Oracle Corp has stepped in to acquire Thinking Machines Corp in a bid to boost its data mining technology for large scale customer relationship management, business intelligence and e-commerce applications. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but the company’s 33 employees have moved from Thinking Machines’ Burlington, Massachusetts headquarters over to Oracle’s Waltham-based facility five miles away, where Oracle Express is developed.
Thinking Machines was formed in 1983 as a supercomputer company, but by 1995 it had entered into protracted Chapter 11 negotiations, and emerged only once it had exited the hardware business altogether in order to concentrate on software. At the end of 1996 it also sold off its GlobalWorks parallelizing software and development tools to Sun Microsystems Inc, and decided to concentrate on its Darwin parallel data mining software (CI No 3,046). Darwin was developed originally as test software for the supercomputers, but over the last few years the company has been porting it onto open systems platforms, including Sun, HP and IBM Unix machines, and selling it to telecommunications and financial services customers.
Oracle has had a relationship with Thinking Machines for a year, and collaborated with it on the sampling feature of Oracle 8i. It says it will continue to sell the product as a standalone tool, and will add a Windows NT version later this year, as well as upgrading the current versions to Release 4. It won’t say whether it will continue to sell to customers with non-Oracle database technology, currently supported through the ODBC interface. Oracle also intends to sell Darwin bundled in with its customer relationship management suite, and over time will subsume some of the algorithms within the Oracle database itself. It promises more details over the next few quarters.
Competitors include Neovista Software Inc, which has concentrated on specific vertical markets, such as retail and financial services with similar parallelization software. Neovista – once known as Maspar – also emerged from the supercomputer industry. But Thinking Machines says its biggest competitor is IBM Corp, with its Intelligent Miner technology, although it points out that IBM sells the product mostly as part of larger services contracts.