Gartner: SOA will drive next round of acquisitions by Oracle, SAP

What's left for Oracle to buy? Probably some of the SOA players out there in the market. Mark Brunelli of SearchOracle recently spoke with Gartner's Gene Phifer, who predicts that Oracle will be looking closely at acquiring SOA-enabling applications and tools to continue to round out its position as an enterprise platform provider.

"I think they'll look at the world of service-oriented architecture and the things that are required to deliver a robust SOA set of capabilities," Phifer is quoted as saying. "Perhaps some things on the development side, the compositing side, the orchestration side… those kinds of SOA-centric capabilities, and also management technologies, because managing Web services is very different than managing traditional technologies. SOA-centric and Web services-centric areas are where we speculate that most of the further acquisitions will come from."

While Oracle's arch-competitor, SAP, may not be quite as adventurous with acquisitions, it nevertheless also will be looking to complete its SOA-enabling portfolio. While he observes that SAP has "a pretty complete portfolio of applications," its likely that the ERP giant  "is probably going to be looking at some spot acquisitions of infrastructure software as well. ...this whole SOA/Web services world is a lot of big stuff. I think SAP recognizes that they've got to plug some gaps in the overall infrastructure base, and acquiring that technology could be a good way to do it."