News Review: Peregrine finds a home inside HP

The Prodigal Returns News that HP have agreed to purchase Peregrine must put some smiles on the faces of the existing 3,500 ServiceCenter customers. At last they can feel that the software house has a valid home, where it will hopefully get the investment and marketing effort it deserves. Peregrine has had an interesting story getting here. It was quite an acquisition-maker itself in the early part of the decade, including an interesting time "dating" Remedy (now part of BMC). Then it ended up filing under Chapter 11, and seemed to write itself out of the history books. The thing that seems to have saved it is that it has a reasonable product, at a time when every company is trying to get into the ITIL framework, by producing software offerings with the ITSM (or Service Management) strapline. HP's offering in the form of OpenView very much complements this, so I foresee a strong future for both products. The key factor for ITSM offerings is having a common configuration management database. This database should be able to tie together all the assets of the company (Servers, workstations, software licenses and installed applications), and cross-match them to the HelpDesk (so that incidents can be logged against them). This in turn means that Problem Management can drill down into root causes by looking at the Incident history. Then Changes and Releases can be implemented against these assets. So a common CMDB is vital - both for a good ITSM offering, and for a successful deployment of ITIL processes. Peregrine has potential to be such a product, particularly if it is well integrated with OpenView in future releases. One curious question: Why didn't IBM purchase Peregrine ? After all, IBM acts as the channel for a lot of the Peregrine products. And surely IBM would benefit from Peregrine's CMDB. These days, I don't hear much about IBM Tivoli. It used to be the market leader in management of mid-range systems and applications. Now we have BMC, Computer Associates and HP. Are IBM unconcerned about the ITSM market ? Or maybe they are just biding their time.

News Review: Oracle + Peoplesoft + Siebel

If you can't make it, buy it. The recent announcement that Oracle will be buying Siebel had been fairly widely predicted in some areas of the press. Oracle are paying $5.8 billion for 4,000 customers. I guess this is relatively small money, compared with the $10 billion they paid for PeopleSoft. However, this leaves Oracle with a massive workload to integrate and get value from all their many products and offerings. The Support Challenge If you look through Oracle's acquisitions during the last few years, there is a huge amount of CRM software which they have in their portfolio: * Peoplesoft * Vantive (part of PeopleSoft) * JD Edwards * plus Oracle's own offering * and now Siebel How on earth could Oracle support that many different code lines for just one functional requirement? Some clues about how Oracle might wish to do this are in a recent article in Oracle Scene, the UK Oracle User Group Journal, about Project Fusion. Fusion is the name for Oracle's new Service-Oriented-Architecture (SOA), which is a way of building software applications which promote connectivity between applications. Oracle will need it!. The article explained how this approach would bring together the best of Oracle, PeopleSoft and JD Edwards. Perhaps SOA-enabling all these tools will work. But there is still a lot of (redundant?) code to support. Motivation So why did Oracle buy Siebel? Basically, there are a number of reasons for buying a rival manufacturer in the industry: * Gain technology, to update or improve your own offering * Take out a competitor, to enable you to charge monopoly prices * Defensive action, to consolidate against another, larger rival. Somehow, I don't think Oracle have bought Siebel in order to gain some valuable piece of technology. Instead, I think the second and third reasons are more likely In the case of third reason, the big rival is, of course, SAP. However, Oracle may have a large percentage of the market share of CRM / ERP software, but their offering is fragmented, unfocused, and expensive to support. There is a battle between Oracle and SAP. And any general will tell you that the organization which is able to mass all it's forces against a single point of attack will win the battle. Oracle is in desperate need of a good coordinating strategy.