Oracle-AMD Acquisition Speculation Flares Once Again

By Zewde Yeraswork, CRN

Dirk Meyer, CEO of Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) has denied rumors that Oracle may look to acquire AMD.

"AMD is not for sale, but we are happy to listen to any proposal which is in the interest of our shareholders," Meyer said at an industry conference in Barcelona, as reported by Reuters.

The speculation was sparked by comments Oracle CEO Larry Ellison made last month at Oracle's annual financial analyst meeting, in which he said Oracle could soon acquire a chip company in addition to software acquisitions.

But at the Oracle annual stockholders' conference earlier this week, Ellison reiterated his interest in acquiring additional semiconductor and software companies, more so than new service offerings.

"My point really was that we are interested in buying intellectual property of all kinds," Ellison said, as reported by The Wall Street Journal . "We would be interested in certain kinds of semiconductor companies and software companies. Most of our acquisitions and the bulk of our strategy are in creating and acquiring intellectual property, including chips."

By acquiring AMD, Oracle would gain access to the chip company's IP portfolio, adding hardware to its software acquisitions and moving closer to end-to-end control of the entire IT stack.

Oracle couldn't be reached for comment Thursday. An AMD spokesperson offered the following comment to CRN: "As a matter of policy, AMD does not comment on speculations or rumors, but I can confirm that AMD is not for sale."

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Oracle acquires AmberPoint

By David Worthington

Oracle today has announced its acquisition of AmberPoint, a maker of SOA management software.

AmberPoint's SOA Management System solution is focused on resolving issues in application performance and transaction monitoring. The financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed, and the transaction is expected to close during the first half of this year, according to Oracle.

AmberPoint has partnerships with HP, Microsoft, Parasoft, SAP and TIBCO. Oracle will continue to support multiple platforms "even if the relationship ends," and it will support OEM agreements going forward, the company said in a conference call with the press.

"My guess is that Oracle will terminate many of these relationships," said Anne Thomas Manes, vice president and research director for Burton Group. AmberPoint, which is the "clear leader" in the SOA management market, is an "excellent acquisition" for Oracle, she added.

"I view SOA management as the most useful piece of SOA infrastructure an organization can buy, yet very few organizations have bought one," Manes said.

"The big vendors have universally promoted ESB as the foundation of a SOA infrastructure, and they've traditionally played down SOA management. I have the opposite perspective; SOA management should be the foundation of the infrastructure, and ESBs are less important."

Oracle intends to integrate data from AmberPoint’s governance runtime into its Fusion middleware products, including Oracle Enterprise Manager, Oracle SOA Governance and Oracle SOA Suite, the company said.

"We expect the addition of AmberPoint's products to Oracle Fusion Middleware SOA Suite will provide stronger end-to-end governance that allows customers to manage the entire life cycle of SOA-based solutions, providing visibility and management across heterogeneous environments," said Thomas Kurian, Oracle executive vice president of product development.

"I doubt that Oracle will start to downplay ESBs, but I expect they will start to aggressively promote SOA management," Manes said.

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Oracle Announces the Integration of Oracle Hyperion Planning and Oracle’s Demantra Real-Time Sales and Operations Planning

On beye networks 19th Jan 2010

OracleAnnounces the Integration of Oracle Hyperion Planning and Oracle’s Demantra Real-Time Sales and Operations Planning

• To improve operational alignment and financial performance, Oracle recently announced the integration of Oracle Hyperion Planning and Oracle’s Demantra Real-Time Sales and Operations Planning.

• Linking Hyperion Planning and Oracle’s Demantra Sales and Operations Planning gives CFOs and supply chain executives a direct path to evolve from a disconnected enterprise and operational planning environment to integrated business planning.

• As a result, CFOs get a reliable revenue forecast that has been validated against the current operating plan. On the operations side, supply chain and manufacturing managers can reconcile current operating plans against updated financial targets and budgets.

• With its top rated Enterprise Performance Management applications now linked to its best-in-class Real-time Sales and Operations Planning application, Oracle is first to provide customers with true integrated business planning capabilities.

Integrated Business Planning Improves Visibility and Profitability

• Leveraging Oracle Application Integration Architecture (AIA), (AIA), this integration enables Oracle Hyperion Planning to publish the financial targets for revenue, profits and other metrics to Demantra Real-Time Sales and Operations Planning. This improves decision-making through increased visibility into financial goals and helps improve the quality and profitability of the supply chain operations and demand shaping activities.

• Demantra Real-Time Sales and Operations Planning provides the current operating forecast and cost of goods sold data to Oracle Hyperion Planning. This operating forecast is delivered in monetary units and enables financial analysts to identify any gaps between the financial plan and current operating plan.

• Customers will gain additional benefits from adopting Demantra Demand Management, which enables a global demand planning process that senses local demand changes, generates an accurate forecast and supports a cross-functional consensus planning process.

• With this integration, data can be moved seamlessly, preserving the user interfaces from Hyperion Planning and Demantra so that new training or re-implementation is not required.

Supporting Quote

• “One key aspect to developing a strategic, actionable operations plan is to integrate it with validated revenue forecasts and to be able to reconcile the operating plans against a real-time budget,” said Gartner Research Director, Tim Payne. “Today, integrated business planning is becoming a valuable strategy as companies are realizing the importance of aligning their operational, strategic and financial plans.”

• “CFOs are continually looking to improve the accuracy of their financial forecasts," said Oracle Vice President, John O’Rourke. "This unique combination of Hyperion Planning and Demantra Sales and Operations Planning helps ensure that the financial plan is feasible, and will provide more accurate financial results.”

• "One of Oracle's core principles is to improve alignment across the enterprise,” said Oracle Vice President, Applications Strategy, Jon Chorley. "Oracle Demantra Sales and Operations Planning is a proven, best-in-class solution to achieve cross-line-of-business alignment at the operational level. Hyperion Planning does this from a financial perspective. This integration combines these two powerful capabilities to deliver alignment across the entire enterprise."

General Availability

The integration between Oracle Hyperion and Oracle’s Demantra Sales and Operations Planning is available today.

Supporting Resources

* Oracle Hyperion Planning
* Oracle’s Demantra Real-Time Sales and Operations Planning
* OracleValue Chain Planning Applications
* Oracle Value Chain Planning Blog
* Oracle Enterprise Performance Management and Business Intelligence
* Oracle Application Integration Architecture
* Cabot Microelectronics Reduces Forecasting Cycle Time by Nearly 50 Percent with Oracle’s Real Time Sales and Operations Planning Solution
* Gartner Market Scope for Sales and Operations Planning

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Oracle-AMD Acquisition Speculation Flares Once Again

By Zewde Yeraswork, CRN

"AMD is not for sale, but we are happy to listen to any proposal which is in the interest of our shareholders," Meyer said at an industry conference in Barcelona, as reported by Reuters.

The speculation was sparked by comments Oracle CEO Larry Ellison made last month at Oracle's annual financial analyst meeting, in which he said Oracle could soon acquire a chip company in addition to software acquisitions.

But at the Oracle annual stockholders' conference earlier this week, Ellison reiterated his interest in acquiring additional semiconductor and software companies, more so than new service offerings.

"My point really was that we are interested in buying intellectual property of all kinds," Ellison said, as reported by The Wall Street Journal . "We would be interested in certain kinds of semiconductor companies and software companies. Most of our acquisitions and the bulk of our strategy are in creating and acquiring intellectual property, including chips."

By acquiring AMD, Oracle would gain access to the chip company's IP portfolio, adding hardware to its software acquisitions and moving closer to end-to-end control of the entire IT stack.

Oracle couldn't be reached for comment Thursday. An AMD spokesperson offered the following comment to CRN: "As a matter of policy, AMD does not comment on speculations or rumors, but I can confirm that AMD is not for sale."

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Cloud, Virtualization Gurus: What Title Is Right?

By Kevin Fogarty

CIO - IT people with skills and experience in server virtualization, cloud computing or both have a far greater chance of getting and keeping jobs than most other IT people now, according to recruiters and analysts. But what do you call these gurus? There's no accepted standard for what to call either virtualization or cloud-computing specialists, so jobseekers will have to look for a range of keywords-and include those in their resumes-to find a match with particular employers, says Dice.com spokesperson Jennifer Bewley.

If you are searching for a virtualization or cloud role, watch your search terms, she says.

Just using "virtualization" as a keyword, for example, pulled up 880 jobs on Dice.com on one day last week, for example, according to Bewley.

"However, there are another 900 jobs that include 'VMware' as a keyword with no mention of virtualization," Bewley found. "That leads us to conclude that searching based on vendor is particularly important in virtualization jobs."

Common terms for virtualization specialists include: Architect SAN/Virtualization; Citrix / VMware specialist or administrator; Data Center Virtualization Systems Analyst; and Product Manager for Large Scale Virtualization.

Cloud Job Searching Tricky People looking for new jobs described using "cloud computing" may not be completely out of luck, but they're not far off, according to M. Victor Janulaitis, CEO of IT job-market researchers Janco Associates, which published this month a survey of CIO hiring plans for 2010.

"I have seen some people just use 'cloud specialist' to describe themselves," Janulaitis says. "There's not really a set of terms yet that are common to refer to cloud computing skills-they just refer to them as architecture or infrastructure skill sets."

[For timely cloud computing news and expert analysis, see CIO.com's cloud computing Drilldown section. ]

Other people just add "cloud" or "virtualization" onto more common titles such as system administrator, systems engineer, architect, or network engineer, Bewley says.

Remember, it's not unusual for employers or prospective employers to use the name of a particular vendor or new technology as a primary identifier in a job ad, especially if they're looking for someone certified in that vendor's technology, according to Tom Silver, senior vice president of tech-job ad site Dice North America.

Normally a company would look for technical skills in a particular technology, not just one vendor's products, Janulaitis says.

"With the economy the way it is, and now people are talking about the possibility of a double-dip recession, a lot of companies are just looking for basic skills and experience," Janulaitis says.

That means plugging holes where they have to-by hiring one person with experience managing VMWare servers, for example-or a lot of junior-level generalists who can be trained in the skills that company needs, Janulaitis says.

Virtualization Salaries Flattening? Salaries for virtualization specialists have also hit a plateau, though the ads for them increased 30 percent in 2009 compared to 2008, Silver says.

After surging 10 percent in 2008 and into 2009, salaries for virtualization experts were flat this year at an average of $84,777, Dice.com data shows.

That's still a premium compared to the national average of $78,845 per year for other tech workers, however, Bewley says.

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MySQL community goes on offensive

Alex Handy

On SDtimes, "MySQL community goes on offensive"

The MySQL again is working to derail Oracle’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems, this time with a petition available for signing on Help MySQL.org.

The petition drive is the second such effort to stop the proposed acquisition by MySQL founder Michael “Monty” Widenius, who earlier posted a blog opposing the purchase that he claims was viewed by more than 60,000 users. The deal is currently being held up by the European Commission, which sees antitrust issues in the deal.

Since that time, Widenius has called upon MySQL users to write to the European Commission, which he claims has already received correspondence from more than 400 Oracle customers in favor of the merger.

One of those in favor of the merger is Eben Moglen, founding director of the Software Freedom Law Foundation. While Moglen is traditionally known as a defender of open-source software and of the GPL, he has already written to the European Commission to explain that Oracle's acquisition of MySQL has little effect on the software's freedom because earlier versions are available under the GPL. Thus, he wrote, the MySQL community is perfectly capable of forking the code and keeping MySQL free.

But Widenius smells a rat in Oracle's MySQL plans. “MySQL is causing Oracle sales losses around US$1 billion a year [in lost sales to MySQL and because of heavy discounting when competing with MySQL]. Why would Oracle have an interest to invest in an open-source MySQL long term?” asked Widenius on his blog.

“Oracle has studied MySQL a long time and even offered to buy it twice before, but I have not yet seen the logic or explanation from Oracle that would explain how they can continue to develop and support MySQL without cannibalizing the most profitable part of their business.”

Perhaps in response to Widenius' earlier anti-Oracle efforts, Oracle issued a statement on Dec. 14 that addressed many of the issues Widenius and others have cited in their arguments against the merger.

In that statement, Oracle claims it will increase spending on research and development for MySQL, and that users will not have to buy a service-and-support contract from Oracle in order to obtain a MySQL commercial license. Oracle also claims it will form both a customer and a storage engine advisory board to help it determine what needs to be done to make MySQL better.

Oracle did not respond in time to comment on this story.

But Widenius is skeptical of these claims, and he calls many of them outright empty promises. He claims that Oracle's previous acquisition of InnoDB, a company that built an open-source transaction engine for MySQL, is exemplary of Oracle's intention to slow down innovation and development in their open-source products.

The European Commission meets this month in Brussels to examine the Oracle-Sun merger, and it is expected to make a decision on the matter before the end of the month

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