Oracle Acquires Primavera - A good analysis from Forrester Research

Ray has provided an excellent analysis on the Oracle's Primavera Acquisition.

http://blogs.forrester.com/appdev/2008/10/oracle-acquires.html

He describes the key issues that are totally aligned with my understanding:

• The rapid market consolidation had made it difficult for niche players like Primavera to break into enterprise sales.
• Oracle’s thin PPM offering made it difficult for the vendor to venture beyond the controller’s or cost account manager’s office.

More precisely, there are three groups:

• Field personnel who are using the Primavera or any project scheduling tool for managing their projects. Some tried to standardize the process and start building PMO.
• Cost Management or Project Cost Control group. These are not accountants. They are cost engineers who are very familiar with the cost breakdown and knowing how to estimate the costs.
• Project Accountants. They could be people assigned from the financial department working on specific projects. They may also be the one who prepare the invoices to customers.

The industry is hunger to have an integrated solutions and unfortunately no single vendor can provide a one stop shop with a prepackaged solution.

I think that a successful solution should also include a web based project analytics tool. It would be the key for an integrated enterprise project management solution. The project analytics application will consolidate the project information from various subsystems and provide a single project management dashboard that allows the deploying company can pull the project information at different stage of project lifecycle with different level of detail information that are required for different users.