Oracle and Acquisition Targets
March 26, 2009
Poor Oracle. The company buys and buys but cannot get respect. The most recent put down comes from MarketWatch. Read “Therese Poletti’s “Has Oracle Run Out of Companies to Buy?” here. The idea is that Oracle paid a dividend in a lousy economy. The leap is that paying a dividend means that Oracle is no longer looking to buy companies. For me the most interesting comment in the story was:
In addition to its cash, Oracle also has about $11.2 billion in debt. So the company likely will proceed cautiously when it comes to doing any more big deals, as opposed to recent media reports suggesting the opposite. Right now in this economy, the longer one waits watching its prey, the better the deal that can be struck.
What if the economy has hit bottom? If true which I doubt, then one could argue that the best deals may be had now. If the economy is drifting lower, then more opportunities will arise for Oracle to add to its warehouse of purchases. Let’s assume that deals are yet to be made. In my opinion, Oracle needs two types of companies. The first need is for an enterprise search solution. The Oracle SES10g is no longer on my radar. After the Triple Hop acquisition, I had high hopes for Oracle becoming more than a reseller of Google appliances.
Beyond Red Hat, there are some opportunities for Oracle to fill major gaps in its data management offerings.
Anyone with content in Oracle tables knows that finding what’s needed can be a chore. With more than 350 vendors in the search and content processing space, Oracle has choices. Lots of choices in this space I believe.
A second category is what I call next generation data management tools. Google is working away in this space as are Aster Data and other companies with clever new database technology. I think Perfect Search is an interesting firm. There are other companies as well.
In short, the MarketWatch analysis does not provide me with the meat and bone to buy the assertion in the headline. Oracle may be suffering more from management issues. Sure, the company’s debt is a factor, but I think there is more to Oracle’s drift than just money.
Oracle may need to kick its efforts up a notch. There is another Mountain View data management company that may soon make life even more difficult for the top dogs at Oracle. And to add spice, the notion of cloud computing data management adds another ingredient to the mix.
Stephen Arnold, March 26, 2009
Search Marketing AI Engine
March 26, 2009
I receive a handful of mirthful email each month. One reader alerted me to a Web site that makes it easy to generate search, content processing, and text mining marketing documents. I am not sure if this site is funny ha ha or funny painful. Please, decide for yourself. Navigate to the Corporate Gibberish Generator here. I generated the following text for a made up company called Enterprise Search Consulting Actualizers (ESCA). The system generated this:
Enterprise Search Consulting Specialists is the industry leader of world-class synergies. We apply the proverb “Look before you leap” not only to our channels but our capability to benchmark. We will extend our capability to syndicate without reducing our aptitude to syndicate. Do you have a scheme to become B2C2B? We have proven we know that it is better to morph strategically than to synthesize dynamically. The aptitude to disintermediate intuitively leads to the power to monetize efficiently. Quick: do you have a reconfigurable game plan for coping with new schemas? A company that can synthesize courageously will (at some unknown point of time) be able to incubate courageously. The metrics for raw bandwidth are more well-understood if they are not strategic. A company that can maximize elegantly will (at some point in the future) be able to expedite correctly. Your budget for reinventing should be at least twice your budget for monetizing.
Some of the news releases I receive seem to make use of this system or one that is similar. I bookmarked this gem.
Stephen Arnold, March 26, 2009
SharePoint Trojan Horsed
March 26, 2009
The article “Where Worlds Collide – and Then There’s SharePoint” her by Oliver Marks gave me a view of SharePoint I had not previously considered. Here is the passage that I found notable:
SharePoint is often Trojan horsed in ‘free’ with other Microsoft products and can be used as a shared drive document repository by end users with no financial impact. The vaunted collaboration components in the current iteration are rudimentary, and a partner ecosphere has grown up to essentially use SharePoint as a database foundation. Going forward SharePoint is everywhere, and as future iterations of a cloud oriented Microsoft Office hook into the next iterations of SharePoint, it seems likely an extensive new walled garden will emerge. How and if this Microsoft ecosphere will allow interoperability with the open source world is a loaded question.
I have highlighted the hook that snagged me. SharePoint is often a bargain. If Microsoft tosses in more robust search, then the magnetic pull of SharePoint gets stronger. I quite like the phrase “Trojan horsed”’
Stephen Arnold, March 26, 2009
YouTube: Week of Woe
March 26, 2009
XchangeMagazine here reported that Google had a tough week over its YouTube.com property. I don’t pay too much attention to YouTube.com. You get to be my age, the notion of watching hours of online video on my Dell Mini screen loses some zing. Tara Seals does a good job summarizing the recent challenges Google has faced. Copyright plays a big part in these hassles. Some like the dispute with music companies can be negotiated. Other hassles with China might be more difficult to resolve. These are not exactly YAGGs or yet another Google goof. These are policy and management issues. No zeros and ones to make choices unambiguous.
Stephen Arnold, March 26, 2009
Microsoft Fast Strategy Shift
March 26, 2009
I have been puzzled by magazines with the word “Redmond” in the title. I get a couple of these publications in the mail, and I find the stories interesting. “Microsoft’s FAST Strategy Shift” by Stephen Swoyer here stopped me in my tracks. The story reported that the roadmap outlined at the Fast Forward 2009 conference a few weeks ago shifted. I had locked in my thinking on the Fast Forward 2009 announcements and was waiting for some concrete deliverables to arrive. Mr. Swoyer wrote:
"[Search Server Express] is offered for free to capture the attention of workers developing low-volume, limited-value projects. Microsoft will incorporate the FAST technology into the search products elsewhere in the Office family as of its next…release date," Andrews said. "For now, Microsoft sells a more independent product, FAST ESP for SharePoint, which it will transform into the FAST Search for SharePoint product when the latter becomes available. Greater scale and functional flexibility are key elements of the FAST product."
I interpreted this comment to mean that integration is in the undefined future. In my opinion, the roadmap is a broad guideline. The product integration is mostly a Web part and manual job. If this is the case, Microsoft will face considerable pressure from third party vendors who offer a “snap in solution”; that is, one that either requires zero new code or minimal tweaking of proven scripts.
I thought Redmond publications were pro Microsoft. If my assumption is correct, this story is softening some hard facts about the Microsoft purchase of Fast Search & Transfer for $1.2 billion about one year ago. Not only does Microsoft have its own SharePoint search solutions, a number of vendors offer very good search solutions that are essentially plug and play. More problematic is the Fast Search & Transfer technology. Perhaps it was once “best of breed”, but now the Fast ESP (enterprise search platform) has become more complex with the addition of new home grown functions, components obtained via licenses or open source, and the integration of sophisticated third party functions from other vendors. The police action remains an issue. On the LinkedIn enterprise search forum, I wrote about a flurry of job openings posted by Microsoft executives. These were blatant appeals for enterprise search professionals. I thought these blandishments were noteworthy. Where there is smoke there is fire in my neck of the Harrods’s Creek woods.
I will continue to monitor this SharePoint Fast integration project.
Stephen Arnold, March 26, 2009
Google Apps Book Review
March 26, 2009
Quick hit: Slashdot ran a useful book review by Lorin Ricker of a new book called “Google Apps Deciphered — Compute in the Cloud to Streamline Your Desktop”. Click here to read the review. I found it helpful.
Stephen Arnold, March 26, 2009
Social Networks in the Organization: Choppy Water
March 25, 2009
Why was I not surprised? Read “Enterprises Struggle to Adopt Social Networking Internally,” an article by C. G. Lynch in CIO Magazine here. Mr. Lynch reported that cultural barriers, not technology was the barrier. Little wonder that organizations are unable to exploit technology. “Getting it” seems in my opinion one issue. Then organizations have to do it, which is another hurdle in a recession. The task may be too much for aging, financially challenged, and regulated deciders. Maybe these Enterprise 2.0 managers should turn to their kids, not business buzzworders who don’t know a twit from a tweet? Just my opinion, of course.
Stephen Arnold, March 25, 2009
Connotate’s Agent Approach Explained
March 25, 2009
The Connotate Web log here offers up a transcript of Bruce Molloy’s explanation of the firm’s software agent approach. The venue was a podcast interview with an interlocutor named Mike Lippis of the Outlook Series. You can find the transcript here. The information is useful, but the best way to read it is by scrolling to the end of the post where Part One is located and then reading upwards to Part Five. For me, the most interesting comment in the transcript was:
I’ll give you 2 or 3 ways that is realized through the simple design of our software. One is Agent creation. If you have someone who’s working in business intelligence or research or an analyst or someone who wants to do price comparisons and that person wants to monitor certain, say, prices or developments or products from a competitors’ site they can very quickly and easily paint the screen, if you will, create an Agent and have that agent then available to monitor over time, every day, or every hour, every minute kind of, what’s going on. Secondly, in terms of the Library and this is, there’s a real multiplier effect here in terms of the Library. As you get people starting to share the Agents, those Agents come to represent really best practices, best ways to get information delivered, to look at it, to compare it, to mash it and as such it’s a repository of expertise that is then shared and multiplied in the organization. And lastly, in terms of output just because it’s so easy to get this output because it’s so well personalized it becomes a solution that individuals, non-technical folks in an organization can use without having to go to IT and get into a long development cycle, if it’s even possible.
A social spin on creating and sharing intelligent software. Interesting idea in my opinion.
Stephen Arnold, March 23, 2009
Valley Wag on Copyright, Wikipedia, and a Dead Tree Outfit
March 25, 2009
Short take. Click here and read “Is the Los Angeles Times Cribbing from Wikipedia? Valley Wag presents snippets from an LA Times’s story and source or coincidental snippets from Wikipedia. I am no expert in legal matters and copyright, but these snippets looked similar. Maybe it is a coincidence? Maybe it is another example of the ease with which information can be located and possibly repurposed. I haven’t had an original idea or sentence in my goosely life, but I am no journalist. I am not sure what to think. I am afraid to quote an Associated Press story, but if this alleged similarity is valid, the Los Angeles Times seems to operate with some interesting methods.
Stephen Arnold, March 25, 2009
Database Alternatives
March 25, 2009
I did not like the title of this article, “Slacker Databases Break All the Old Rules” here. I skipped the title and went directly to the write up, and I strongly recommend that you navigate to the article, read it, and save it in your useful info slide. The write up by Peter Wayner explains and to some depth analyzes the following data management tools:
- Amazon’s SimpleDB
- Apache’s CloudDB
- Google’s App Engine
- Persevere.
Take away: InfoWorld sees these as experiments. I see them as the future.
Stephen Arnold, March 25, 2009
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