Oracle Puts Dibs On TimesTen

After absorbing Retek, Oblix and PeopleSoft, Oracle now says it is acquiring TimesTen, a realtime database specialist. Terms of the agreement, expected to close by the end of July, weren't disclosed.

Oracle, Redwood Shores, Calif., tends to run large back-end databases, while TimesTen runs in the middle tier for realtime handling of subsets of that data, according to Jim Groff, CEO of TimesTen, Mountain View, Calif.

TimesTen's customers include telecommunications carriers, financial services companies and defense firms. But despite its pending acquisition, TimesTen continues to grab new business. Tibco Software just announced that it will embed TimesTen's DataServer database into the next release of Tibco's business activity monitoring software, BusinessFactor.

Oracle and TimesTen have significant customer overlap, Groff said. For example, a company may use Oracle at the back end to manage and maintain all customer data, a tiny subset of which—billing and service information—gets pulled forward to TimesTen when a customer calls into a call center, he said.

VARs said the deal furthers Oracle's goal to build up its Fusion middleware infrastructure. "It's interesting because even as Oracle is clearly driving down into the lower-end markets. It's continuing to position itself against IBM in these big, big accounts," said Ron Zapar, CEO of Re-Quest, an Oracle integrator in Chicago. The telecom implementations run "tons and tons of processing transactions," he added.