Oracle AppsLab - Latest Comments in On Acquiring Innovation

Re: On Acquiring Innovation

Jake — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 11:38:51 -0000

@Steve: Nice post, acquisition renewal may fit equally well to describe what I have observed. As for declining markets, I'm not in a position to evaluate that, sitting in my corner of development.

Re: On Acquiring Innovation

Steve Mann — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 11:09:37 -0000

Jake... wrote a piece on Acquisition Innovation during OOW.

http://ablebrains.typepad.com/ablebrains/2007/1...

Hope you are well.

Steve

Re: On Acquiring Innovation

Jake — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 22:00:24 -0000

@Marian: The article you mentioned is interesting and touches on some critical points. One thing that's not the focus of the article, but should be pointed out is that pieces of s/w bought from different vendors have a lower change of working well together than acquired pieces now under the same umbrella.

For example, buying R12 and Hyperion would work out better now than it would have when the 2 companies were independent. Part of acquiring innovation is getting access to the code and the hidden features, like EBS has always had access to DB features and technologies that weren't available to PSFT or SAP.

Re: On Acquiring Innovation

Jake — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 16:30:04 -0000

Thanks for the link, I'll check it out in a bit. R12 and E9 were basically finished when we acquired PSFT, so both those releases were almost entirely completed.

We got a shot in the arm with the acquisitions, and I think if you're impressed with R12/E9, you'll be blown away by future releases.

That's the goal anyway.

Re: On Acquiring Innovation

Marian — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 12:12:28 -0000

Software acquisitions can be a tricky business and benefits may not always be obvious. The WSJ ran a nice piece on the subject a while ago:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119551706770298...

Some kind of consolidation was inevitable but only time will show how much customers and users benefit. Oracle is still mainly a technology company, not an application one. The acquisitions brought more focus on applications and users, which is now pretty apparent in R12 (which looks more like Peoplesoft) and overall customer service.