Platinum Technology Inc., the well-known acquisition gourmand, appears to have developed another healthy appetite, having announced intentions to acquire Hewlett-Packard's Intelligent Warehouse (IW) technology as well as data modeling leader Logic Works Inc. within the space of a month. Platinum hopes these acquisition will nicely round out its patchwork of enterprise offerings.
IW middleware--which provides virtual integration of disparate data warehouses, marts, and other sources to enable "drill across" queries and centralized administration--may become the "stitching" that holds the patchwork together. Platinum is among the many data warehouse vendors scrambling for a metadata solution. According to Platinum executive Theresa O'Neil, IW has a "very strong" metadata layer that will enable the company's vision of data warehouse design, development, and management as an ongoing process. Platinum will port IW to Windows NT as well as integrate it with version 2 of the Microsoft Repository when it arrives.
Logic Works expects that Erwin will benefit from its inclusion in Platinum's set of application life cycle tools; according to executive Ed McLaughlin, "Erwin will no longer be a point solution; instead, it will be a major factor in an integrated offering." Platinum clearly agrees; representatives said that Erwin will be an anchor of its enterprise modeling product line and that the company plans to position it as "the tool of choice" for data warehouse design.
In the words of NCR and Microsoft executives, the two companies "formalized and enhanced an existing relationship" in March by announcing a technology and marketing alliance that will bring the companies closer together. As described at a press conference by Ian Rogoff, Microsoft's general manager of enterprise partnerships, and Gary Horning, NCR's vice president of strategic alliances, the five-year deal involves a portfolio cross-patent licensing agreement, cooperative sales engagements and services, and joint engineering efforts to finalize the porting of Teradata to Windows NT. Essentially, the idea as described will integrate Teradata with Microsoft BackOffice technologies in order to craft e-commerce, customer relationship management, and ERP systems.
This move is a promising one for both companies. Microsoft needs NCR's enterprise expertise and contacts (not to mention reputation for immense mission-critical systems); in Rogoff's words, the deal "exposes NT to a whole new customer base and market." NCR needs to divorce Teradata from its proprietary underpinnings through an NT port--single-node Teradata on NT is expected later in 1998--and links to SQL Server-based dependent data marts; in fact, Horning described SQL Server as being "very central to NCR's overall data warehousing strategy." The most interesting opportunity here, however, may be integration with Microsoft's imminent Plato OLAP server, which could conceivably blow OLAP support for Teradata wide open.
The unknown implications relate to Microsoft's relationship with Compaq Computer Corp. After Compaq bought Tandem Computers Inc.'s enterprise-class technology, expertise, and sales force, the implication was that Compaq would be Microsoft's prime mover for bringing NT into the data center. This agreement may indicate a degree of dissatisfaction on Microsoft's part on the progress thus far. When asked about this scenario in terms of clustering initiatives, Rogoff coyly replied: "Microsoft works with 10 vendors on clusters; Tandem and NCR are two of them."
If you were betting against an Oracle resurgence after last quarter's fiasco, you lose. In early March, the company reported that its third-quarter earnings were $215 million, more than 10 percent higher than the $193 million reported in the same period last year. According to Oracle, worldwide license and other revenue grew by 14 percent from last year and worldwide services revenue escalated by an impressive 41 percent. This growth occurred almost exclusively in Europe and the Americas; living up (or down) to expectations, Asia-Pacific sales declined 12 percent.
As this issue went to press, Oracle had been relatively quiet since the infamous second-quarter plunge. Most notable had been a marked decline in the amount of evangelizing about network computers, an emphasis that many analysts had identified as a distraction from Oracle's core business and a deciding factor in its problems. (Few, however, raised the question about what Oracle's "core business" is these days; it may be consulting more than anything else.)
Oracle, however, has not backed off from network computers completely but merely shifted the focus of its argument. Oracle president Ray Lane confirmed this thought in a recent interview, explaining, "You will see us not talking about network computers so much as network computing and three underlying products that support it: the data server, the tools environment, and the applications." In other words, Oracle now plans to place the horse (servers, tools, and enterprise applications) ahead of the cart (network computing).