Macehiter Ward-Dutton: Blog on IT-business alignment and related things

IT-business alignment

Thursday, June 09, 2005

Oracle acquires TimesTen: a rational move but not without some challenges

Oracle today announced the acquisition of privately-held, 90-person TimesTen, Inc for an undisclosed sum. TimesTen provides a memory-based, relational database targeted at mission-critical, (pseudo-) real-time applications, particularly in telecoms (fixed and mobile) and financial services, especially capital markets. TimesTen, with its TimesTen/Cache already provides out-of-the-box integration with the Oracle database, enabling synchronisation between the Oracle database at the back-end and the cache in the application tier.

As well as the out-of-the-box integration, this acquisition makes a lot of sense for Oracle. It should bring Oracle into opportunities where it has been less of a dominant database force and, via TimesTen’s relationships with equipment providers such as Cisco, Ericsson and Nokia, potentially new routes to exploit those opportunities. Whilst 50% of TimesTen’s customers are shared with Oracle that still leaves a good 700+ opportunities for Oracle to attempt to displace competitors, such as Sybase in capital markets. During the call to discuss the acquisition, Oracle’s VP of Database Server Technologies Andy Mendelsohn indicated that Oracle will consider the opportunities to improve integration with non-Oracle databases and pointed to the fact that Oracle’s Application Server works with the likes of DB2 and SQL Server. I am not convinced that Oracle will follow the same logic when it comes to data management, which is its raison d’etre.

Whilst this acquisition makes a great deal of sense, one aspect which wasn’t discussed in the call was TimesTen/Transact, which applies the in-memory database to high performance, message-oriented applications, particularly in financial services, and is tightly integrated with Tibco’s Rendezvous message bus. Application integration and business process management are a key area of investment and focus for Oracle as part of its recently renamed Fusion middleware stack, where it competes (on paper at least) with Tibco. Oracle is going to have to tread a careful line here and avoid the temptation to attempt to displace Tibco since it lacks both the technology and the credibility to do so. It will be interesting to see the details of the product roadmap, which Oracle plans to outline later this month.

posted by Neil Macehiter @ 6:03 PM 1 comments

permalink

Comments:

Thanks for your comment.

I did indeed see the analysis - extracts below in ""

“Then is it perhaps because Oracle thinks that it is worth harvesting the TimesTen user base? Given that this is peanuts compared to Oracle and that many of them are joint customers anyway then it is obvious that this is not the case.!”

Whilst I acknowledge that TimesTen’s user base is very small compared to Oracle I don’t think it’s the size of the customer base, but rather the fact that TimesTen has seen success in markets where Oracle has not been traditionally strong – capital markets and telecommunications (including the equipment manufacturer OEM channel) – particularly as 50% of TimesTen’s customers are not Oracle customers.

“Do you begin to see a pattern here? It certainly looks as if the acquisition of TimesTen is actually about preventing Progress from making inroads into Oracle accounts. Progress is miniscule compared to Oracle so it would be difficult to conclude that Oracle was running scared of Progress per se but this strengthens the argument that I have written about before: that Oracle is increasingly under attack and, moreover, is increasingly seen as vulnerable by other suppliers. If that is the case then one part of a defensive strategy would be to shore up the battlements – the purchase of TimesTen seem sto fit within that picture.”

I really don’t buy this. I fail to see that Oracle is threatened by Progress, which has seen the vast majority of its success from the ISV community based on it’s database and tools combination. Progress operates Apama as part of a separate business unit – much like it does Sonic – and I believe that the primary motivation for Progress is to target a discrete market opportunity with Apama rather than to try and upsell its database into the same market: it just doesn’t have the credibility (or the product) to take on the likes of Oracle.

posted by