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Oracle
Corporation is back in the news. On February 9, 2006, a week
after officially completing the acquisition of Seibel Systems,
Oracle Corporation announced the plan to lay-off 2000 employees
both from Seibel and Oracle. A week after the announcement,
the company announced its plan to sell the CRM consultancy
unit, OnTarget, that was held by Seibel since 1999.
Oracle
Corporation, the Redwood Shores, California-based company,
develops, manufactures, markets, distributes, and services
computer software that enables organizations to manage their
businesses globally. The core business of Oracle is database
technology software and it is also into developing, implementing
and servicing enterprise application software like ERP and
CRM. However, the company has been in the business news since
2003, when it started acquiring other companieslarge and small
via hostile and not-so-hostile means, with uncanny speed and
efficiency. These acquisitions are quite obviously strategic
moves to oust its biggest competitor SAP and grow in a maturing
market.
Given
that the database technology industry is fast reaching saturation,
Oracle's foray into the applications business seem to be its
growth rider. The company has been attempting to make itself
the leader in Enterprise Applications by providing industry
specific software and support. At the same time it is developing
a new "fusion middleware" that can create a common
migration path for all the different applications (that it
is acquiring) so that its database technology becomes inevitably
tied to the enterprise applications business. This two-pronged
strategy seems to be workable provided its "fusion strategy"
is implemented successfully. According to some s, this
kind of strategic diversification into enterprise applications
is understandable as the revenues from this business increased
by 28% in 2005 when compared with the database revenues' increase
of 13% for the same year.
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