The week in Oracle

A roll call of news from the big O, then, to cap the workweek.

Oracle Corporation doled out some nice awards this week, namely its top performing Oracle Partner Network partners with awards for delivering Oracle application solutions to small- and medium-sized businesses in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

Certified Advantage Partner IBM of France took the Oracle EMEA SMB Partner Award for Sales Performance; certified partner Abast Solutions (Spain) took the Oracle EMEA Partner Award for Customer Success; and the Oracle EMEA Oracle Accelerate Excellence Award was called a tie between certified partner De Theus Technologies (France) and certified partner Pyxis Consulting Group (Germany).

IBM France is a strategic systems integrator partner for Oracle and boasts a large Oracle applications practice. Abast Solutions is a twenty-plus year veteran of the IT market with more than 1000 customers. De Theus Technologies and Pyxis Consulting Group were among the first EMEA partners to submit an Oracle Accelerate solution for Oracle’s review following the programme’s launch in March.

The Oracle Accelerate programme based on “the company’s approach to fully address the diverse IT requirements of SMBs…” Meanwhile, from the technological heart of the Asian “region,” news outlet SDA-Asia reported on a statement out of Oracle stating that Oracle CRM On Demand is “gaining momentum” in the Asia Pacific market, which Oraclers now reckon will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 18.9 percent between 2006 and 2011, to reach $846.4 million in total software revenue in 2011.

The Oracle brain trust figures one-quarter of new business software will be delivered as software as a service by 2011.

Lest we forget Oracle also does actual CRM work, the big firm recently announced that Yarra Valley Water, a Australian water and sewage services provider, has selected Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing to provide a reliable, scalable billing platform for the 1.5 million Yarra Valley customers in the Melbourne area. Yarra Valley Water’s legacy CRM system had been in place since 1995.

Finally, for those of you interested in the Oracle v. SAP corporate espionage lawsuit (and who doesn’t love a good lawsuit?), Oracle legal counsel Geoff Howard of Bingham McCutchen LLP got to exchange a little legal gunfire with SAP yesterday.

Oracle brought a lawsuit in the US Federal District Court in the Northern District of California against SAP and TomorrowNow in March. The lawsuit alleged that SAP was guilty of violations to the Federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and California Computer Data Access and Fraud Act, Unfair Competition, Intentional and Negligent Interference with Prospective Economic Advantage and Civil Conspiracy, i.e. they ripped off Oracle data.

Henning Kagermann himself spoke to the media after SAP legally filed in the ‘suit, explaining that TomorrowNow was authorized to download materials from Oracle’s Web site on behalf of TomorrowNow customers.

Kagermann also admitted that “SAP acknowledged that some inappropriate downloads of fixes and support documents occurred at TomorrowNow. Importantly, SAP affirmed that what was downloaded at TomorrowNow stayed in that subsidiary’s separate systems. SAP did not have access to Oracle intellectual property via TomorrowNow.”

In return, Howard stated that, “SAP CEO Henning Kagermann has now admitted to the repeated and illegal downloading of Oracle’s intellectual property. Oracle filed suit to discover the magnitude of the illegal downloads and fully understand how SAP used Oracle’s intellectual property in its business…”

Sounds confident, eh?