Oracle Announces Acquisition of One Meaning Inc.
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Oracle has announced that it successfully concluded the acquisition of One Meaning Inc., a privately-held technology leader for enterprise meta data management solutions headquartered in Palo Alto, Calif. One Meaning Inc. was founded in 1989. This acquisition complements Oracle's Common Warehouse Meta Data strategy for enabling the sharing of data across multiple data warehousing products. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. Oracle does not anticipate that the acquisition will have a material impact on its financial results this fiscal year.
"Meeting the meta data challenge of increasingly complex data warehouse solutions clearly demands solid enterprise experience and a deep understanding of the integration complexity across multiple products via a common enterprise vocabulary," said Aaron Zornes, Executive Vice President, META Group. "This acquisition amalgamates Oracle's enterprise expertise with a leader in meta data integration, One Meaning, thus positioning Oracle well to address the needs of the data warehousing marketplace."
Common Warehouse Meta Data (CWM) is Oracle's open standard for data warehousing meta data. CWM incorporates both technical and business meta data and covers all aspects of warehousing. CWM will enable tighter integration of meta data among Oracle's products as well as across industry-leading tools from Oracle partners, resulting in reduced implementation complexity and greater user productivity. In early 1999 Oracle Warehouse Builder will become the first product to adopt CWM. CWM enablement for other products such as Oracle Discoverer and Oracle Express will quickly follow.
Companies today rely on a great diversity of information to make decisions that are business critical. The necessary data, however, is often locked up in incompatible systems, applications and tools. Meta data allows end users to understand the origin, contents, and meaning in these data silos.
"Meta data technology is a critical component for the data warehousing market," said Michael Howard, Oracle vice president of the Data Warehouse Program Office. "One Meaning will enrich Oracle's CWM strategy by providing interchange technology and detailed models of legacy sources, transformations, and scheduling. The combination of CWM and One Meaning forms a complete meta data management solution."
Business managers and end-users often undervalue data they are presented with because of the difficulty of evaluating that data in the correct context. CWM and One Meaning provide the ability to trace the lineage of data, so that an accurate interpretation is possible.
"An executive interpreting a number in a report can with a single click discover the complete lineage of that number, what it means, where it came from and when it was updated," said Andrew Mercer, founder and CEO of One Meaning. "It is that type of capability that One Meaning's tools will bring to Oracle's customers."
In addition, Oracle joined IBM, Unisys and other industry leaders in creating a Request for Proposal (RFP) for a Common Warehouse Metadata Interchange (CWMI) standard to the Object Management Group (OMG), http://www.omg.org , as the first step in creating an industry standard. These standards will enable metadata interoperability among vendors data warehousing products.
"Unisys, Oracle and IBM are already taking a leadership role at OMG in championing the Common Warehouse Metadata Interchange initiative. The acquisition of One Meaning, a long standing Unisys OEM partner, and Oracle's commitment to standards based meta data interoperability will accelerate the deployment of enterprise class data warehousing solutions in the industry, " said Sridhar Iyengar, Unisys Fellow and Chair, OMG Object Analysis & Design Taskforce (OA&DTF) which is standardizing modeling and meta data standards.
A number of partners support Oracle's meta data strategy:
"One Meaning's technology will help empower Oracle and Business Objects users to better understand their meta data," said Alex Moissis, senior director of product line marketing at Business Objects. "Through our close relationship with Oracle -- and its recent acquisition of One Meaning -- we hope to deliver even better functionality to our joint customers."
According to Chris Hyrne, vice president of marketing at Prism Solutions, "Customers are seeking solutions that integrate business, technical and operational meta data from a wide range of sources, including modeling tools, warehouse development tools, DSS tools, and administrative products. Prism supports Oracle's leadership in delivering a common meta data interchange facility. We have worked with One Meaning in the past and we look forward to working with Oracle as they enhance this technology."
"Common meta data standards within the Business Intelligence community will increase the rate at which organizations deploy mission-critical information to their knowledge workers," said Larry Ford, president and CEO of Information Advantage. "As one of the leaders in this space, Oracle's Common Warehouse Meta Data initiative is significant and advantageous to the industry."
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