Oracle

Innovation: It's all in how you see it

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--"Innovation" has been thrown around so often in technology circles that to some, it's a four-letter word.

At one tech company, innovation can mean bringing a dazzling new product to store shelves. At another, it can translate to a tiny new button on a Web site. That's why, executives say, the word itself has been overused and devalued.

Still, new cutting-edge products mean everything to a successful tech company.

Executives from eBay, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, and others were here at SDForum's first Corporate Innovation and Research Fair on Friday to talk about … Read more

Oracle amends SAP TomorrowNow suit

Oracle upped the ante in its lawsuit against rival SAP on Monday, claiming in an amended complaint that SAP's CEO and other top executives were aware of alleged illegal downloading of proprietary software and documents before, during, and after its acquisition of third-party support and maintenance company TomorrowNow.

The amended complaint broadens the allegations raised by Oracle in its initial lawsuit in March 2007. In that initial lawsuit, Oracle alleged that its enterprise software applications rival acquired TomorrowNow (TN) to not only woo away its PeopleSoft customers who needed maintenance and support, but to also use those customers' contracts … Read more

Proprietary software is a...services business

Interwoven, a leading web content management vendor, just announced really good financial results. Vignette, another competitor, did not.

In both cases, however, I was fascinated to see how little of their revenue stemmed from license sales. License sales are supposed to be the lifeblood of the proprietary software model: Write the software once, monetize forever. Yet in Interwoven's case, license revenue accounted for only 37 percent of the company's revenue. For Vignette, it was even worse: 21.6 percent.

Compare this to a recent IDC survey of open-source vendors, which found that 63 percent of open-source vendor revenue stems from software, not services. In Alfresco's case, an open-source competitor to Vignette and Interwoven (and my employer), the percentage of software revenue is much higher. Much higher.

This would imply that open-source vendors spend much more time writing great software, thereby creating room for a healthy ecosystem of value-added resellers and system integrators to grow up around them. Proprietary vendors may increasingly be competing with their partners in an attempt to goose revenue upward as license revenue deflates (as Oracle's recent earnings suggest may be in full swing).… Read more

Oracle is grabbing a lead spot in identity management

In the 1990s and early 2000s, Oracle dabbled in the identity space with database access controls and a network directory. But it really wasn't considered a player in this space.

This changed in 2005 when Oracle acquired its way into identity management with the purchase of Oblix and Thor Technologies. Even with these acquisitions, many industry watchers never thought that Oracle could buy its way into the market and weave disparate products into an integrated suite.

Once again, common wisdom was completely wrong. While others struggle or abandon this space, Oracle has vaulted to a leadership position. In fact, … Read more

MySQL bumping out Oracle?

Arjen Lentz spotted an interesting comment on Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz's blog, which suggests that Oracle may have cause for concern in its competition with MySQL:

I work for a major Fortune company, and we're in the process of putting Oracle on a "sunset" list of restricted vendors. No new applications are allowed on Oracle, the only approved vendors are Sun/MySQL and Microsoft/SQL Server.

An isolated incidence? Possibly. But where's there's smoke, there's fire. I imagine that this isn't the only Fortune 500 company that is looking to shave the … Read more

Oracle avoids SaaS to keep margins up, raise prices

Oracle is a shrewd, shrewd company. As reported by Sarah Lacy in Businessweek, Oracle long ago recognized the potential for Software-as-a-Service, both to liberate customers and to decimate its profits. Noting that the two may very well go together, Oracle has demurred from jumping into SaaS:

On-demand software has turned out to be a brutal slog. Software sold "as a service" over the Web doesn't sell itself, even when it's cheaper and actually works. Each sale closed by these new Web-based software companies has a much smaller price tag. And vendors are continually tweaking their software, fixing bugs, and pushing out incremental improvements. Great news for the user, but the software makers miss out on the once-lucrative massive upgrade every few years and seemingly endless maintenance fees for supporting old versions of the software....

Why isn't Oracle a bigger player in on-demand software? It doesn't want to be, Ellison told the analysts and investors. … Read more

Oracle consumes 44 percent of the database market

Over the past few years, Oracle has bought nearly every enterprise software company in existence, but comparatively few database-related vendors (Sleepycat, InnoDB, etc.). This hasn't mattered, however, as it's gargantuan applications business is helping to drive its database business, now climbing to 44 percent of the enterprise market.

Verdict on Oracle's consolidation strategy? Big ambition with big returns. Well done.

Sun is trying to hollow out Oracle's momentum with an aggressive, all-you-can-eat pricing for MySQL, but the real competition in the short term is from Microsoft and IBM.

I'd love to see data on whether … Read more

Total economic cost of insecure software: $180 billion a year in the U.S

David Rice's book Geekonomics: The Real Cost of Insecure Software calls the software industry to account for its careless attitude toward security.

As reported on Forbes.com: Rice blames the software industry for a litany of hidden costs, ranging from the infrastructure needed to fix hackable bugs in software to recent data breaches at the U.S. State Department and the Pentagon--even a Boeing 747 crash in 2005 that resulted from software glitches. All told, he places the total economic cost of security flaws in software at around $180 billion a year.

Companies like Oracle or Microsoft say their … Read more

Oracle is up, but is the technology economy down?

Oracle knocked another quarter out of the park, with fourth-quarter profit up 27 percent and revenue climbing 24 percent to $7.2 billion. Life is good, yes?

Well, maybe. Oracle President and CFO Safra Catz indicated that she is expecting a tough summer quarter, with tightened technology spending on the horizon. This, coupled with RIM's quarter, which was strong but below analyst expectations, suggests that we may be in for a long, hot summer.

Yes, open-source companies and software should fare well in a down economy as buyers search for bargains. But in such an economy, buyers are also … Read more

Oracle sees solid growth for its fourth quarter

Software licensing drove a healthy increase in revenue for Oracle during its fourth quarter.

For the quarter, which ended May 31, the enterprise software giant reported revenue of $7.24 billion, up 24 percent from the same period a year earlier. During that three-month period, revenue from new software licenses rose 27 percent to $3.14 billion, and revenue from software license updates and product support rose 25 percent to $2.83 billion.

Revenue from services also was on the increase, though not by quite as much. It was up 18 percent, to $1.26 billion.

Oracle said that its … Read more