Oracle Buys Agile in Chess Game with SAP

Enterprise solutions giant Oracle announced Tuesday that it is enlarging its corporate family with the purchase of Agile Software, a company that provides product-lifecycle management (PLM) software.

The acquisition is yet another that Oracle has made in the past few years, buying companies, such as PeopleSoft, to expand its suite of enterprise solutions and to position itself in its rivalry with SAP Relevant Products/Services.

The Agile deal involves a cash merger of $8.10 per share, worth about $495 million.

Managing Products

Engineers, manufacturing, and supply-chain professionals use Agile's solutions to collaborate across the supply chain and to help manage product innovation and product introductions.

The company said in a statement that its products "help customers make better product portfolio decisions, accelerate new product introduction, improve manufacturing quality, and manage regulatory compliance." Regulation compliance includes following rules from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the European Union, among others.

The addition of PLM to its suite of enterprise tools will help Oracle further its "strategy of delivering industry-specific enterprise applications," Oracle President Charles Phillips said in a statement. He added that PLM was "one of the fastest growing application segments" and that Agile will "serve as the foundation of our PLM offering."

In an indication of the move's importance in the corporate chess game with SAP, Phillips said that the purchase will "offer yet another strategic application to SAP customers."

SAP's Own Buying Spree

SAP has been on its own strategic buying spree as it also fills out its suite of enterprise solutions. On Monday, it announced that it intended to acquire MaXware and Wicom Communications.

Wicom provides contact center and other business communication software that is entirely IP-based. The current worldwide business environment, SAP said, involves customers connecting through many channels, and the Wicom acquisition can "deliver a multichannel, all-IP, end-to-end contact center solution, integrating communication processes into customer service."

MaXware, this week's other announced purchase by SAP, currently provides services to about 300 customers worldwide. It offers identity management as a service, specializing in standards-based accessibility to confidential information that could reside in several repositories. In particular, it provides identity management in a service-oriented architecture (SOA) world, where a person can have access to many applications across several layers, sometimes only temporarily.

And, last week, SAP announced it is buying OutlookSoft, a performance-management software company.

The Oracle-SAP rivalry extends beyond just competing acquisitions. In March, Oracle sued SAP for stealing copyrighted software. The 43-page suit, filed in U.S. District Court in San Francisco, claimed that the German company repeatedly obtained unauthorized access to its password-protected Web site, using customers' access codes.