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Oracle Corp.s buying spree continued on Thursday as it announced plans to acquire TimesTen Inc., a maker of real-time data management software that takes information locked in legacy applications and replicates it to a relational database at what customers say is lightning speed.
“The TimesTen technologies will be a natural extension of our database and Oracle Fusion Middleware,” said Andrew Mendelsohn, senior vice president of Oracle Database Server Technologies, in a statement. “This will enable us to provide our customers—such as those in the telecommunications and financial services industries—with instantly responsive and continuously available access to critical transaction data.”
TimesTen is a privately held company based in Mountain View, Calif., that counts among its clients companies such as Cisco Systems Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co., United Airlines, Sprint Corp., Nokia Corp., NEC Corp., Lucent Technologies Inc. and L.M. Ericsson.
Its technology today runs systems for real-time billing, stock trading, call centers, airline operations and many other ultra-high-performance applications.
The company last year unveiled three modules: Times-Ten/Transact, which provides real-time queuing, dispatching and processing of message-based transaction requests; TimesTen/Data-Server, which provides real-time, memory-optimized data replication and data management across multiple and distributed nodes; and TimesTen/Cache, which is designed for applications that require faster access to a subset of information stored in a relational DBMS, and offers real-time relational processing of selected data from databases, as well as automatic data loading and update synchronization.
TimesTen CEO Jim Groff said that customers will be the real winners of the Oracle takeover, since many of them already run on Oracle. “By combining our technology with Oracles industry-leading database and middleware, we will be able to provide an extremely responsive, scalable, robust and secure solution,” Groff said in a statement.
Carl Olofson, IDC research director for information management and data integration software, said that telecommunications and financial services, especially trading systems, have a sharp hunger for very-high-speed data storage and retrieval using database constructs with recoverability and integrity.
But such requirements are also becoming increasingly important for large-scale distributed data environments, such as logistics, inventory management or any grid-based deployment of application servers—all areas in which TimesTen has a long track record.
“TimesTen has been offering this technology for years,” Olofson said in a statement. “With this acquisition, Oracle will be able to offer their customers the benefits of this functionality as a seamlessly integrated element of their products.”