So – as reported in eWeek and linked to by ebizQ, Oracle Corp. is buying Agile Software Corp. Oracle and some of the reporting of the news cast it as yet another Oracle acquisition, intended to make the company Master of the Enterprise Applications Universe and/or to continue an Ahab-like fixation on application market leader SAP AG.
I prefer to see it another way – although my view may end up no less contentious than those above. I see this as Oracle moving closer to and more deeply into solutions that embody business processes for select, vertical markets. After all, product lifecycle management or PLM, Agile's primary market focus, is simply a focused set of repeatable, coordinated business policies, practices…and processes. In this case, instead of focusing on a particular vertical market, as Microsoft Corp. appeared to do with BPM in health care, Oracle's latest move is focused on a particular subset of more horizontal BPM – PLM. Lots of companies design and manufacture products, across multiple industry segments. But the underlying processes can overlap greatly across those segments. Hence the PLM market, and Oracle's interest in it.
For Oracle, the sustainable business benefit of the deal is more opportunities to create more leverage of the corporate information repositories overseen by Oracle database management software. This will happen whether or not Oracle sells one more bit of application software. For enterprises using Oracle database management solutions, the deal promises greater integration and interoperability between database management and PLM-focused BPM efforts, processes, and solutions. (This is especially true if all of those solutions come from Oracle, but if it is only true then, Oracle and its customers both lose.)
BPM comes in a variety of guises, including what I've referred to here previously as "business knowledge management" (BKM). BPM is even tightly coupled with business intelligence (BI), which relies on managed processes of its own and informs others. PLM, when it's done right, not only brings consistency and greater manageability to product development efforts. PLM can also be implemented in ways that support and are closely aligned with other BPM efforts across an enterprise and its business partners. This can make better use of the information within a bunch of different databases.
So that's why Oracle's interested in Agile, and PLM, at least by my lights? But enough of what I think, at least for now – what do you think?
Michael Dortch has been an analyst, 'information entrepreneur,' speaker, and writer about IT and 'the real world" for the past 30 years. After almost 10 years at the Robert Frances Group (RFG), Michael begins a new position with Aberdeen Group in September.
Dennis Byron is an analyst with ebizQ, focusing on Open Source Software as well as Business Process Management technologies.
