Oracle filled a cavity in its applications portfolio today, acquiring
Demantra to help customers get a better grip on their supply chain
planning.
Demantra, of Waltham, Mass., combines analytics and collaboration utilities
in its Spectrum Suite, which helps customers fulfill product demand,
replenish stores after sales, and plan sales, operations and promotions
in real time.
Demantra has over 140 customers in various lines of business, including
Consumer Goods, Industrial Manufacturing and Quick Service Restaurants.
Rick Jewell, senior vice president of applications development at Oracle,
said that Demantra’s software, combined with Oracle’s supply chain and
enterprise resource planning applications, will help customers better gauge
global supply chain operations.
“This will allow companies to reduce their total cost of ownership, while
increasing their ability to operate an integrated, information-driven
enterprise,” Jewell said in a statement.
Oracle expects to seal the deal this month.
Oracle has been among the more aggressive companies on the acquisitions
front in the last few years.
To fortify its position against German applications giant SAP, Oracle spent
roughly $15 billion on PeopleSoft, Siebel
Systems and Retek.
The Redwood Shores, Calif., company has also been filling in gaps in its
software stacks with smaller buys to take on IBM, Microsoft and BEA Systems
in the market for infrastructure software.
These include SleepyCat
Software for its Berkeley open source database, Thor
Technologies and OctetString for security, and Portal
Software for telecommunications billing.
With this application/infrastructure strategy, Oracle aims to serve as broad
an array of customers as possible, giving it access to several
multi-billion-dollar software markets.
Financial terms of the deal were not made public.
