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Enterprise Software - Tuesday, November 22, 2005

SAP Checks Oracle With Khimetrics Buy

Most tech pundits fixate on the battles between Google, Yahoo and Microsoft but there is also a loser-leave-town cross-Atlantic grudge match continuing between Oracle and SAP. We don’t' yet know how much SAP paid for Khimetrics, but we know why they did it: to kick back at Larry Ellison. Scottsdale, AZ-based Khimetrics makes demand analysis software for retail, consumer-packaged goods and financial services firms. The firm has the most experience in pricing optimization for grocery stores and food markets. Khimetrics' analytics software to run forecasts, promotions and pricing. The merger came after Oracle's successful July acquisition of ProfitLogic, which produces similar demand intelligence software for pricing, markdown and merchandising analysis. ProfitLogic's expertise has been mainly with clothing retailers.

Also in the retail field, SAP and Oracle swapped offers for Retek last March with Oracle's successful $670M purchase. Retek had about 200 customers and its 2004 annual revenue was $174.2M.

The news story reminds us of a comment that SAP Ventures' Jeff Nolan made at a recent event where he called the German language a competitive advantage for SAP - it reduces the pool of hackers who might crack SAP versus the English language code of Oracle and Microsoft.

Read - SAP Acquires Retail Software Vendor (TechTarget)