i-flex. It already holds a 55 percent stake in the company. Oracle would be paying about $531 million for the additional stake. Oracle subsequently delayed the open date of the offer from Nov. 6 to Dec. 4.

In an statement to the BSE on Friday, i-flex said that Oracle had increased the number of shares it wanted to purchase in the open offer from the earlier 16.63 million to 28.39 million, representing 34.14 percent of the emerging voting capital. An i-flex spokeswoman declined to comment on the new offer.

Oracle will be paying about $1.7 billion for the additional equity if its offer sails through. The open offer closes on Dec. 23.

Author: John Ribeiro

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EMC and Oracle buckle up for joint integration ride

EMC Corporation and Oracle have announced a broadened investment in joint engineering testing and integration and solutions development to support customers who are deploying EMC Information Infrastructure in Oracle environments.

EMC's Information Infrastructure offerings provide a range of hardware, software, and services for enterprise applications, database, and middleware solutions.
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Jointly integrated services, solutions, and support seek to help customers avoid multi-vendor complexity when deploying end-to-end information infrastructure solutions based on EMC and Oracle technologies.

The EMC Information Infrastructure for Oracle includes four solution areas: Data Warehousing, whereby EMC partners with the Oracle Information Appliance Program to offer customers packaged, low-cost data warehouse solutions that are high performance, quick to deploy, and can easily scale through validated building blocks known as Foundations; Oracle Unbreakable Linux, jointly engineered grid computing solutions backed by the Oracle Unbreakable Linux support program which have generated Oracle Validated Configurations and pre-defined best practices, allowing customers to reduce deployment time while minimizing risk with tested and qualified Oracle Enterprise Linux on core EMC platforms and software; Enterprise Security, integrating RSA security technologies and Oracle's identity management and data protection solutions along with user authentication, database encryption, and compliance reporting tools for database applications across the enterprise; and Grid Computing, using joint reference architectures and best practices for midrange environments to help customers rapidly deploy Oracle Grid Computing environments across EMC NAS or SAN platforms with low-cost tiered storage for simplified consolidated management and unique business continuance software for transaction consistency. All EMC Information Infrastructure for Oracle Solutions are backed by the EMC-Oracle Joint Escalation Center that provides customers a dedicated single path for support.A file is a file, the saying goes, but not all files are the same. Logically, they are just bits on a disk. However, from a usage perspective this is where the commonality ends. Databases are very different from plain text files and have differing usage scenarios and storage performance needs. Likewise, not all databases are the same. Oracle database solutions have specific performance and data storage requirements that are part of Oracle's articulated strategy for storage, which involves clustering, disk management and replication, as well as promoting the Linux OS.

The choice of storage architecture affects database performance, storage utilization, suitability as a high-availability solution, and the ability to tune and optimize the solution to meet organizational goals. Organizations deploying storage solutions that are not in alignment with Oracle's strategy as instantiated by Oracle 10g, ASM, and RAC may find themselves at a disadvantage from an operational and competitive standpoint.

As such, the availability of tried, tested, and true storage infrastructure for Oracle databases is well positioned to assist organizations get the most from their extensive Oracle investments, which for many represent the operational lifeblood of their enterprise.

To appreciate the significance of this announcement, one must consider the depth of the technical and commercial relationship the two companies share, and the dependency upon one another that they have developed over time. The Oracle Global Single Instance, which has been promoted by Oracle as the driving force behind a multi-billion dollar IT cost savings, runs on a variety of EMC hardware.

Similarly, EMC is one of the five largest Oracle customers in the world, based on the number of Oracle Application modules, users, and database instances deployed. The two companies' first-hand experience with each other, which should mirror the many operational experiences of customer organizations, feeds each other's product requirements and assessments.

This does allow many of the deployment and usage "gotchas" that are inevitable in the customer environment to be experienced firsthand by the vendors, which should help alleviate issues sooner rather than later and reduce the likelihood of the issues impacting end-customer's production environments.

Overall, this announcement will likely be welcomed by the many organizations, large and small, that depend on Oracle databases to run their businesses. Although vendor partnerships are common and sometimes short-lived, it is a rarity in the industry for such a deep vendor relationship to develop for a substantial period of time.

The obvious joint investments made by EMC and Oracle bode well for users of their certified technologies and serve as an example of the value of long-term strategic relationships not only for the vendors in question, but for their customers and partners as well.

Author: Clay Ryder, The Sageza Group

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Oracle 11g hits the streets

Oracle has released Database 11g, the first major refresh of its database management software in over three years, making it smaller and greener.

The company promised customers hundreds of new features including the ability to patch without taking systems offline, simplified application testing, and several green upgrades, such as data compression, to make it three times smaller.

Oracle Database 11g is the successor to 10g, which shipped in February 2004. After 10 months of beta testing, Oracle yesterday described 11g in detail for the first time, saying it stems from the work of 1,500 developers and 15 million hours of testing.

Oracle president Charles Phillips emphasised 11g's ability to save space and power, during a launch event in New York City yesterday.

"Every customer is looking at this space issue, the fact that they're buying so many disks. The cost of data centres alone is a big concern." Phillips said. "We built in advanced compression. We compress the data on the fly for you automatically, so you get a 3X savings on disk space." Another space-saving feature takes standby databases - normally kept in reserve in case the main system crashes - and offloads certain tasks to them. The standby database is simultaneously available for reporting, backup, testing and rolling upgrades of production databases.

Oracle also added what it calls "real application testing" to help customers quickly test and manage changes, such as database and operating system software upgrades.

These features save space by eliminating the need for a dedicated test server and backup recovery server, Phillips said. "Everybody wants a greener data centre," he said.

Oracle, which has been criticised for not quickly providing patches, said it added a "rolling patching" system to its latest database to update the grid automatically with no downtime.

"This is a breakthrough we think is huge," Phillips said. "You don't want to take systems down."

More than a third of Oracle database customers who attended the Independent Oracle Users Group annual conference plan to upgrade to 11g within one year, and more than half will upgrade within a few years, the group said.

IOUG president Ari Kaplan spoke at Oracle's launch event and praised the company for helping customers with regulatory compliance.

11g introduces Total Recall, a query tool allowing administrators to look at data from any time in the past, which Oracle says will be useful for tracking data changes, auditing and compliance.

The price of 11g was not released. When asked, an Oracle spokeswoman said "we'll have more to share regarding pricing in the near term."

Oracle launched 11g at an event featuring James Burke, science historian, author, producer and host of the BBC series, "Connections." Burke said 11g will "free up the massive potential of the brainpower in companies," adding that "in this new age of innovation speed is the key, not only to innovate but to do it faster."

Oracle partners followed up with their own announcements, including EMC, which said it will support Database 11g, and the vendor Application Security, which said its database security suite will also support 11g.

Author: Jon Brodkin

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