By Dan Jones
Oracle Corp says that it along with rival SAP AG will dominate the business intelligence sector by buying up or pushing out smaller niche vendors. Neil Brooks, application marketing manager, talking about the new strategic enterprise management (SEM) applications the company has just announced (CI No 3,574), claimed that access to data would determine which companies won out in the sector. He said that this inevitably meant that the largest enterprise resource planning vendors would beat smaller ‘best of breed’ suppliers. He claimed that companies would not take the risk of implementing BOB vendors apps because they needed to be sure that access to data would be enterprise-wide. Brooks denied that Oracle was moving more heavily into business intelligence software because of the industry-wide malaise of falling ERP license fees. He said that Oracle was still selling its traditional ERP packages into sites. Instead, he characterized Oracle’s move as a natural evolution driven by customer demand. Brooks said that Oracle would continue its drive into the business intelligence sector with a mixture of in-house development and buying select vendors to fill holes in its portfolio – unlike SAP which is undertaking the bulk of new application development work itself. Brooks also pushed the pre-configured nature of the firm’s new SEM apps, claiming that, although user-customizable, they were a lot more pre-defined than software offered by other business intelligence vendors.
