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Technology Stocks : Oracle Corporation (ORCL) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: MeDroogies who wrote (9450)	1/30/1999 10:10:00 PM
From: John Wright	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 19080

MeDroogies, we differ on Oracle acquisitions. I'm not sure ORCL would really have anything to gain by acquiring any of their competitors. Certainly they'd have everything to lose. The only winners would be the struggling acquiree. An acquisition would be expensive, and probably use up most of Oracle's cash. Certainly it would be much cheaper and prudent to simply watch the other ERP vendors continue to falter, lose market share or drift slowly into oblivion (like Baan). If an acquisition were to be considered do you think a Supply Chain Vendor like I2 might provide a great fit to Oracle's existing ERP business??? By the way, as part of the application software selection process, Fortune 1000's will look at vendor financial stability and mkt share, to get a feel for future product support and development and innovation. Partnering with a loser, for lack of a better term, can get very expensive. Do you think some of the struggling ERP vendors will now find themselves behind the 8 ball on their sales pitches. Can companies like Baan ever recover? Where will Informix and Sybase be 5 years from now? Marginal tiny niche players at best? Thoughts, opinions, anyone? John

To: MeDroogies who wrote (9450)	1/31/1999 6:40:00 PM
From: lml	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 19080

I agree with John. ORCL is not inclined to acquire competitors, or more appropriately, competing technology, unless the technology fits into overall ORCL's product solution. This was the case when they acquired Treasury Services Corporation (TSC) in 1997. TSC offered ORCL the opportunity to incorporate into its product solution TSC's primary product, Treasury Services Evaluation and Reporting System (TSER). TSER included solutions for asset/liability management; funds transfer pricing and performance reporting; budgeting and forecasting; acquisition valuation and analysis; interest rate risk management; target marketing and campaign management; strategic market analysis; customer relationship management; and customer profitability analysis. As you can surmise the acquired technology fit well into the ORCL product solution. Generally, competing technology does not. ORCL prefers to build their own core franchise rather than acquire competing technology that more likely than is not necessarily congruent with nascent ORCL technology. Problems merging the two undoubtedly arise. IFMX's acquisition of Illustra is a perfect case example. Look what happened. Its a risky strategy to pursue. The strategy may have merit when the acquiring company finds itself in a desperate situation. ORCL is in no position that it needs to take such risk. JMO.