October 18, 2006
Why Oracle bought ETL specialist Sunopsis
The acquisition of data integration specialist Sunopsis by Oracle has many analysts puzzled. Sunopsis is a so-called pure-play ETL tool vendor (or ELT - extract, load and transform as they call it themselves) with over 500 large customers worldwide, but mainly in Europe.
Most industry analysts only look at the data warehousing side of this deal, and say Oracle's main interest may have been the acquisition of these 500 customers and the elimination of a competitor, as those Sunopsis products overlap heavily with Oracle's own data integration products called Oracle Warehouse Builder (OWB), which is very Oracle-centric and - as the name suggests - heavily targeted towards BI applications. However, we believe that the Sunopsis products - in particular their active integration and real-time solutions - will be used to fill the gaps in Oracle's upcoming Fusion offering. Because these products are higly performant and very open, the acquisition gives Oracle a strong piece of technology to strengthen its Fusion middleware layer on which all of Oracle's future applications will be built.
Anyway, the local Sunopsis consultant F-IT Consult thinks the acquisition is very good for his business, as Gartner will not be able to neglect Oracle's Sunopsis products in the same way as it neglected Sunopsis, although this had already made it into the visionary quadrant of Gartner's May 2005 assessment of the ETL market.
Posted by admin at October 18, 2006 03:16 PM