IT Vendor Outlook: Oracle
Bio-IT World spent time with several Oracle executives to provide this wrap-up of where the database and enterprise applications vendor is headed in the healthcare and life science industries. Oracle seems intent on moving away from proprietary formats such as Oracle Forms thanks to its Fusion platform, and challenges healthcare IT players to commit to open standards. It is true that too often, interfaces, say between different billing systems, cost thousands of dollars and require long waiting times before they can be implemented. At best healthcare software vendors commit to integration, when interoperability is more desirable because it does not require additional software to make things work together (at least in theory).
In the interview Ed Lengyel, Oracle’s senior director of product strategy, was noncommital as to how the Siebel acquisition would ultimately affect Oracle Clinical, as product teams are still assessing the strengths of Siebel Clinical. He mentioned a forthcoming Clinical Data Repository (CDR) product with an emphasis on Oracle’s role as an infrastructure player focusing on features such as security or audits. Overall, Oracle appears to be pushing further into healthcare, though how fast and how it can integrate its huge recent acquisitions (not only Siebel, but PeopleSoft and J.D. Edwards too) remains to be seen.
February 8, 2006 Related topics: IT & software