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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Oracle issues BEA deal ultimatum

Oracle on Tuesday threatened to walk away from its proposed acquisition of BEA Systems by Sunday unless the embattled software company agreed to a deal.

While the threat wiped nearly 4 per cent from BEA’s share price by mid-afternoon, the stock still stood above the $17-a-share Oracle offer, pointing to a belief on Wall Street that the brinkmanship had not seriously damped the prospect of a deal and that Oracle or another buyer would still end up paying a higher price.

“Oracle has no interest in a long, drawn-out process to acquire BEA,” Chuck Phillips, Oracle’s president, wrote in a letter addressed to the company’s board on Tuesday. The letter followed what Oracle said had been another rejection by the BEA board of its all-cash offer.

BEA rejected the latest approach, repeating its earlier claim that the offer “seriously undervalues” the company and adding that it was open to “a transaction that appropriately reflects BEA’s value, reached through a reasonable process.”

The attempt to bring a quick end to the BEA battle is in stark contrast to the fight over PeopleSoft, the deal that launched Oracle’s ambitious attempt to force consolidation in parts of the business software market. That fight lasted 18 months, in part because Oracle had to persuade a court to overturn a US antitrust objection to the deal.

Though he started by offering $16 a share for PeopleSoft and insisting at one point that that was his “final” price, Larry Ellison, Oracle’s chief executive officer, eventually paid $26.50 a share to win over the PeopleSoft board.

Justifying the offer for BEA, Mr Phillips said it represented a 21 per cent premium to the price the day before the proposal was announced and a 44 per cent premium to the level before activist investor Carl Icahn disclosed in August that he had bought a stake in the company.

Mr Icahn, BEA’s biggest shareholder and a critic of the company’s management, has been pressuring BEA to find another buyer.

Author: Richards Waters @ www.ft.com

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Oracle wins CRM deal with Jafza

Jebel Ali Free Zone (JAFZA) has deployed Oracle's E-Business Suite in a bid to improve its customer service offering and achieve greater operational efficiency.

The free zone, which is located in the Jebel Ali area of Dubai, said the customer relationship management (CRM) solution would enable it to significantly enhance its customer service experience and boost the number of services that is it able to offer online.

"We needed a solution that could scale with our growth and be flexible in adapting to varied requirements of the different economic zones and logistics and industrial parks in our portfolio, while enabling a consistent business process model," Salma Hareb, CEO, Jafra and Economic Zones World commented on the implementation.

"Oracle's ability to meet our requirements efficiently made us choose this solution," she added.

Jafza expects to achieve a 300% return on investment from the implementation within a couple of years, Hareb told ITP.net.

Almost 90% of Jafza's customer services are now online, with the other 10% expected to go online over the next year, Hareb said.

Oracle said the implementation with Jafza was probably one of the most advanced integrations it has done in the region.

"Jafza is transforming itself to meet increasing customer demands and economic pressures to be more responsive, efficient and competitive," Sergio Giacoletto, executive vice president, Oracle, EMEA said.

Owned by investment company Dubai World, Jebel Ali Free Zone is one of the largest business hubs in the Middle East housing approximately 6,000 companies from 120 countries across the world.

Teo Chin Seng, group CIO of Dubai World, said that the Oracle implementation provided a strategic piece of its technology solution, enabling consistent business processes across diverse business units.

"Jafza's business model requires a seamless flow of information across financial, property management, customer relationship and human capital functions," he said. "We have used components across the Oracle E-Business Suite that are pre-integrated, allowing us to deploy a configurable workflow based process model," he added.

The free zone began implenting Oracle's E-Business Suite in 2005 with the final phase of the implementation taking place in fall this year.

Source: ITP.net

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