Oracle says that with Taelo, it intends to create a comprehensive cloud offering for organizations to manage their HR operations and employee careers.

“Human capital management has become a strategic initiative for organizations,” said Thomas Kurian, EVP, Oracle Development. “Taleo’s industry leading talent management cloud is an important addition to the Oracle Public Cloud.”

“Taleo’s integrated cloud-based talent management solutions optimize how organizations hire, manage, develop and reward their employees and gives companies the intelligence needed to capitalize on their most critical asset – their people,” said Michael Gregoire, Chairman and CEO of Taleo. “Joining forces with Oracle gives us the opportunity to better serve our customers.”

Gregoire posted the following letter on the Taleo site:

Taleo Customers and Partners,

Michael Gregoire
Chairman and CEO

Oracle is in the process of reviewing Taleo’s product roadmap. The company says it will be providing guidance to customers.

The transaction has already been unanimously approved by Oracle’s board, though still subject to regulatory approvals. It’s expected to close by late 2011/early 2012.

“RightNow’s products add leading customer experience capabilities that help empower companies to interact with and provide a consistent experience to customers across channels,” said RightNow CEO Greg Gianforte. “We look forward to combining our complementary capabilities along with maintaining and expanding our presence in Bozeman, Montana in order to better service our customers.”

“Oracle is moving aggressively to offer customers a full range of Cloud Solutions including sales force automation, human resources, talent management, social networking, databases and Java as part of the Oracle Public Cloud,” said Thomas Kurian, EVP, Oracle Development. “RightNow’s leading customer service cloud is a very important addition to Oracle’s Public Cloud.”

Oracle has an interesting presentation available (pdf) looking at how it intends to implement RIghtNow into its strategy. Here’s a flow chart that shows the B2C Plan:

And the B2B plan:

RightNow is a 1,000-employee company headquartered in Bozeman, Montana. Its services are already used by about 2,000 organizations.

It tells a tale of two tech giants teaming up to impede the progress of a third tech giant. More specifically, Google is being attacked through a patent war by Microsoft and Apple (along with Oracle and others). Drummond writes:

They’re doing this by banding together to acquire Novell’s old patents (the “CPTN” group including Microsoft and Apple) and Nortel’s old patents (the “Rockstar” group including Microsoft and Apple), to make sure Google didn’t get them; seeking $15 licensing fees for every Android device; attempting to make it more expensive for phone manufacturers to license Android (which we provide free of charge) than Windows Mobile; and even suingBarnes & Noble, HTC, Motorola, and Samsung. Patents were meant to encourage innovation, but lately they are being used as a weapon to stop it.

A smartphone might involve as many as 250,000 (largely questionable) patent claims, and our competitors want to impose a “tax” for these dubious patents that makes Android devices more expensive for consumers. They want to make it harder for manufacturers to sell Android devices. Instead of competing by building new features or devices, they are fighting through litigation.

Now Google, who has often been called names like “anti-competitive” by Microsoft and other competitors,  is calling this whole strategy “anti-competitive”.

“Microsoft and Apple’s winning $4.5 billion for Nortel’s patent portfolio was nearly five times larger than the pre-auction estimate of $1 billion,” Drummond adds. “Fortunately, the law frowns on the accumulation of dubious patents for anti-competitive means — which means these deals are likely to draw regulatory scrutiny, and this patent bubble will pop.”

The Nortel patent portfolio in question is currently under Department of Justice scrutiny. So is Google’s proposed acquisition of AdMeld. Meanwhile, the FTC is investigating Google’s broader business practices.

Various other Googlers are sharing Drummond’s post on Google+. A few are adding their own commentary. Amit Fulay simply added, “Well said David…”

Google’s Jeff Huber added, “Sad when competition shifts from trying to have better products & user experiences, and enabling user choice, to collusion and having more lawyers…”

Update: Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith tweeted the following:

And…

Microsoft’s Head of Communications Frank Shaw tweeted the following:

The link shows an email, which says:

Brad –
Sorry for the delay in getting back to you — I came down with a 24-hour bug on the way back from San Antonio. After talking with people here, it sounds as though for various reasons a joint bid wouldn’t be advisable for us on this one. But I appreciate your flagging it, and we’re open to discussing other similar opportunities in the future.
I hope the rest of your travels go well, and I look forward to seeing you again soon.
– Kent

Update 2: Google Has updated its original post in response to Microsoft:

Drummond writes:

It’s not surprising that Microsoft would want to divert attention by pushing a false “gotcha!” while failing to address the substance of the issues we raised. If you think about it, it’s obvious why we turned down Microsoft’s offer. Microsoft’s objective has been to keep from Google and Android device-makers any patents that might be used to defend against their attacks. A joint acquisition of the Novell patents that gave all parties a license would have eliminated any protection these patents could offer to Android against attacks from Microsoft and its bidding partners. Making sure that we would be unable to assert these patents to defend Android — and having us pay for the privilege — must have seemed like an ingenious strategy to them. We didn’t fall for it.

Ultimately, the U.S. Department of Justice intervened, forcing Microsoft to sell the patents it bought and demanding that the winning group (Microsoft, Oracle, Apple, EMC) give a license to the open-source community, changes the DoJ said were “necessary to protect competition and innovation in the open source software community.” This only reaffirms our point: Our competitors are waging a patent war on Android and working together to keep us from getting patents that would help balance the scales.

Update 3: Frank Shaw fired back again with a series of tweets:

While Oracle is expected to assist in the transition, it’s clear the time that’s been put into making OpenOffice a viable alternative to the ever-present Office suite is at an end. The announcement of Oracle’s intentions was also accompanied by the following statement:

“Given the breadth of interest in free personal productivity applications and the rapid evolution of personal computing technologies, we believe the OpenOffice.org project would be best managed by an organization focused on serving that broad constituency on a non-commercial basis,” said Edward Screven, Oracle’s Chief Corporate Architect. “We intend to begin working immediately with community members to further the continued success of Open Office. Oracle will continue to strongly support the adoption of open standards-based document formats, such as the Open Document Format (ODF).”

Based on other readings, it sounds like Oracle wasn’t entirely sure how to manage OpenOffice.

According to The Register, there was split in the creative team responsible for OpenOffice which resulted in the following:

The Document Foundation was created in September 2010 by community members of the OpenOffice project when Oracle refused to release OpenOffice as an independent project. The Document Foundation is building the OpenOffice fork Libre Office.

Apparently, the differences began in 2010 when Oracle took what was perceived as a strong-arm approach to the software suite. While there is some ambiguity concerning the future of the OpenOffice project, the fact that Oracle relinquished control of the property should provide some level of hope to OpenOffice supporters, but again, the Register cautions:

Also, too, whether Oracle will – as is likely – retain the OpenOffice trademark, which would mean that it would retain the ultimate form of control over what changes go into OpenOffice.

Considering the success of Google Docs, one would think there’s room for additional office productivity software suites that don’t cost consumers a thing.

Oracle filed suit against SAP the Spring of 2007, after the company discovered TomorrowNow was accessing Oracle databases with former customer passwords and downloading proprietary information. TomorrowNow used the downloads to sell products to Oracle customers for half the price of what Oracle was charging. 

Here’s a snippet from our coverage in July of 2007, just after TomorrowNow admitted it had downloaded the files:

SAP is defending its subsidiary by saying that TN customers authorized them to download files on their behalf, a defense Eric Goldman calls the "proxy defense" that’s doomed to fail.<

"Oracle can control the manner and means by which people access its servers," writes Goldman, "so even if it permits its customers to access the site, that permission isn’t automatically extensible to third parties acting on the customers’ behalf. Indeed, Oracle expressly precluded such behavior in some cases."

According to Bloomberg, who broke the news:

The verdict, which came after one day of deliberations, is the biggest ever for copyright infringement and the largest U.S. jury award of 2010, according to Bloomberg data. The award is about equal to SAP’s forecasted net income for the fourth quarter, excluding some costs, according to the average estimate of analysts surveyed by Bloomberg.

SAP spokesman Bill Wohl said the German software maker will pursue all available options, including post-trial motions and will appeal if necessary. “This will unfortunately be a prolonged process and we continue to hope that the matter can be resolved appropriately without more years of litigation.”

Former SAP CEO Leo Apotheker is of course now running HP, which has created some turbulence between Oracle and HP this year.

"Driven by the convergence of online and traditional commerce and the need to increase revenue and improve customer loyalty, organizations across many industries are looking for a unified commerce and CRM platform to provide a seamless experience across all commerce channels," said Thomas Kurian, Executive Vice President of Oracle Development. "Bringing together the complementary technologies and products from Oracle and ATG will enable the delivery of next-generation, unified cross-channel commerce and CRM."

"More than 1,000 global enterprises rely on ATG’s solutions to help increase the value of their online customer interactions," said Bob Burke, President and CEO of ATG. "This combination will enhance the ability to bring all their commerce activities together – creating a more consistent and relevant experience for their customers across all interaction channels, including online, in stores, via mobile devices and with call centers."

The company offers a variety of e-commerce products and services: 

"The addition of ATG, which brings market-leading products used by some of the largest and most well-known retailers and brands, furthers Oracle’s strategy of delivering industry-specific enterprise applications," added Bob Weiler, Executive Vice President, Oracle Global Business Units. "This acquisition builds upon our dedication to offer the most complete and integrated suite of best-of-breed software applications and technologies required to power the most demanding companies in the world in every industry."

The acquisition has yet to gain stockholder or regulatory approval, and must go through other customary closing conditions, but Orcale expects to close the deal by early next year.

If you’re in the mood to read a lot of legalese, Google’s full 27-page response to the lawsuit is available courtesy of John Paczkowski, and it’s not too terrible as such things go.  But we’ll try to hit the highlights.

Here’s the main point(s) of the document: "Google specifically denies that Google has infringed or is liable for infringement of any valid and enforceable patents of Oracle.  Google further specifically denies that Oracle is entitled to any relief whatsoever of any kind against Google as a result of any act of Google or any person or entity acting on behalf of Google."

Then another important detail is Google’s assertion that "Oracle’s claims . . . for alleged infringement of the Patents-in-Suit are barred by the doctrine of misuse."

As a result (and as mentioned in the first paragraph), Google wants the complaint dismissed with prejudice.  It also wants Oracle’s patents to be declared invalid.  Finally, the company’s seeking "an award to Google of its reasonable costs and expenses of litigation, including attorneys’ fees and expert witness fees."

This could turn into a fierce battle if the judge isn’t of a mind to make a decision quickly.