Has Oracle's acquisition hunger been sated?
Published: 27 Jul 2005 11:45 BST
One question about acquisitions: We heard recently about the ProfitLogic deal. Should we expect more deals of that type — smaller, more focused buys — or is Oracle thinking about larger acquisitions?
I can't give you a single pattern, because given our size, we can do small, medium and large acquisitions, and multiple deals. We have a pretty good process down now, and in fact, where people calling us to ask us how we did [the PeopleSoft deal] so quickly.
I think, given the skill set that we have, we're not limited, we don't have to focus on one size deal or the other. I do think we'll be opportunistic when price makes sense. Obviously we have an ongoing process; we're reviewing a lot of those opportunities, but nothing has really changed, and we don't have to limit ourselves.
Do you feel like you've digested the PeopleSoft acquisition completely?
I think that we've digested it. I mean, we didn't have one of these plans where we evaluate everything for nine months and slowly start to make changes. We made the changes in the first 30 days. And people are again still asking how we did that, so I think the speed served us as well, because it gave clarity to customers. I think it gave clarity to employees too. We're able to get out in front of the customers quickly and not be bogged down in internal meetings.
So, that was done in the first 30 days, and then the last remaining infrastructure pieces on the back end of the IT stuff was done a couple of months ago. So, there's not anything remaining. We're operating as a single company and moving forward.
Do you see any need to kind of realignment along vertical lines, and are you forced to sell slightly differently than you have in the past?
We're doing that as we get deeper into selected verticals. So we're not doing a wholesale reorganisation the way IBM did. We don't need to do that, and that's disruptive. But certainly, as we build our products and verticals, or make acquisitions like Retek, we create organisations around them.
Retek has been run as the Oracle retail business unit, and that's a vertical business unit within Oracle globally. We'll do more of that, but build it incrementally over time. It doesn't make sense to do that until you have more content in any particular industry.
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