Oracle continues with merger prowl

Why this qualifies as news is beyond me....

Oracle is not done with its acquisition spree, especially in niche IT segments across different industries, says company president Charles Phillips.
...Phillips said Oracle's acquisition strategy is still in its early days. "There are many areas in the industry where there are very complicated domain experts in different industries that are not part of a larger software company."

Of course, Oracle is going to continue acquiring (here's a list of acquisitions to date). In the Industry-focused event Oracle had a couple of weeks ago, Phillips showed by industry Oracle's product functionality and said basically wherever they didn't have functionality is where you could expect them to make acquisitions. So if you have a small software company that has functionality in one of the following areas, you might want to give Chuck a call.

Utilities	SCADA
	GIS
	Scheduling/Settlement
	Energy Trading & Risk Mgt
Fin Serv	Customer Channels -Cards
	Customer Channels - Kiosk
	Customer Channels - POS
	Customer Channels - ATM
	Customer Channels - Voice
	Customer Channels - Wireless
	Customer Channels - Smt/Billing
	Customer Channels - Teller
	Credit Analytics
	Fund Management
	Mortgage Operations
	POS/Debit & Credit Card Ops
	Trading/Investment Banking
	Electronic Payments
	Tax - Assessment
Comms	Revenue Assurance
	Fraud Management
Retail
	Space optimization
	Task Management

In addition to filling in industry functionality, Oracle needs to acquire application revenue to continue showing the (non-organic) growth rates that they've been touting. If memory and math serve me, Siebel should be mostly anniversarying this quarter (Oracle Q3 '07 ends Feb 28) and completely by next quarter. I'd reckon Oracle would be looking to pick up about a couple of hundred million in annual application revenue to avoid disappointing the market again. So who's in that area? Manhattan Associates, Ariba; I can think of a couple of others.

Last point is not about acquisitions, but rather what is said about Oracle's competition with Microsoft:

Phillips conceded that Oracle was worried about competition from Microsoft five years ago, but said the situation today has changed. "I think they've got a little defocused in areas that we are in," he said. "We're probably most thankful to Google which has distracted Microsoft."

"Microsoft is now more worried about search, Xboxes, games and other things," he added. "They don't come to the table in the enterprise space like they used to. I don't think they are really that relevant to large companies making enterprise decisions."

I would have imagined that Microsoft might beginning to compete well in the space that JD Edwards plays in. Also, as Dynamics CRM adds something like 50K users a quarter that the Siebel, and Siebel On Demand, folks might be getting a little nervous. And, Microsoft SQL Server "not relevant" in the database market? My sense is that both in capability and in messaging Microsoft applications and database have been moving up market and increasingly playing in Oracle's space. Not to mention if, or maybe when, Oracle gets around to acquiring Larry's On Demand SME play, Microsoft would have to figure into any competitive analysis. For Chuck's sake, I hope that's just messaging and that he's got several smart folks internally keeping an idea on Microsoft.
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