The big integration news this week is Oracle's announcement it will acquire GoldenGate Software, a real-time data integration (aka, change data capture) company based in San Francisco. Thursday, Oracle revealed the two companies had reached an agreement and, assuming all goes as planned, GoldenGate will become yet another part of Oracle's vast holdings by year-end.

Earlier this year, I talked with GoldenGate's VP of marketing and product management, Sami Akbay, about why real-time data isn't more widely used among retailers. He pointed out that adoption just takes time, adding, “technology like ours has only been available in the last three or four years.”

GoldenGate's fact sheet states the company was founded in 1995. In those 14 years, GoldenGate has managed to add 400 customers in a range of industries, including financial data services, telecommunications – four of the top five telecom providers -- commercial banking, hospitals, and food and drug stores. Among their clients: Bank of America, Travelocity, Overstock.com, Chase Paymentech, Raymond James and Direct TV.

And now they've been bought out by Oracle. It's not bad work, if you can get it.

But what's in it for Oracle – besides, of course, yet another notch on its acquisition belt? A presentation released by Oracle includes a list of benefits to customers of its database, Oracle BI/EPM, and other Oracle applications, all of which focus on GoldenGate's ability to deliver high availability data and real-time data integration. For example:

• Support for continuous update during outages or software upgrades
• Real-time data for Oracle's business intelligence and performance management apps
• Reducing load on transactional applications
• Bi-directional replication synchronizes across systems and allows fall-back

It probably doesn't hurt that GoldenGate has been an Oracle partner for the past 10 years. The two have many of the same customers and GoldenGate already supports integration for many Oracle solutions, according to the presentation.

But I suspect all of these may just be icing on the cake, with the cake being Oracle's Fusion Middleware. Channel Web reports Oracle will add GoldenGate to its Fusion Middleware product line, although it's only fair to note that IDG News Service reports it's still “unclear how Oracle will fold in GoldenGate's technology once the deal is complete.”

You may remember that the aptly namedFusion Middleware already boasts an impressive integration story from previous Oracle acquisition.

So far, no one knows what the deal will cost Oracle. AMR Research senior vice president Jim Shepherd told TechTarget GoldenGate is worth about $10 million, but the 451 Group estimates GoldenGate made about $100 million in revenue last year.

And kudos to the 451 Group, by the way, for predicting the Oracle-GoldenGate deal last month. The analyst firm also gave their assessment of what this would mean for the market:

“If Oracle is indeed picking up GoldenGate, the acquisition should enable the database giant to compete more effectively with IBM’s Information Server and other data management offerings from Big Blue. GoldenGate’s technology would give Oracle the opportunity to extend its data migration, high-availability and real-time integration capabilities to non-Oracle environments. GoldenGate already provides data migration capabilities for Siebel applications and real-time integration for Oracle’s data warehouse, for example, so there’s already technical integration in place.”

The deal may also be bad news for SAP, according to Forrester analyst Rob Karel, who told TechTarget that SAP customers were already clamoring for real-time data integration and high availability:

"SAP cannot afford to ignore it and really needs to move quickly on this. One of the biggest pain points out there in the market is support for SAP migrations."

In the same article, Gartner VP and Distinguished Analyst Ted Friedman said SAP's efforts to address the problem have fallen short and seemed to suggest SAP consider an acquisition in the real-time data integration space. Since IBM bought DataMirror a few years ago, that leaves three pure-play choices: Attunity, Vision Solutions and HiT Software.

Looks like it's SAP's move, which could make for an interesting fourth quarter in the real-time data integration market. With drama like this, who needs fantasy football?