Oracle defends acquisition strategy

At a meeting earlier today,Oraclepresident, Charles Phillips, defended his the company'sacquisition strategy, saying Oracle was now providing global suport and internationalisation for the products it bought.

"We want to solve integration in a standard way, and acquiring companies gives us research and development with no risk," Phillips said.

Oracle has spent billions acquiring companies such as PeopleSoft, Siebel, Retek and, most recently, Hyperion. It has an overall plan to integrate these through a service-oriented middleware platform and strategy known as Fusion.

However, some analysts have suggested that the acqusition plan is failing to deliver benefits to users. Phillips said, "Driven by customer advice, we buy things that add value."

He said, "There is no reduction in support [for the products we acquire] and quality goes up. We globalise, provide 24/7 support and run 2 million tests every night on the products.

One of the criticisms of Oracle's strategy has been that it makes maintenance of products complex, as Oracle has to support so many different products.

Phillips said that Oracle owning so many products actually benefits users.

"It is easier for our customers to do milddleware updates because Oracle can synchronise the middleware and certify which configurations work well."

In fact, Oracle has introduced a tool called Configuration Support Manager, currently deployed by 11,000 users, which provides patch management. Phillips said Configuration Support Manager allows users to update patches with software configurations Oracle has already tested would work.