No sooner had Oracle snapped up Siebel Systems (see Technology News, this issue) than it announced it was taking over G-Log, a provider of transportation management system applications.
G-Log has enjoyed good success with its GC3 suite, but TMS is not a huge market, says AMR Research. By being blended into Oracle, G-Log should be guaranteed to survive. The same is true for G-Log employees, for the most part. Oracle says it will keep most of G-Log's 180 employees.
Oracle says it intends to use G-Log assets to build a logistics hub, which is critical to Oracle's retail industry product and should be complementary to the Oracle Advanced Planning Suite and the Oracle Field Service applications.
A look at some Oracle acquisitions in the past two years shows the kind of direction and pace it has in supply chain execution: J.D. Edwards and Retek, both with good warehouse management systems and other products; PeopleSoft, an enterprise software vendor; Siebel systems, a leader in customer relationship management; and now G-Log.
As Oracle continues to digest the other companies, it certainly doesn't hurt that the G-Log product was designed using an Oracle database, and more than half of G-Log customers are currently Oracle application users.