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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.

Oracle is getting ready to debut Oracle 10g Release 2.0, the latest version of its flagship database with improved data-management and backup capabilities. Some of the new features are also geared toward helping companies comply with data-protection regulations.

Although Larry Ellison has poured millions into his personal storage start-up Pillar Data, it doesn’t appear to be good enough for Oracle – at least not yet. Oracle will continue using Network Appliance and EMC rather than switching to competing systems from Pillar. Pillar’s inability to push NetApp out of Oracle hits especially hard since Pillar has billed itself as a cheaper, more efficient alternative to NetApp.

Oracle has gobbled up smaller database player TimesTen in the hopes of using the firm’s ultra-fast transaction technology to speed its software.
TimesTen makes a specialized database that speeds up many types of transactions by storing data in memory as opposed to disk. Customers in the financial services, telecom and networking industries have been the biggest fans of TimesTen’s products. Deutsche Bank, Cisco, JP Morgan and the Nasdaq exchange are just some of the high-profile clients claimed by the company.