Continuing on its long line of acquisitions, midrange ERP software supplier SSA Global announced last week that it has acquired the Marcam software unit from Invensys, a British maker of factory controllers that bought a bunch of software companies a few years ago, as it had aspirations of controlling everything from the factory floor to the back office.

In June 2003, SSA Global acquired the Baan ERP suite, which was one of the high-fliers in the Unix market a few years back, from Invensys. With the Marcam purchase, SSA Global can bolster its offerings among process manufacturers, which buy its PRISM and Protean suites. PRISM runs on OS/400 servers, and Protean runs on Windows servers. SSA Global will eventually detail how the PRISM and Protean products will be integrated with its collection of products, and has agreed to support "all existing versions" of these two products.

The financial terms of the Marcam acquisition were not disclosed, but since SSA Global is going public, with a $200 million IPO, we will eventually be able to tell what the company paid for Marcam. The Securities and Exchange Commission is a stickler for the disclosure of such details.

PeopleSoft Launches World Express

PeopleSoft announced last week that it has begun shipments of the PeopleSoft World Express RPG suite tailored for OS/400 servers. As we previously detailed in this newsletter, World Express is not a stripped-down version of the World ERP applications, but a full-tilt-boogie suite targeted at manufacturers, distributors, home builders, construction firms, and automotive suppliers with annual revenues from $20 million to $100 million. The suite runs exclusively on the eServer i5 and iSeries and could be a significant driver of shipments in the coming years.

IBM Sells iSeries/pSeries RAID Controller Biz to Adaptec

Having sold its disk drive business to Hitachi last year, IBM is now getting out of the RAID disk controller business. The engineers in IBM's iSeries and pSeries groups have been making some of their own RAID disk controllers, and now IBM has sold off the intellectual property behind those RAID controllers to Adaptec. IBM already uses Adaptec RAID controllers in its xSeries line, and with this agreement some of the IBM engineers behind the iSeries and pSeries RAID controllers will move to Adaptec and Adaptec will supply RAID controllers for IBM's xSeries, iSeries, and pSeries servers. Adaptec says that it will sell RAID controllers worth about $50 million a year to IBM for the iSeries and pSeries lines, which will boost Adaptec's revenue by about 10 percent. It is unclear how much of the $453 million in sales that Adaptec booked in its fiscal 2004 (ended in April of this year) was from the xSeries line, but it is probably a big chunk, considering that Adaptec is IBM's single source for RAID controllers for that product line.

LANSA Joins Intermec Consulting Partner Program

Midrange middleware supplier and UCCnet software specialist LANSA announced last week that it has inked an agreement with Intermec Technologies that will allow LANSA to resell Intermec's line of automated data collection equipment. Intermec makes and sells a slew of such gear, including automated data collection equipment (including wired and wireless types); RFID tags and readers; handheld and various mobile computing systems used to manage supply chains; and barcode printers and readers. LANSA hopes to work with Intermec to push various data collection technologies, offering its services to integrate its own Data Sync Direct software for connecting with the UCCnet global registry and synchronizing product information among manufacturers, distributors, and retailers that are linked to one another in supply chains.

Get Ready for the OCEAN iSeries Technical Conference

The OCEAN User Group of iSeries professionals, based in Costa Mesa, California, will host its 11th annual "Catch the Wave" iSeries technical conference and vendor expo, featuring educational tracks for iSeries application development, e-business Web tools, iSeries security and infrastructure and IT project management. The one-day event will be held at the Hyatt Regency Hotel, at 17900 Jamboree Blvd., Irvine, California. For conference information and a registration form, e-mail a request to staff@ocean400.org.

Lawson Says Oracle and PeopleSoft Are Its Major Rivals

The soap opera of Oracle's $7.7 billion hostile takeover bid of PeopleSoft continued last week as Jay Coughlan, Lawson president and chief executive officer of midrange ERP software supplier Lawson Software, took the stand in the trial that is pitting Oracle (which wants to acquire PeopleSoft) against the U.S. government (which thinks such an acquisition will result in too much consolidation in the high-end software market). In 2002, according to Coughlan's testimony, Oracle apparently approached Lawson, which had gone public a year earlier, to see if it was interested in being acquired. Coughlan said that Lawson is no longer interested in being acquired, and named Oracle and PeopleSoft as his major competitors. The Department of Justice has been arguing that companies like Lawson do not compete directly enough against Oracle, PeopleSoft, or software giant SAP for big enterprise customers to be considered a rival of these three companies.