The big software story of the year was the completion of
Oracle's purchases of PeopleSoft and JD Edwards in January, and its
surprise acquisition of CRM market leader Siebel in September,
which it bought for £3.24bn.
Users were left anxious about the cost of a potential forced
migration to the latest version of Siebel's products, and whether
products would remain supported by Oracle.
However, Oracle's response was to flesh out its strategy to
support the acquired product lines, and combine them in the future
into a modular application - Oracle Fusion. This new architecture,
said Oracle, would be more responsive to business change and help
firms to move to service oriented architecture (SOA).
Meanwhile, SAP integrated its Netweaver application server into
its MySAP family of products, also aiming to help users implement
SOAs. Over time, this should result in ERP and other enterprise
systems that are more flexible and better able to accommodate
business change than is possible today, said analysts.
However, Gartner research vice-president Andy Kyte warned that
users should brace themselves to pay as much as three times the
original cost of their ERP system to migrate onto the
next-generation Oracle Fusion and SAP Netweaver architectures.
This year was also the year that Microsoft named Longhorn
"Windows Vista" and gave developers details of the forthcoming
Windows Server Longhorn operating system. Microsoft ended the year
with a major upgrade to Windows Server 2003, and an overhauled
Microsoft CRM 3.0.
But the rest of the year saw only minor releases for Microsoft,
which put out Exchange Server 2003 Service Pack 2, with some
security enhancements, and SP2 for its Office 2003 collaboration
suite, again with security enhancements, as well as stability and
performance improvements.
Microsoft also issued a further "final" update to its ageing
Windows 2000 operating system after admitting a previous final
update was flawed.