Anyone following the strategic acquisitions by Oracle the last few years can see a very clear trend: Oracle is amassing a treasure-trove of business applications that are powerful, interoperable, and valuable to mission delivery.
Most recently, Oracle snapped up Sun for $7.38 billion, right from under the clutches of IBM!
Oracle with $22.4 billion in revenue in 2008 and 55% of license revenue generated overseas âis the worldâs largest business software company, with more than 320,000 customersâincluding 100 of the Fortune 100ârepresenting a variety of sizes and industries in more than 145 countries around the globe.â(www.oracle.com)
Oracleâs roots are as a premiere database company. However, since 2004, they made more than 50 acquisitions in calculated business areas.
The Wall Street Journal, 21 April 2009, identifies some of these notable buys:
2004âPeopleSoft for human resources and financial management.
2005âSiebel for customer relationship management.
2007âHyperion Solutions for business intelligence.
2008âBEA Systems for infrastructure management.
2009âSun Microsystems for software, servers, and storage devices.
âOracle has been able to acquire companies with operating-profit margins of 10% and within six months expand those margins to 40%.â
With the recent purchase of Sun, Oracle is gaining control of critical open-source software such as Java programming technology, Solaris operating system, and MySQL database.
According to Forrester Research, âForty-six percent of businesses plan to deploy open-source software in 2009.â Oracle can now provide an important service in product support and updates for this. (Wall Street Journal, 22 April 2009)
In addition, Oracle also provides various middleware to integrate business applications and automate processes.
From databases to end-user applications, from service-oriented architecture to infrastructure management, from content management to business intelligence, Oracle has put together a broad impressive lineup. Of course, this is NOT an endorsement for Oracle (as other companies may have as good or even better solutions), but rather an acknowledgement of Mr. Ellisonâs keen architecture strategy that is building his company competitively and his product offering compellingly. Ellison is transforming the company from a successful single brand that was at risk of becoming commoditized to a multi-faceted brand with synergies among its various lines of business and products.
Some lessons for enterprise architects and CIOs: Build your product lineup, create synergies, uniformly brand it, and be number one or number two in every product category that youâre in (as Jack Welch famously advised) and grow, grow, grow!