Pythian Group

Oracle, currently in the process of acquiring the leading CRM (“Customer Relationship Management”) vendor, Siebel, is seeing some form of competition from SAP, who is offering to US companies running Siebel, a credit of up to 75% of their existing Siebel software licensing fees toward the licensing of SAP’s comparable CRM products.

SAP is offering a program called “Safe Passage Program” to Siebel customers who are uncertain about Oracle’s pending acquisition of Siebel. The program is aimed at providing, among other things, the 75% credit and also conversion tools, implementation methodologies and services from SAP and its partners to help ensure a smooth transition to my “SAP CRM”.

We’ll anxiously wait to see how many of Siebel customers went to Oracle and how many went to SAP…

Read more at the following:

SAP Safe Passage home
SAP – Press release
Media coverage at ZDNet

Many companies are considering deploying enterprise IT on platforms such as VMWare’s ESX. As IBM has long done on its enterprise-class hardware, Microsoft has now introduced a new licensing policy, allowing CPU-restricted virtual machines to be created, and software to be licensed based on the CPU’s assigned to the virtual machine. This allows software licenses to besold based on CPU’s actually in use rather than number of CPU’s physically present.

Learn more at News.com.

After acquiring TimesTen Inc. in June, 2005 Oracle Press, oracle is now offering its first release of the TimesTen product, under the Oracle brand name. TimesTen is an application tier database, or an “in memory database”, targeting real-time and time-critical applications for industries such as national defense, telecommunications, and travel. It will be very interesting to see how much of the TimesTen technology Oracle will use to innovate its already powerful RDBMS database flagship.

Read more at the following:

CRN
Oracle Press
Computerworld

Oracle continues to pursue it’s Computer Associates style acquisition strategy in its tenth such in a year’s time. This time, it’s logistics software company G-Log’s turn. Some good analysis is available at Information Week and at TechWorld.

Although Siebel as an acquisition target was not included in Forrester Research’s analysis last month, it does make sense in the wake of Oracle’s other pushes in the CRM space. In the press release, Larry Ellison brags about the 4000 customers and 3.4 million users of Siebel Systems – Does it surprise anyone that it seems he may really have been after the customers and users, and not the technology? Read more at oracle.com’s press release.

Oracle has hired Omar Tazi to join the firm to become Oracle’s chief open-source evangelist. Oracle’s role in the open source community has been increasing, and among other initiatives Oracle recently introduced a major new entrant into the open-source clustered filesystems sphere, OCFS 2. Tazi was previously the CEO of XML software company Orbeon, according to this article at CNET News.com.

In addition to 32-bit Windows and 32-bit Solaris, Oracle 9.2.0.7 is now available for AIX5L, 64-bit Windows, and 64-bit Solaris.

Metalink.

The patch can be downloaded at http://metalink.oracle.com/.

Cary Millsap has announced that the call for papers is now on in what is considered the industry’s most intensive performance-oriented annual conference, the Hotsos Symposium. More information is available at the conference page on hotsos.com

A survey by outsourcer Yoh Services LLC covered by Information week reveals that there is little momentum in U.S. IT salaries through 2005 so far. Salaries have remained flat and although some momentum, so far it has not shown itself to be sustainable. However, costs are steadily increasing in a few fields, and among them is Oracle database administration. Another interesting observation is that average IT wages in the U.S. have
increased about 5.1% since January 2001. A quick check at the U.S. Goverment Bureau of Labour Statistics confirms our suspicion that this has trailed inflation: It takes $1103.33 today to buy what would have cost only $1000 in 2001.

Information Week coverage
Press release from Yoh Services LLC
BLS.gov Inflation Calculator

In a particularly insightful article that could only have been written by someone who has been watching the enterprise IT industry for a long career, Judith Hurwitz raises a red flag about Oracle’s new aquisition strategy. It appears Larry Ellison himself has now clearly articulated a plan that involves buying “companies with a narrow profit margin that have attractive maintenance revenue.” Ms. Hurwitz astutely points out that this type of strategy, coupled with neglecting cash cows, is exactly how Computer Associates faded to irrelevance at the same time that they saddled themselves with several thousand software products to maintain. read article.