Oracle Buys GoldenGate: Should Customers Be Concerned?Oracle Buys GoldenGate: Should Customers Be Concerned?

Another independent gets taken over by the big boys. That's the good-for-Oracle, possibly bad-for-the-industry news today with Oracle's acquisition of GoldenGate Software, the San Francisco-based data integration, replication and synchronization vendor. The deal is good for Oracle because it gives it change data capture and other low-latency data integration options it previously lacked. But what of GoldenGate's many technology-agnostic tools and industry partnerships?

Intelligent Enterprise has covered GoldenGate's data quality, disaster recovery and "transactional data management" software over the years, but the latter appears to have motivated today's announcement, as indicated here:"The need to improve operating performance in a global 24x7 environment has led to the need for data integration to support real-time and high availability capabilities," stated Hasan Rizvi, senior vice president Oracle Fusion Middleware Product Development. "With the addition of GoldenGate, Oracle expects to help our customers achieve better performance through improved business intelligence and business continuity with real-time information."

Of course, plenty of partners besides Oracle were interested in GoldenGate's low-latency data integration offerings, particularly it's change data capture (CDC) capabilities. Teradata, for one, highlighted the importance of CDC in this Q&A interview from May. Other GoldenGate partners include Microsoft, Netezza, Greenplum and Microstrategy. Oracle is saying all the right things to allay partner concerns, as in these statement: "We expect business to continue as usual for GoldenGate partners... In addition to increased product support and investment, GoldenGate partners are expected to benefit from the Oracle PartnerNetwork, our global world-class partner program, which provides access to a broad portfolio of solutions, comprehensive resources to support partner business and opportunities for growth with Oracle."

If I were Teradata, Microsoft, Netezza, Greenplum or Microstrategy, I certainly wouldn't count on having the same, vendor-neutral relationship with GoldenGate. That said, I'm guessing customers using GoldenGate software with Oracle-competitive products will insist on -- and likely get -- continued support in terms of compatibility, connectors, updates and what not. Otherwise, what good is the software?

I'm sure many GoldenGate customers will take a wait-and-see attitude, much as MySQL customers are waiting to see if there's an impact from Oracle's purchase of Sun. (In fact, those customers weren't even used to Sun's treatment in the wake of its 2008 acquisition of MySQL, so more than one jury is still out.) It's just that GoldenGate seemed so independent and interdependent on its partner network; it's difficult to imagine things being quite the same under Oracle's wing.

It's been too long ago now and, as a journalist rather than a customer, I don't really have a sense of the long-term impact of IBM's acquisition of Ascential, which would seem to be a good parallel. So it might be helpful to hear from an Ascential customer who can offer a take on how things turned, in the long term, with that deal. Please comment below or email me at [email protected] if you think GoldenGate customers should be complacent or concerned.

Update: Forrester analyst Rob Karel says Data Mirror-IBM is a better parallel to the Oracle-GoldenGate deal than Ascential-IBM. Even if Ascential was more ETL-oriented, it was a trusted independent that worked with many partners. My interest is in hearing from customers and whether they are still well served by products that used to be offered by independents.Another independent gets taken over by the big boys. That's the good-for-Oracle, possibly bad-for-the-industry news today with Oracle's acquisition of GoldenGate Software, the San Francisco-based data integration, replication and synchronization vendor. Just what will become of GoldenGate's many technology-agnostic tools and industry partnerships?