Oracle Gets More Social On the Way to $40

Oracle (NASDAQ:ORCL) made a lot of interesting announcements at the OpenWorld conference, including the launch of its cloud platform – Oracle Public Cloud – and the launch of its new Big Data and NoSQL offerings. It also revealed another interesting offering – Oracle Social Network, its new enterprise collaboration and social networking tool which can be used across business lines and departments. ^[1] Oracle is the largest player in the database market, and also has significant share in the application and middleware segments. It is also becoming one of the major players in enterprise hardware, thanks to its acquisition of Sun Microsystems in 2010. It competes primarily with SAP (NYSE:SAP), Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT), IBM (NYSE:IBM) and Salesforce.com (NASDAQ:CRM) in the enterprise software market.

We currently have a $40 Trefis price estimate for Oracle, which is 30% above the current market price. Enterprise software, including database, application, and middleware offerings account for more than 75% of its Trefis price estimate.

Check out our complete analysis for Oracle.

Oracle Goes Social in a Bid to Fight Salesforce.com, Microsoft and SAP

Oracle’s major competitors – Microsoft and Salesforce.com – have been integrating social features in their enterprise offerings. Both of them, as well as SAP, have also been working on cloud based, on-demand versions of their software. Oracle has finally embraced the cloud, and announced the Oracle Public Cloud at OpenWorld.

In a bid to remain competitive, and retain its dominant position, it also unveiled the new Oracle Social Network, which adds a social layer on top of the new Oracle Fusion applications. The new features include activity feeds, personal profiles, status updates, discussion forums, document sharing, messaging, email, and web conferencing. It will also be available on all major mobile platforms like iOS and Android, and as a web based application. It will be aimed at salespeople, HR professionals and project and resource managers to aid in customer relationship management, enterprise resource planning and other business processes.

We expect Oracle’s revenue and marketshare in applications and middleware to increase through the forecast period.

Understand How a Company’s Products Impact its Stock Price at Trefis

1. Oracle Unveils Oracle Public Cloud and Oracle Social Network at Oracle OpenWorld, Arcweb [↩]