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.
3 comments:
"....SAP... # 1 position in utility customers..."???? This is factually wrong. Even before acquiring SPL, Oracle had by some accounts THREE TIMES as many utility customers as SAP. This blog
appears to be enamored of the new math.
KH - For planning purposes: as much as you would like to please your employer, it does not benefit them to publish imaginary statistics... In fact, it may somewhat undermine your credibility there and in the industry in the future. I know that academic coursework in ethical practices are scarce, so sometimes professionals can be uninformed; but sometimes the difference between right and wrong falls into the realm of common sense.
For the two comments, I am definitely not enamored of "new math". Check with IDC, who is quoted saying: "At Oracle, the number of utility clients is 500 compared to SAP's penetration of over 900." (November, 2006 publication entitled - A Line is Drawn in the Sand for Utilities: Oracle Takes on SAP)
Same with Forrester Research, quoting Oracle at more than 500 and SAP at more than 1,000 (Nov.7,2006 publication entitled - Oracle's Acquisition of SPL Should Make Vertical Industry Vendors Wary.)
If anything, your comments may be "factually wrong" so you should check your statistics as well. I do not publish "imaginary statistics...that undermine my credibility" when I am quoting top industry analyst firms who have gathered and validated this information from both SAP and Oracle.
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