Oracle Acquisition of Haley Aimed at Social Service Agency Products

By David Sims

TMCnet Contributing Editor

 

Oracle (News - Alert) has announced an agreement to acquire RuleBurst Holdings, the parent company of Haley Limited, a vendor of policy modeling and automation software, to create an end-to-end product for social services agencies.

 

It’s the belief of Oracle officials that “social service agencies are moving to commercial software to automate entitlements. With limited resources to serve a growing constituency, these agencies need to administer and distribute entitlements consistently and accurately as defined by the underlying legislation.”

 

To that end, they say, Haley’s policy automation platform “translates legislation and policies into defined, automated rules that are deployed in an application.”

 

Oracle will put it with their ERP and Siebel CRM applications to “create the first packaged software product for social services agencies with an enhanced case management application,” using Haley to drive eligibility determinations.

 

This reporter isn’t convinced by Oracle’s traditional strategy of acquiring vendors; seems that more and more of these sorts of applications are going to reside in the cloud.

 

The Haley policy automation platform is also used in other regulated industries, such as financial services and insurance, to implement and manage policies in common language without the need for specialized software programming.

 

Haley management said they and the company’s employees will join Oracle to form a global business unit focused on enterprise policy automation products across multiple industries. Haley’s CEO Dominic O’Hanlon is expected to lead the business unit as Senior Vice President and General Manager.

 

The transaction is subject to stockholder and governmental approvals and other customary closing conditions and is expected to close in the first quarter of calendar 2009. Until the deal closes, each company will continue to operate independently. Financial details of the transaction were not disclosed.

 

Oracle Senior Vice President of CRM, Anthony Lye, said by acquiring Haley, “Oracle is accelerating its investment in public sector to create an integrated product.”

 

In other Oracle news TMCnet has the news that Expert System, a vendor of semantic software that discovers, classifies and interprets text information, has announced it has
joined the Oracle PartnerNetwork as a worldwide member.

 

Expert System's COGITO Semantic Intelligence Engine was called “a natural fit” with the Oracle Spatial option of Oracle Database 11g, according to Oracle officials.

 

The integration of Expert System's COGITO software with Oracle's Business Intelligence and Enterprise Performance Management software “enables both companies to support customers” with a semantic intelligence and business analytic product, Oracle officials say.