The Oracle Acquisition Machine Swallows ClearApp

Morshad published 03 Sep 2008, 09:48 in main - 185 views

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Following last week’s surprise announcement of a new chief financial officer, Oracle on Tuesday returned to more typical ways by purchasing software maker ClearApp.

ClearApp operates in the acronym-rich SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture) segment of the business software market. Its products are designed to gauge the performance of various applications as they interact with each other. In addition, ClearApp’s products can identify potential problems both in the code of a particular application and with how that application affects another piece of software. ClearApp’s software already works with Oracle’s Enterprise Manager product line and IBM’s WebSphere set of middleware.

Oracle looks set to add the ClearApp products to the Enterprise Manager suite should the acquisition close as expected later this year. No financial terms for the acquisition were provided.

Over the past three years, Oracle has demonstrated a voracious appetite for fellow software makers — both large and small. It has purchased seven companies so far this year, including BEA for $8.5 billion. Last year, Oracle bought 11 companies.

Such activities should make plenty of work for Jeff Epstein, who was just tapped as Oracle’s C.F.O.

In an unusual turn, Mr. Epstein will report directly to Oracle’s president, Safra Catz, who had been handling the C.F.O. duties, rather than the chief executive, Larry Ellison.

Leading up to the job at Oracle, Mr. Epstein’s most prominent work as a C.F.O. came during his time at advertising broker DoubleClick, which Google acquired last year. Some analysts expected Oracle to pick a new C.F.O. with more experience working at a large company.

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company