Oracle Acquisition Drive Continues

by Demir Barlas, Line56
Friday, June 10, 2005

Oracle's buying spree -- which began with PeopleSoft, continued with Retek, and most recently snapped up Oblix -- continues. This time Oracle has acquired TimesTen, a provider of high-speed data management technology, for an undisclosed sum.

TimesTen works best in environments that require data to be pulled from databases (in the case of many TimesTen customers, Oracle databases) in as close to real time as possible. That could be of value in call centers, stock trading systems, real-time billing of any kind, and any other environment in which, as TimesTen CEO Jim Groff once told Line56, a company wants to "avoid those 20-second pauses and holds with customers."

The most obvious demand is in telecommunications and financial services (always a pioneer for any e-business technology anchored in real-time), and those are the verticals Oracle will initially target. Existing joint customers will see a particularly valuable synergy, according to Andrew Mendelsohn, SVP of Oracle Database Server Technologies, "with TimesTen providing in-memory caching and Oracle providing the enterprise database infrastructure."

Call it part of Oracle's drive to own more parts of the middleware puzzle, which is part of the company's larger quest to dominate middleware (against the likes of IBM, BEA, and Microsoft) and applications (against SAP, its only frontrunner in that particular race) alike.

http://www.line56.com/articles/default.asp?ArticleID=6633