Oracle acquires TimesTen: a rational move but not without some challenges
Oracle today
announced the acquisition of privately-held, 90-person TimesTen, Inc for an undisclosed sum. TimesTen provides a memory-based, relational database targeted at mission-critical, (pseudo-) real-time applications, particularly in telecoms (fixed and mobile) and financial services, especially capital markets. TimesTen, with its TimesTen/Cache already provides out-of-the-box integration with the Oracle database, enabling synchronisation between the Oracle database at the back-end and the cache in the application tier.
As well as the out-of-the-box integration, this acquisition makes a lot of sense for Oracle. It should bring Oracle into opportunities where it has been less of a dominant database force and, via TimesTen?s relationships with equipment providers such as Cisco, Ericsson and Nokia, potentially new routes to exploit those opportunities. Whilst 50% of TimesTen?s customers are shared with Oracle that still leaves a good 700+ opportunities for Oracle to attempt to displace competitors, such as Sybase in capital markets. During the call to discuss the acquisition, Oracle?s VP of Database Server Technologies Andy Mendelsohn indicated that Oracle will consider the opportunities to improve integration with non-Oracle databases and pointed to the fact that Oracle?s Application Server works with the likes of DB2 and SQL Server. I am not convinced that Oracle will follow the same logic when it comes to data management, which is its raison d?etre.
Whilst this acquisition makes a great deal of sense, one aspect which wasn?t discussed in the call was TimesTen/Transact, which applies the in-memory database to high performance, message-oriented applications, particularly in financial services, and is tightly integrated with Tibco?s Rendezvous message bus. Application integration and business process management are a key area of investment and focus for Oracle as part of its recently
renamed Fusion middleware stack, where it competes (on paper at least) with Tibco. Oracle is going to have to tread a careful line here and avoid the temptation to attempt to displace Tibco since it lacks both the technology and the credibility to do so. It will be interesting to see the details of the product roadmap, which Oracle plans to outline later this month.
