The merger and acquisition activity continues unabated in the BI world! Today Oracle announced plans to enhance its Oracle Fusion middleware offerings through the acquisition of Sunopsis, a provider of heterogeneous data integration products.
Oracle said it plans to make Sunopsis an integral part of its service-oriented architecture, business intelligence, and master data management products. It is certainly a badly needed component in Oracle's push to compete with IBM and Microsoft as the "one stop shop".
Sunopsis is optimized for heterogeneous IT environments but Oracle has committed to continuing Sunopsis' ability to support Oracle and non-Oracle data sources and targets. I guess time will tell on that one.
"Real-time information access, next-generation architectures and more mixed IT environments are driving increased requirements for sophisticated, fast, heterogeneous data integration solutions," said Thomas Kurian, senior vice president, Oracle Server Technologies. "Oracle and Sunopsis have complementary products with a shared focused on delivering the very best data integration products to our customers."
Not much else is known at this time but according to the press release, Oracle will provide more information to the general public at Oracle OpenWorld conference in two weeks.
Sure does put a damper on Sunopsis' brand new partnership with Netezza though. The Sunopsis Open Connector for Netezza was redesigned to integrate the Netezza Performance Server® (NPS®) data warehouse appliance with the ETL platform Sunopsis Data Conductor. But then again, who knows -- maybe Oracle will buy Netezza next...
Yours in BI Success.
Claudia
Posted October 9, 2006 8:00 AM
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Claudia,
The acquisition not only puts into question Sunopsis’ new partnership with Netezza but also another new partnership with salesforce.com (Sunopsis Open Connector for Salesforcec.com), along with its longstanding working relationship with Teradata.
The Catch-22 of this acquisition, is whether Oracle will leverage the most attractive aspect of Sunopsis from an industry perspective, i.e. a heterogeneous and vendor neutral data integration platform, or will Oracle lose that capability by trying to direct the world to its own applications and database. Oracle’s existing ETL offering OWB (Oracle Warehouse Builder) required an Oracle database as its target up until its latest release this year.
Who knows who Oracle will buy next….it’s anybody’s guess…but it will happen.
I enjoy your blog,
Rick Sherman
On the conference call this morning I got a few distinct impressions. One is that Oracle still doesn't understand data integration, but realizes that with so many acquired applications they now need it.
Another is that the people heading up Fusion are as confused as ever. It felt like I was listening to "why ETL is good" talks from several years back. It was almost as if the people managing Fusion are still stuck in a late-90's EAI view of the world, and only recently stumbled on concepts like metadata-driven extracts and not coding logic at the system endpoints with a dumb pipe in between.
I also think they completely missed the boat when it came to OWB Paris. They should have renamed it Oracle ETL or some such. No idea how Data Conductor and OWB will "merge over time" as they said. The Active Integration product makes more sense and fills a gap, but the ETL side makes a lot less sense.