Oracle to buy into PLM with Agile Software acquisition

$495m deal continues trend of eating into SAP via shared customers and vertical industries

Phillips: offering strategic apps to SAP customers

Oracle is continuing its policy of chipping away at SAP’s grip on enterprise applications with a $495m agreement to acquire Agile Software, a developer of software for product lifecycle management (PLM).

PLM serves companies’ needs to develop, build, improve, service and dispose of products, and is widely seen as blurring with the enterprise resource planning (ERP) market where Oracle is chasing SAP.

This is Oracle’s first move into the sector and “will serve as the foundation of our PLM offering”, said Oracle chairman Charles Phillips in a statement.

It also provides more potential inroads into accounts that use SAP’s enterprise applications. While probably not the main reason for the deal, Oracle hopes its long merger-and-acquisition streak could help it ambush some SAP accounts.

Phillips hinted as much in his statement by saying that the Agile deal will “further Oracle’s strategy of delivering industry-specific enterprise applications and allows us to offer yet another strategic application to SAP customers.”

Similarly, when Oracle announced in February an agreement to acquire Hyperion, Oracle president Charles Phillips said, "Thousands of SAP customers rely on Hyperion as their financial consolidation, analysis and reporting system of record. Now Oracle's Hyperion software will be the lens through which SAP's most important customers view and analyse their underlying SAP ERP data."

Agile Software’s customers include technology giants such as Dell, Acer and Philips, energy giants such as Shell and brands including Heinz, Johnson & Johnson and McDonald’s.