By now it's no secret that Oracle's made M&A one of its core competencies. What interesting about this week's grab is that this one appears to be directly at SAP's expense.
The company in question, Interlace Systems, offers something that Gartner terms an "Integrated Planning System." In other words, a planner of planners. The guiding notion is that manufacturing enterprises have separate planning silos in sales, operations, and finance that have traditionally proven difficult to reconcile. That is, marketing may want to boost overall penetration, sales may target specific customers, while the financial side has profit goals. Yet, a strategy to target customer A could come at the cost, not only of operational efficiency as certain orders gain precedence over others, but that it may be at cross-purposes to increase overall market penetration and wind up killing margins.
Interlace's tool provides an Excel spreadsheet interface atop a federated data model where you can test drive different planning assumptions or strategy against the big picture. It is intended to pick up where Sales & Operations Planning (S&OP) tools typically leave off.
For Oracle, the acquisition is pretty logical. It would beef up the financially-oriented EPM (Enterprise Performance Management) tool that it picked up with PeopleSoft.
But here's the rub. Today, the day that the Oracle deal was announced, Interlace's own partner web page continues to give greater prominence to SAP. That is, SAP appears to be a greater than equal partner for a company that otherwise appears to be playing it straight down the middle. It is a logo'ed IBM business partner, an Oracle technology partner, and has several SAP logo certifications. More importantly, the page also includes a link to another page on Interlace's own site describing its SAP support in more detail. As of the date of Oracle announcement, no such page existed for Interlace's Oracle support.
As the deal gets closer, we'll be interested to see how fast these links get broken.
As we've noted previously with Oracle's offer for BEA, SAP right now is otherwise occupied with the pending Business Objects deal that represents a totally new acquisition model for them. Maybe we're splitting hairs or parsing too many pixels. But the fact that Interlace actively promoted SAP support makes this look like the deal that SAP let slip away.


Tony Baer, principal of onStrategies, is a well-published IT analyst with over 15 years background studying implementation issues in enterprise systems, application development, data management, and business intelligence. Baer's commentaries and rants on the state of the IT market are available here.