Oracle's Full Plate

The PeopleSoft deal closed in January after something like 18 months of bile-and-rancor. But since the blockbuster transaction, Oracle has shown no signs of slowing down its buying binge. Last week alone, it acquired assets and personnel from content integration player Context Media, as well as a majority stake in i-flex Solutions, an India-based ISV specializing in banking applications.

Those lagniappes came on the heels of Oracle&'s buyout of Oblix in March, Retek in April and ProfitLogic just last month. Phew. No wonder Oracle felt the need to appoint three presidents, recently naming former Microsoft CFO Greg Maffei as its third co-president (he joins Charles Phillips and Safra Catz). Maffei, who also holds the CFO title at Oracle, made a name for himself through Microsoft&'s buyout of Great Plains, among other deals.

As for the acquisitions, Retek gives Oracle a good-sized hunk of the retail software market, Oblix brings federated identity management expertise and ProfitLogic sports pricing analytics software.

All of this adds up to ... well, I&'m not sure yet, other than some potentially big integration issues, but it is an interesting portfolio.

Some Oracle partners suspect that while the execs at this acquisitive company make big, mean noises about taking on SAP, the ultimate enemy remains Microsoft—and IBM.

“Oracle seems really focused on SAP, but I think IBM is the real game. If you look at Collab Suite, that&'s an anti-Lotus move, and if you look at the app server and SOA stuff, that&'s all positioned against WebSphere,” said one.

Of course, Oracle and its talkative CEO, Larry Ellison, have to make nice toward IBM publicly because Oracle now has a number of AS/400/iSeries customers in the fold running J.D. Edwards software. No use ticking off the paying customers.

Scott Jenkins, CEO of The EBS Group, a longtime Oracle database-and-apps partner in Lenexa, Kan., said the company is making smart buys of mature and proven technologies. Still, he acknowledges that Oracle management has its “hands around a big hamburger right now.”

What&'s your take on Oracle&'s land grab? Let me know at (781) 839-1223 or via e-mail at [email protected].