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Oracle Shells Out $1B To Buy ATG
wiredmikey writes "Oracle announced this morning that it would pay $1.0 Billion in cash to acquire ATG, a provider of high-end e-commerce software."
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What patents do they own?How can we moeterise them?
the title says it all
Is Slashdot now trying to replace the AP wire service with one-liners?
Yours In Moscow,
Kilgore Trout.
P.S.: Tea Party motto: Help us take our country BACK!!
>Back where, the 19th century? or better yet the 17th century?
Maybe they'll do as good a job on this one as they did on Sun. ATG have anything truly fun with massive potential? Hope not, cuz it's about to get pissed on.
I'm sorry Larry we accidentally brought the wrong ATG. Never mind, I am sure that we can use it for something.. Corporate hospitality perhaps? I'm sure that some of our clients would love a trip to Palestine. No, wait - perhaps a relocation of our open-source initiatives would be in order.
...and they get a lawyer-proof Java license.
Is this their new database code name?
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Oracle#ATG_patents_acquired
Expert in software patents or patent law? Contribute to the ESP wiki!
By combining forces, Oracle and ATG expect to help businesses grow revenue, strengthen customer loyalty, improve brand value, achieve better operating results, and increase business agility across online and traditional commerce environments...
I just wish they cared this much for the Open Office brand. Oh, wait that doesn't make money for Mr. Shareholder. Too bad.
ATG used to have their own J2EE Application Server, so presumably their "high end e-commerce software" is based on J2EE (or JEE) technology so that Oracle has more products to sell.
I learned about them about 5 years ago - a job offer read "ATG Dynamo developer" and I had to explain the guys they better started looking for J2EE developers instead...
I was using ATG's products back in 1998. This was before even Java Server Pages had caught on (one of my great regrets in life was having the opportunity to write a JSP book and turning it down :( ). If I remember correctly they even told us that Sun used some of their patents in developing JSP (though don't hold me to that, it was a long time ago).
Their technology was very ColdFusion-like, trying to create an entire programming language complete with conditionals and looping structures all inside a markup syntax. But once you got used to it, it was very powerful. We ran our entire ecommerce platform on it for buying and selling mutual funds, encompassing 16 business units.
It was a fun company, founded by some wanna-be rockstars (Jeet, really - not so much Joe). They threw a heck of a party. At least one of them ended with a shirtless Jeet playing guitar inside a gogo-dancer's cage. Ah, memories. I think that was the party that took place in New Orleans, where I bumped into my very drunk "customer advocate" coming down Bourbon Street, who asked me if I was having a good time. Apparently not as good as he was.
Funny story - I got a tour of the place once. This was during a time when we were trying to use their brand new adapter for the content management system Documentum, and it was not going well. During the tour, before being shown engineering, my tour guide (Hi, Katja!) paused and asked me if I could identify my technical contact by sight. I said no, so the tour continued. I honestly think they were afraid I was going to make a scene.
I used to own some stock, I'll have to go see if I ever dumped it.
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
Back where, the 19th century? or better yet the 17th century?
Back to 2008 spending levels.
Huh, doesn't sound quite so insane when you put it that way. I wonder where you get your information from...
Just because there are a few wackos at some Tea Party events does not mean that most of the people are not there for the core message of fiscal prudence and smaller government - a smaller government is naturally less corrupt, having less power attracts fewer monied predators.
You'd think, posting from Moscow, you'd know something about that...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The first thought that comes to mind is that ATG is the most common start codon in translation of genomic sequences. Symbolism?
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
The good thing about this deal? No OSS community to be driven off....
I am thinking with the current movement against software patents, now isn't the best time to spend a billion dollars trying to acquire them. If court cases eventually overturn all software patents as they should, that money will wind up being a huge waste and a huge loss on Oracle's reports.
so for a cool billion Ellison got himself a bunch of generic patents (such as "Flexible order structure", "Method and system for constructing personalized result sets" and "System and method for interfacing and separating formatted content and program code", you get the picture) and he also now is a proud owner of some sort of 'in house' web based IM system and some sort of a rules engine on top of a knowledge base.
Obviously I am not mentioning the 1000 or so clients that ATG supposedly has.
I suppose this is a somewhat meaningful purchase, though obviously the company in question has over 942M market capitalization (per Yahoo) and this year revenue is just over $50 million, which doesn't say much about their profit. Ellison can do whatever he wants with his money but I think he is overpaying for this company by at least a factor of 2.
You can't handle the truth.
"Oracle Sues a bunch of people for 1 billion dollars"
Oracle is like a plague. It 'captures' companies for their patents, and does pretty much nothing for their products.
Screw Oracle before Oracle screws you!
My guess is they want to complete the hardware and software stack to complete head on with IBM and SAP.
This acquisition is definitely not about software patents, it's about further penetrating IBM's hold on the eCommerce market and saturating large enterprises with more Oracle products across the board. I've worked as an IBM WebSphere Commerce architect for many years and Oracle has always tried to fight off these sales. A large eCommerce installation costs anywhere from 200K to 15Mil in just software licenses, let alone the professional services fees which start at 350K for a small implementation. IBM has been the top dog in this space for many years with ATG and Hybris coming behind. Now that Oracle has ATG they can compete at another level against IBM.
Further, the eCommerce business exploding right now in the B2B sector. All the major B2C players have eCommerce installations, most based on WebSphere Commerce or ATG. The B2C market couldn't afford not to be in this place over the past ten years. However the B2B market has been slow to adopt electronic commerce, but with the economy recovering and pressure from customers to have these services B2B resellers are investing heavily in this space right now. I haven't even touched a new B2C project in a year, everything is B2B. Another aspect that is attractive to Oracle is that the B2B customers have much more complicated requirements than B2C retailers which means more SOA components, more complicated data analytics, extensive business process automation and much more. These are all areas which Oracle and IBM compete in everyday, and with more integrated solutions Oracle has a better sales pitch to the enterprise to be their one stop shop.
If you've worked in a large enterprise you have no doubt found that enterprises typically lean towards either IBM or Oracle for their software infrastructure. With the previous acquisition of Sun and now ATG Oracle is positioning them selves to take on IBM in all areas. Patents are just a very small part of large technology companies, software licensing, maintenance costs and professional services bring a huge amount of revenue.
If corporations are indeed equivalent to aggregate persons, then why isn't it considered slavery when one corporation "acquires" another?
when reading the headline on my rss reader on my old screen and little crufty fonts... I read $18.
for $18 it would be funny ... for $1B it's just pathetic.
ATG has a pretty strong commerce suite. It is ranked at the top in the eCommerce offering along with IBM WebSphere Commerce (as per Gartner ranking). They are just v.closed off (you can't even get to the documentation unless you have a contract with them).
www.atg.com/gartner-ecommerce-magic-quadrant
(i know its atg's site itself, blah blah, but it's gartner's analysis of the eCommerce product offering).
Got it. Here's what worked:
#p-logo a:hover {background: none; background-repeat: no-repeat;}
The HTML is generated by Mediawiki, so I can't change that without patching the code (and the sys admins wouldn't be too happy with having to maintain a patch for each upgrade).
Thanks. (and also to the anonymous poster just below.)
Expert in software patents or patent law? Contribute to the ESP wiki!
The problem is that a smaller government will be left powerless in the face of the multi-national mega corps that are paying out the ass to fund the tea party.
You mean like Obama being heavily funded by companies like BP?
The government is already heavily influenced by corporations, in all parties, at all levels. The only way to reduce LEGAL corruption (really just influence if you don't want to use a scary term) of this sort is smaller government which then cannot have as much effect on YOUR life through controlling regulation.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Oracle should slow down; they haven't even finished digesting and ruining Sun yet.
I'm not so sure about the "eventually lead us to ruin" bit - the last year or so really just looked like frantic dog paddling to avoid drowning while all kinds of loonies attach lead weights to the US government and economy in general. The economy is probably already dead but still warm enough so that nobody is really sure yet.
It is very, very simple. A push for a small limited government led by the obviously corrupt is likely to end in corruption. What they REALLY want is a lack of checks and balances which will put limits on the personal gains of the corrupt. They want a monarchy in everything but name - centralised power and no questions asked - divine right of fucking Kings.
Ideology has nothing at all to do with it and the "patriot" angle is just wrapping up the objectionable in a flag to make it appear less so. They are attacking the realised dream of the revolutionaries to try to put in place something like George III had going while taking the name of the revolutionaries in vain.
Most of this crap has so much of a following simply because people are uncomfortable with a President that is just not "one of us", he's a well educated lawyer and sounds like one, and he's also black. He's like nobody most of those people would ever have a beer with from two directions. Bush didn't have that problem since he took care to sound like a dumb Texan instead of a born to the purple political Prince that grew up in Washington and had been to Harvard. He even had a fake ranch built to get a "common touch".