Why purchase SPL? Oracle's rationale was the following:
- Penetrate an industry where SAP is the clear leader. With SAP in a strong #1 position (over 800 utility customers & 300 CIS customers), Oracle saw an opportunity to buy a foothold in a market where it lacked presence.
- Existing Oracle utility products were weak or functionality was missing
>Oracle had weak and overlapping Enterprise Asset Management products; it still has a long way to go in rationalizing disparate applications – Oracle eAM, JD Edwards, and the SPL-acquired Synergen product
>Oracle completely lacked Customer Care & Billing, Outage & Distribution Management, Meter Data Management, and Mobile Workforce Management capabilities
Oracle speaks of the integration work done between Siebel and SPL. However, the integration between Siebel and SPL is not as strong as Oracle purports it to be. Business processes are not integrated--examples include not being to move between applications to complete a business scenario.
There's plenty of marketing hype surrounding this acquisition. Sure, if Oracle succeeds in integrating all of the pieces SPL has itself purchased (CES, Axiom, Sidewinder, Synergen) and ties these products to Siebel, JDE, PSFT, and Oracle...then yes, we might have something. But Oracle has a bigger challenge in Fusion. The question is, will it really dedicate resources to utilities when it has much much bigger development issues at hand? I do commend Oracle for spinning out a separate utilities division. Whether it thrives or fails in the Oracle machine is to be determined.
