San Francisco-based GoldenGate, founded in1995, is regarded as a key vendor-neutral provider of middleware and tooling that offers real-time integration among the major database platforms including those from Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, Sybase, Teradata and open source offerings such as MySQL and Ingres, among others.
"They were the last of the major pure plays focused on providing a real time data integration tooling for data warehousing and BI," said Forrester Research analyst James Kobielus. "It's quite a catch for Oracle in that it's a significant addition to its data warehousing and BI portfolio."
GoldenGate is regarded for its change data capture technology, which provides sub-second synchronization to changes in data across various repositories for real time business intelligence and data warehousing for business critical functions.
While gaining key technology, Oracle already offers other tools enabling real time data integration: Oracle Warehouse Builder, an ETL tool that ships with its data warehouse platform; Oracle Data Integrator, which provides heterogeneous real time integration for both batch and real time for transactional and analytical applications; and the WebLogic event server that was added to Oracle's new Fusion Middleware 11g suite, announced earlier this month.
Still, Kobielus said grabbing GoldenGate was a coup for Oracle. While gaining a prestigious base of 400 blue chip customers that use GoldenGate's technology, it also keeps it out of the hands of key rivals such as Microsoft and SAP. IBM already has its own change data capture technology it acquired from DataMirror in 2007 for $161 million.
For its part, Microsoft has introduced change data capture into SQL Server 2008, noted Andrew Brust, chief of new technology at twentysix New York. "There’s nothing that I know of that sits on top of it and updates the warehouse in real-time," said Brust in an email. "You could run a SQL Server Integration Services package on a frequent basis to look at the CDC data and update the warehouse, but that wouldn’t enable sub-second updates. But the infrastructure is there to create something that does."
Ovum analyst Tony Baer said it wouldn't be surprising if over time Oracle melded the technology into its own tooling. "They could extend the reach of the Oracle tooling and therefore give Oracle customers less reason to go outside Oracle," Baer said.
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