Oracle subsumes i-flex

Meanwhile, the excellent online investor newsletter The Motley Fool announced the AMR Research results in tandem with reportage and analysis of another big investment move by none other than Oracle.

On Monday, software behemoth Oracle announced the firm’s investment of another US $125 million in Indian software and services firm i-flex, further augmenting the extant 52.5 percent Oracle stake in the firm.

As The Fool sees it (and rightly so), i-flex is just another example of how Oracle has come to dominate market segments and subsegments such as the HCM pored over by AMR Research. i-flex is a software providers whose clientele consists of some 575 banks, including Citigroup, Deutsche Bank AG, and UBS. Alongside the agreement regarding Oracle’s purchase of i-flex was an i-flex agreement to purchase financial services industry security products provider Mantas for US $122.6 million.

As The Fool sees it, the most impressive statistic turned in by AMR researchers was Oracle’s growth in total HCM revenues of almost eighteen percent after closing the PeopleSoft acquisition deal. The Fool concludes that “Oracle has kept the customers it spent US $19 billion to acquire while winning ever more business. … because it’s mostly purchasing and supporting specialists.”

Oracle now boasts an HR firm in PeopleSoft, CRM in Siebel, retail in Retek and i-flex in the finance market; to call this base-covering impressive would be an understatement, and might just allow Oracle to continue to dominate while the firm’s buy-now-ask-questions-later strategy continues to work.