With economy sluggish, all eyes will turn to Oracle

Investors looking to gauge the effect of the troubled U.S. economy on the technology sector will focus on Oracle Corp.'s second-quarter earnings report, expected after the market's close Wednesday.
Analysts polled by Thomson Financial expect Oracle to post earnings of 27 cents a share for the period ended in November, on $5 billion in revenue.

Many analysts and investors are keen to hear what Oracle has to say about the health of its business now, amid the ongoing credit crunch and troubles stemming from the subprime mortgage crisis.
Business software maker Oracle has numerous customers among the country's largest financial services firms and other corporations. Some have speculated that these firms may scale back their purchases of software and other technologies amid the economic turbulence.

But analysts have made generally positive predictions for Oracle's quarterly results and outlook. Broadpoint Capital analyst Mark Murphy wrote in a note to clients Tuesday that he expects Oracle to beat consensus estimates on second-quarter sales and profit.
"Despite signs of softening macroeconomic demand, we continue to view our [Oracle earnings] forecast as being relatively resilient, due to Oracle's acquisitiveness and its large base of recurring maintenance revenue," Murphy wrote.
Oracle has turned in a string of well-received quarterly reports this year, translating its many recent acquisitions into quickly growing revenue while branching into new and more specialized areas of the business software market.
Shares of Oracle have risen more than 20% in the year-to-date, while U.S.-traded shares of rival business software maker SAP AG have fallen roughly 5%. Oracle shares rose slightly Tuesday, to $20.98.

Oracle's most recent acquisition, of Netherlands-based Moniforce, was announced earlier this month. Performance management software maker Moniforce "has a presence in the retail, federal, and financial sectors," CIBC World Markets analyst Brad Reback wrote in note released to clients.
Though Oracle's sales to financial firms may be slowed by the credit crunch, it should be able to cover its losses in the second quarter with gains in sales in other sectors, Global Equities Research analyst Trip Chowdhry wrote in a note to clients earlier this month.
The "subprime mortgage industry may negatively impact Oracle's business by 2% to 4%," Chowdhry wrote, "however strength in healthcare, packaged goods and hi-tech verticals may offset the above weakness."
Chowdhry said he is expecting a "positive revenue surprise" for Oracle's second-quarter results, and "in-line guidance."
Pacific Crest Securities analyst Brendan Barnicle concurred with Chowdhry's upbeat expectations for the quarter.
"We have been very surprised by the strength of our [second-quarter] Oracle channel checks," Barnicle wrote in a note to clients earlier this month.
Barnicle said he's heard of strength in Oracle's sales to financial services firms, "which we certainly did not expect," as well as strong sales to small and medium-sized businesses, "which has historically been weak."

Author: John Letzing @ www.marketwatch.com

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Calsoft accelerates buy out of Inatech - Strengthens its Oracle practice

Chennai, 17th December 2007: Calsoft today announced the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) for acquisition of the minority shareholding of 49% in Inatech Infosolutions, India (Inatech). The consideration for the acquisition of this part is valued at approximately USD 6.17 Million and will be paid through a combination of cash & stocks, subject to due regulatory approvals as applicable.

Earlier in Nov 2006, Calsoft had taken 51% majority interest in Inatech, a specialized end-to-end Oracle solutions provider in the enterprise space. As part of the agreement, Calsoft was to originally acquire the balance in November 2009.

Mr. S. (Sam) Santhosh, Managing Director & CEO, Calsoft, said, “Inatech’s good performance, their management team and European presence have encouraged us to accelerate the buy out. We expect this transaction to be accretive to Calsoft’s earnings. Given the size of our organization and the complementary nature of our businesses, we should recognize substantial revenue synergies and significant economies of scale.”

Inatech has posted consolidated revenues of Rs30.54 crores (US$ 7.5million) and with profits after tax of Rs 3.6 crores (US$0.9 million) for the half-year ended 30 September 2007.

Mr. Vedante Srihari, CEO & Founder of Inatech added, “There is an increasing demand for high quality Systems Integrators who can deliver globally. Now is the time for Inatech to join Calsoft and leverage synergies.”

Moving forward, Mr. Vedante Srihari would head Calsoft’s Enterprise Solutions strategic business unit.

Forward Looking Statements

Some of the statements in this release that are not historical facts are forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements include our financial and growth projections as well as statements concerning our plans, strategies, intentions and beliefs concerning our business and the markets in which we operate. These statements are based on information currently available to us, and we assume no obligation to update these statements as circumstances change. There are risks and uncertainties that could cause actual events to differ materially from these forward-looking statements. These risks include, but are not limited to, the level of market demand for our services, the highly-competitive market for the types of services that we offer, market conditions that could cause our customers to reduce their spending for our services, our ability to create, acquire and build new businesses and to grow our existing businesses, our ability to attract and retain qualified personnel, currency fluctuations and market conditions in India and elsewhere around the world, and other risks not specifically mentioned herein but those that are common to industry.

About Calsoft

California Software Company Ltd (Calsoft) is a public limited company in India with a global presence. Its development practices are certified at CMMi Level 5. Founded in 1992, Calsoft group including subsidiaries currently employs over 1000 professionals. The group has development centers in Chennai, Bangalore and Mysore in India and Pleasanton, (California), Alameda (California), Boston (MA) in the USA. Calsoft group has marketing offices in the US, UK, Singapore, Dubai, Copenhagen and in India. Calsoft is listed in India at NSE (cali.ns) and BSE (cali.bo). For more information on Calsoft visit www.calsoft.co.in

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Amazon Takes on Oracle and IBM With SimpleDB

Companies can now go ahead and fire their expensive database administrators—those engineers who keep the Oracle or IBM databases humming. Amazon has just added an enterprise-class database called SimpleDB to its suite of cloud-based IT infrastructure, which also includes storage (S3) and computation (EC2) available by the drink. Today, Amazon is taking sign-ups for the SimpleDB beta, which should start in a few weeks. As it points out on the new Simple DB page:

Amazon SimpleDB is a web service for running queries on structured data in real time. This service works in close conjunction with Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), collectively providing the ability to store, process and query data sets in the cloud. These services are designed to make web-scale computing easier and more cost-effective for developers.

Traditionally, this type of functionality has been accomplished with a clustered relational database that requires a sizable upfront investment, brings more complexity than is typically needed, and often requires a DBA to maintain and administer. In contrast, Amazon SimpleDB is easy to use and provides the core functionality of a database - real-time lookup and simple querying of structured data - without the operational complexity. Amazon SimpleDB requires no schema, automatically indexes your data and provides a simple API for storage and access. This eliminates the administrative burden of data modeling, index maintenance, and performance tuning. Developers gain access to this functionality within Amazon’s proven computing environment, are able to scale instantly, and pay only for what they use.

This will be especially attractive for Web startups. Amazon has just taken another major infrastructure cost off the table for them. Relational databases are expensive to buy and maintain. Whatever features or performance SimpleDB lacks, it should make up for in price. Amazon wants to democratize the database by making it available to more businesses, and even individuals, thus leveling the playing field between big companies and startups even more.

And since SimpleDB operates at Web scale, larger companies will wake up to the cost saving opportunities of such a service as well. IBM, for one, is already trying to preempt any customer defections with its copycat Blue Cloud initiative. If speed is of the essence, you might still want to keep your database on your own servers. But the Web is where most software will one day live, whether consumer or enterprise. And Amazon’s got nothing to lose by speeding that day along.

Pricing for SimpleDB is as follows:

Machine Utilization - $0.14 per Amazon SimpleDB Machine Hour consumed

Data Transfer

$0.10 per GB - all data transfer in

$0.18 per GB - first 10 TB / month data transfer out
$0.16 per GB - next 40 TB / month data transfer out
$0.13 per GB - data transfer out / month over 50 TB

Data transfer “in” and “out” refers to transfer into and out of Amazon SimpleDB. Data transferred between Amazon SimpleDB and other Amazon Web Services is free of charge (i.e., $0.00 per GB).

Structured Data Storage - $1.50 per GB-month

Author: Erick Schonfeld @ www.techcrunch.com

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