Oracle to launch retail brand for business apps

Oracle, which has spent much of the past year buying up rivals, will take further steps next week towards reorganising its product line-up.

At its OpenWorld customer conference in San Francisco this week, the company plans to announce Oracle Retail, a new umbrella brand for existing software and for products obtained through recent acquisitions.

The Retail brand will be applied to Oracle's own retail-focused business applications, to software obtained through the acquisitions of PeopleSoft, ProfitLogic and Retek. It will also cover products from JD Edwards, which PeopleSoft bought several years ago.

The move is among the first by the company to unify the specialty retail software that it has recently accumulated. Oracle says that, all told, it serves more than 1,900 retail customers with retail optimisation and planning software, as well as with its core database and enterprise resource-planning applications.

Oracle closed its $10.3bn deal for PeopleSoft in January. In April, the company purchased retail software maker Retek for slightly less than $500m. And, in early July, Oracle bought retail-pricing specialist ProfitLogic for an undisclosed sum.

Overall, since the PeopleSoft deal was finalised, Oracle has continued to invest in or acquire companies.

Last month, Oracle took a $650m stake in Indian banking software maker I-flex Solutions.

The latest move came earlier this week, when Oracle said it plans to buy Siebel Systems, which makes customer relationship management software, in a deal worth $5.8bn. The deal, subject to approval by Siebel shareholders and regulators, is expected to close next year.

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison revealed the software maker's plans to acquire additional companies during court testimony that was part of the PeopleSoft acquisition last summer.

The company's goal is assemble a stable of business software products to take on market leader SAP. Meanwhile, Microsoft is consolidating some of its business software under a new Dynamics brand and is looking to become a more formidable competitor in the future.

The company has said it isn't targeting the top end of the business applications market, where Oracle and SAP compete.

Recent comments from Microsoft executives raise some questions about that strategy, however. In an interview on Tuesday, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates said Microsoft is "very serious about our CRM plans, including scaling that up to very demanding cases".

Gates also criticised Oracle's plan for growth through acquisition. "Larry [Ellison] forecast big consolidation, and he wanted to see that come true, so he's making it come true. It's a brilliant forecast. If the next three people under you don't write code but they do deals, what do you get? You get deals. They will probably do more deals than anybody, and we'll write more code than anybody," he said.

Mike Ricciuti writes for CNET News.com