And it’s almost certain to do just that, judging from Relsys’s pedigree. The company has been around for some 20 years and it counts 21 of the top 50 pharma companies among its customers. As Redmonk analyst James Governor notes, this is a savvy acquisition and one that positions Oracle well to take advantage of future Obama administration health care spending. “Oracle didn’t get to where it is today without knowing which way the wind is blowing, and it’s not exactly hard right now to know where the rest of the US Government’s money will go, after its blown most of its wad on financial services bailouts,” Governor said. “Healthcare and Utilities are both set for significant investment. Oracle was already in healthcare, but the Relsys acquisition takes it to the heart of concerns around drug provenance and compliance. Regulatory compliance remains one of the best ways to sell software–nobody wants to do it, but everyone has to. It’s like flossing your teeth–if you could license an application to do that for you, you would, right?”

Facebook really is That company. Which company? That one. That company that shows up once in a very long while–the Google of yesterday, the Microsoft of long ago. That company where large numbers of stunningly-brilliant people congregate and feed off each other’s genius. That company that’s doing with 60 engineers what teams of 600 can’t pull off. That company that’s on the cusp of Changing The World, that’s still small enough where each employee has a huge impact on the organization, where you think about working now and again, and where you know you’ll kick yourself in three years if you don’t jump on the bandwagon now, even after someone had told you that it was rolling toward the promised land. That company where everyone seems to be having the time of their life. … I’m serious. I have drunk from the Kool-Aid, and it is delicious.”

– Facebook manager Justin Rosenstein, June 15, 2007

Facebook manager Justin Rosenstein once described the social network as “the Google (GOOG) of yesterday, the Microsoft (MSFT) of long ago.” Today, Rosenstein perhaps views it as the Facebook of So Totally Last Week because he’s leaving the company, along with departing Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz. Together the two hope to develop some sort of new extensible enterprise productivity suite, something that will be “to your work life what Facebook.com is to your social life,” according to a post on Rosenstein’s Facebook page.

“We see this new venture as very complementary to Facebook,” Rosenstein explained. “We hope our products will become to your work life what Facebook.com is to your social life. Our software will use Facebook Connect as the default option for identity and authentication. Our user interface will adopt many of Facebook’s conventions, creating a seamless and familiar experience for current Facebook users. And if our new development tools turn out to be useful, we hope the Facebook engineering team will come to adopt them.”

The departures are a blow to Facebook, which has been suffering something of a brain drain recently, and more specifically, to CEO Mark Zuckerberg who founded the company with Moskovitz while the two were undergraduates at Harvard.