Oracle Corp finally agreed the acquisition of Digital Equipment Corp’s Rdb relational database business on Friday, taking the assets of the Rdb business, DEC’s CDD/Repository – only recently still regarded as one of the company’s most strategic software products, and the DBA Workcenter suite of database administration tools. It pays $108m – around one year’s annual revenue – in what is DEC’s most pressing requirement, cash, and of course gets all the corresponding support businesses. Oracle says it is making every effort to retain the 250 engineers, management and support employees responsible for the development and maintenance of the Rdb database and repository businesses, and it is to create an Oracle New England Development Center, its first such database facility based outside California; it will also add a Colorado Springs Rdb Support Center to its worldwide customer support and services network. Employees abroad will be integrated with existing Oracle operations in those countries. The company did not make clear whether it plans any new releases of Rdb, but says it does intend to make significant investments in the Rdb technology set. Oracle will continue to enhance its capabilities and quality and will extend the existing gateway between Rdb and the Oracle7 parallel database to ensure interoperability between the two, but over time hopes to migrate everybody to a future release of Oracle. It will also complete and bring to market the implementations of Rdb for DEC OSF/1 and Windows NT for Alpha AXP. DEC retains responsibility for all existing maintenance contracts for the next 15 months; thereafter, those that have not expired will pass to Oracle. DEC will continue to offer consulting services for the Rdb product set, and will add consulting support for Oracle7 products. Oracle will also expand the range of products it offers for DEC hardware, in particular putting the Oracle Media Server up on DEC’s video server hardware; it will implement Oracle7, Oracle Co-operative Development Environment and Co-operative Applications to DEC’s Windows NT for Alpha AXP, to complement the existing OpenVMS VAX, OpenVMS AXP, and DEC OSF/1 AXP versions. Oracle Workgroup Server will go up under the DEC Windows NT for iAPX-86 and Oracle also agreed to resell DEC’s transaction processing and data integration lines.
