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Oracle has long dominated the database market, but it has always been deeply unhappy about trailing SAP in the enterprise resource planning market. Over the last two years it has steadily built up its applications portfolio, through the high-profile acquisitions of PeopleSoft/JD Edwards, Retek and Siebel. Its latest acquisition aims to help bring this abundance of infrastructural software together.

The acquisition of French-based data integration vendor Sunopsis – for an undisclosed amount – in October 2006, further enhances Oracle’s services-orientated architecture (SOA) platform by improving its data migration capabilities.

Using Sunopsis’ two core products, Data Conductor, an extract, load and transformation (ETL) tool, and Active Integration Platform, a services-orientated integration tool, Oracle will broaden its support for the integration data sources – particularly non-Oracle data. It is also recognition of the limitations of its own ETL tool, Oracle Warehouse Builder, a product used largely to process business intelligence data.

According to Thomas Kurian, senior VP of Oracle’s Server Technologies unit, Sunopsis’ technology will form an integrated part of Oracle’s service-orientated architecture, business intelligence and master data management solutions.

Both Oracle and Sunopsis use a similar architecture for migrating data: data is extracted from the source system and loaded into a target database before it is transformed into a format suitable for analysis. The value for Oracle, however, lies in Sunopsis’ ability to extend its reach beyond the Oracle database platform and into other vendors’ databases, such as Teradata, IBM and Microsoft.

The acquisition of Sunopsis is a shrewd move for Oracle, says Mark Rittman, a database consultant at business intelligence and data warehousing vendor SolStonePlus.

“It allows them to take their current [ETL] philosophy from just Oracle targets to mostly every other database platform, keeps to their Java technology direction and brings on board a development team with direct experience in the ‘next generation’ ETL market,” he says.

It also gives Oracle a cash-rich business. Sunopsis revenues have grown consistently, with sales rising by 71% in 2004 and 69% in 2005.

The move leaves a question mark over a relationship between Sunopsis’ rival, Informatica, and Oracle. Informatica’s data integration software is sold along with the Siebel CRM analytics tools.

Database rival, IBM, had previously acquired the other major player in the market, buying data integration vendor Ascential in 2005.

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