Posts by Paul Vallee

The acquisition of TimesTen may actually be about preventing Progress from making inroads into Oracle accounts. Although Progress is miniscule compared to Oracle, Oracle may feel a defensive strategy is necessary after being continually attacked on multiple fronts.

Although Oracle’s top-line numbers may be impressive, analysts will be digging deeper to predict Oracle’s future.

Oracle announced that it is furthering its commitment to the Java developer community by making Oracle JDeveloper 10g available for free to all developers. Additionally, Oracle is proposing to spearhead a JavaServer Faces (JSF) tooling project within the Eclipse Foundation open-source community and will also join the Apache MyFaces project as a core contributor.

Oracle has posted a higher-than-expected quarterly net profit, thanks in part to the company’s acquisition of rival PeopleSoft. In pre-market trade, shares of the software giant rose 2.5 percent. Oracle beat the average analyst expectation by 3 cents with earnings of 26 cents per share.

Oracle won a hostile takeover bid of PeopleSoft late last year, thereby eliminating a key competitor. The company also came out on top in a bidding war with rival SAP for retail software firm Retek. But despite all of this activity, Oracle’s stock remains lodged at roughly the same level it was at when the company first announced the PeopleSoft bid almost two years ago.

Oracle has brought in former Microsoft CFO Greg Maffei to take on the role of President and CFO. Maffei will be joining Oracle as the company adjusts to its recent acquisition frenzy. In addition to Maffei, Oracle employs two other presidents who report to CEO Larry Ellison.

EMC Corporation and Oracle have announced the creation of a joint center for technology devleopment by EMC China and Oracle China in Beijing. One of the first Asia Pacific centers of its kind for both companies, the goal of the center is to develop and showcase leading cooperative solutions to joint customers in the Asia Pacific region.

Intel and other companies are upset over an Oracle software licensing scheme that could potentially hinder the adoption of new dual-core processors and raise the price of software for customers. Many customers pay for software based on the number of processors in the system. Since these new chips have two cores, Oracle wants to charge customers for two licenses per dual-core chip.

Bull and Oracle announced a record-setting TPC-H one terabyte data warehousing benchmark that sets the bar for the best performance result on the Windows operating system for a 16 processor system. This result outperforms in both performance and price, utilizing the same number of identical processors, the recently announced best performing Microsoft SQL Server 2005 TPC-H one-terabyte result for a 16 processor system on Windows.

SAP is beefing up its Silicon Valley presence as the company fights with Oracle to grab larger chunks of a $24 billion-a-year market. SAP is adding staff to its Palo Alto research and development force and launching a strategy to boost sales through an array of partnerships.