Oracle seeks more SMB, industry, and compliance business
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(InfoWorld) - Oracle is positioning itself to try and attract more SMBs as well as customers that have specific industry requirements and those with particular governance or compliance needs. The highly fragmented SMB market presents opportunities for large and small applications vendors to increase revenue if they can attract customers to adopt their ERP and CRM software. Both Oracle and its main rival, SAP, regularly come out with new initiatives designed to win more SMB hearts and minds. Oracle already believes it has done a lot of work to make it easier for SMBs to install its applications, according to President Charles Phillips. "Our next investment will be around distribution," he said Wednesday atÂ Oracle's launch of new versions of its E-Business Suite, JD Edwards, PeopleSoft, and Siebel applications. Within the next few weeks, Oracle executives will begin a "world tour for SMBs," stopping in 20 cities and looking to sign up additional partners, Phillips added. Industry-specific applications is "a wide-open area," Phillips said, where many customers have previously used customized software they built themselves. On the industries side, Oracle has established four key business units to meet the needs of retail, communications, financial services, and utilities customers. "It's a new concept for Oracle," Phillips said. Each unit has its own general manager and is responsible for its own profits and losses. Establishing the business units was vital to retaining the key management executives with industry-specific expertiseÂ Oracle gained throughÂ the acquisitions of companies, he added. These include retail software vendor Retek, communications software firm Portal, and most recently, utilities applications provider SPL WorldGroupÂ in November, as well as the 82 percent stake Oracle holds in Indian financial software vendor i-flex Solutions. "It was something of a lessons learned story," John Wookey, senior vice president of applications at Oracle, said in an interview Wednesday. He referred back to the company's experience in 1997 when it acquired Treasury Services, a profitability and risk analysis software provider. When Oracle completed that deal, it moved the Treasury developer team over to Oracle's development operation and mapped all the other Treasury staff including sales and marketing over to the equivalent organizations within Oracle. Over time, while Oracle was able to retain most of the Treasury developers, very few of the skilled sales organization who were educated on the Treasury software remained with the company. "When we did the Retek acquisition, we didnât want to lose that expertise, so we created the retail unit and, most recently, the utilities unit for SPL World," Wookey said. Oracle may look to set up additional industry business units, he added. The vendor already has a public sector group that is separately organized from the general applications sales operations. Another business unit Oracle has recently put in place is a GRC (governance, risk and compliance) organization, Wookey said, which was formed after the vendor acquired enterprise content management vendor Stellent in December. Along with content management, Stellent also provides compliance and records management software and expertise to help customers manage enterprise risk across their entire organizations. The GRC unit will be home to that part of Stellent as well as internal controls software that's featured in E-Business Suite and in PeopleSoft, respectively, Wookey said. In May, Oracle's arch-rivalÂ SAP announced its plans to establish a GRC business unit after acquiring compliance software vendor Virsa Systems. Â
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Integration is a key factor with any large ERP implementation and ongoing maintenance, and Oracle Corp. is catching on. At its London-based OpenWorld event this week Oracle announced better integration between
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Melding a hodgepodge of different software makers into a cohesive business is supposed to be difficult. But Oracle Corp. is making the task look easy as the Redwood Shores-based company churns out one impressive quarter after another, nearly three years into a $25 billion shopping spree that is yielding bigger dividends than many skeptical software analysts and executives anticipated.
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Oracle has released tools using technology acquired with Stellent that can automate compliance with government regulations such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.
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REDWOOD SHORES, Calif.  - Oracle Corp. ORCL.O  plans in a few years to combine Oracle and PeopleSoft business  software products in a challenge to market leader SAP AG  SAPG.DE, Oracle Chief Executive Larry Ellison said on  Tuesday.
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Although the threat of Oracleâs hostile takeover continues to cast a shadow over it, PeopleSoft is pressing on with plans to integrate into its product mix the enterprise applications it picked up last year in its acquisition of J.D. Edwards.
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PeopleSoft announced a broad partnership with IBM on Tuesday, in an attempt to show that it is moving forward aggressively despite the turmoil created by Oracle&#39;s $7.
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Company looks to juice its application server business with a version tuned for smaller organizations.
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(InfoWorld) - Oracle Corp.'s launch of new releases of its five application families was a surprisingly sober affair, designed to restate the vendor's May 2006 pledge to continue to enhance all of the software products. The event took place Wednesday in the glamorous red and gold Hudson Theatre in the heart of New York's theater district, but there was no burlesque-style entertainment or amusing video skits. Instead, there was a series of straight-up presentations and product demonstrations from Oracle executives outlining the functionalities of the new versions. Oracle displayed E-Business Suite (EBS) 12.0, PeopleSoft Enterprise 9.0, Siebel CRM 8.0, JD Edwards EnterpriseOne 8.12 and JD Edwards World A9.1. EBS is Oracle's long-time applications suite, while the vendor picked up all the other ERP (enterprise resource planning) and CRM (customer relationship management) software through the acquisitions of PeopleSoft and Siebel. At the time of those acquisitions, many users expressed concerns that Oracle would either force them to migrate to EBS or to Fusion, its planned new applications suite due to appear in 2008. In May 2006, Oracle committed publicly to continue to support and improve all the acquired applications under an initiative called "Applications Unlimited." Wednesday's event was the proof of that commitment, according to Oracle executives. "We thought we did a lot of work pitching Apps Unlimited at OpenWorld, but we found afterwards users still had a lot of questions," said John Wookey, senior vice president of applications at Oracle, in an interview at the event. Oracle's OpenWorld user conference was in October in San Francisco. Although JD Edwards World A9.1 shipped last April, the other products have only recently become available, for instance,Â EBS 12.0 debutedÂ last week. Capabilities across the board included role-based analytics, business intelligence dashboards, master data management and XML-based reporting. Specific improvements included a new task-based user interface and enterprise search functionality in Siebel 8.0 and new human capital management features such as talent management in PeopleSoft 9.0 Wookey also noted that plans are under way for the next releases of all the products. "Apps Unlimited is not a one-time thing, it will go forward," he said. For instance, Siebel 8.1, which will include a focus on self-service capabilities, should be out late this year. All the applications are integrated with Oracle's Fusion middleware, created using an SOA (service-oriented architecture) development approach. The idea is that by moving to the new versions of the Oracle applications, users will be well positioned to adopt the SOA-based Fusion applications come 2008. The Fusion applications will be based on Oracle's Fusion middleware. The only moments of unintentional levity came in the question-and-answer session where there was persistent feedback and echoes as customers and partners in Amsterdam, London, Mexico City and Paris posed questions to the Oracle executives in New York. Much of the tenor of the questions suggested some users are still confused about their choices. Oracle Applications Users Group recommends that users move to the new releases sooner rather than later, according to Basheer Khan, a major participant in the organization. "The sooner you're able to adopt and train up your IT, the better," he said. Khan described Wednesday's product launch as a "feather in Oracle's cap," and a move that's made users of the applications feel a lot more comfortable. "One thing we were concerned about was pricing," he said. "But now Oracle has said there are no upgrade fees; it's just like another upgrade." Customers are also pleased with Oracle's decision in late December to simplify its pricing model making life easier particularly for users running a number of different Oracle applications. Khan was also pleased to hear Wookey confirm that the Fusion applications when they appear will be integrated with several earlier versions of each application family. Â
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(InfoWorld) - Midmarket applications vendor Infor Global Solutions Inc. sees challenges for companies like SAP AG and Oracle Corp. to adapt their enterprise software products for small and medium-size business. Earlier this month, SAP announced plans to establish a dedicated SMB unit and expand the company's footprint in the huge midmarket, a move that Infor Chairman and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Jim Schaper thinks is easier said than done. In an interview with IDG News Service, Schaper talked about Infor, a relatively young provider of business applications that has grown through acquisitions and now generates more than US$2 billion in annual sales, and discusses growth markets and competition with SAP, Oracle and Microsoft Corp.. The following is an edited transcript. IDGNS: The midmarket means different things to different people. How do you define it? Schaper: Midmarket customers are typically independent businesses that range in revenue from $25 million to $2 billion. We believe that somewhere between 60,000 and 62,000 customers of our total 70,000 customer base are in the midmarket. If we compare that with SAP, which estimates that 65 percent of their 36,000 customers are SMBs or little more 23,000, we are clearly twice the size of SAP in the midmarket. IDGNS: How large is the market you're going after? Schaper: Our market is globally 1 million prospective customers, including the plants and divisions of large enterprises. IDGNS: Why do you include these? Schaper: A number of very large global enterprises run our applications on a decentralized plant or division basis. That's why, for Infor, a classical view of an SMB definition doesn't work. IDGNS: Why should a midmarket company choose Infor and not SAP or Oracle, which have substantial expertise in business software and have stepped up efforts to target SMBs? Schaper: We fill a hole in the market. We have maximized on what smaller niche providers provide -- namely business-specific solutions with domain expertise to implement them -- and on what the large players have to offer: global distribution. We provide our customers with global reach, alternative channels and products built for their markets at the lowest total cost of ownership. IDGNS: SAP would argue that it also offers products with deep industry-specific functionality. Would you disagree? Schaper: If they're digging down deep, then they've just started because that hasn't been their business model in past. They said they will do this primarily through partners. IDGNS: SAP does offer different versions of its software for different markets. Could this provide a competitive edge? Schaper: They've attempted to take a tier 1 product and move it down market. You don't leave the complexity of the product behind, or the cost or length of time it takes to implement. IDGNS: And Infor has a different approach? Schaper: Our products were built for the markets they're serving. We're not attempting to take a product that was built for large enterprises and cram it down into the midmarket. We're equally not trying to take something that is prepackaged for mass consumption and move it up market as Microsoft is trying to do. There are inherent complexities that are built into a product to serve large enterprises. IDGNS: So what do SMBs want? Schaper: They want very specific functionality at the lowest total cost of ownership with the least amount of complexity. IDGNS: Where are your customers? Schaper: Fifty percent of our revenues come from the Americas, 41 percent out of Europe and 9 percent out of Asia Pacific region. IDGNS: How important is China? Schaper: Not unlike every other software company, including SAP, it is our highest growth area. We have typically looked at the Chinese market, earlier in the evolution of Infor, as a market where we wanted to go after multinationals, whether U.S. or European-based. We have now moved with some new product capabilities into the mainland Chinese market, which is a much lower-end market but one where we believe we're perfectly positioned IDGNS: And what challenges do you face in this particular market? Schaper: You start small but your products must be able to scale quickly because what today is a local Chinese auto supplier, for example, is likely to become in a few years a global supplier as China exports automobiles to the U.S. and Europe. This is coming in the next 18 months. IDGNS: Do you offer any on-demand or hosted services? Schaper: We do but not for all applications. Most of what we build is at the request of customers. They have a lot of influence in our long-term development plans. But there are components that can be provided on either a hosted or on-demand model. Asset management is one, customer relationship management is another. But when you get into the extended supply chain, like warehouse management, planning and scheduling -- all core ERP applications -- we just haven't seen customer demand for that. Our products are capable of being hosted and we will host them as we see customer demand. IDGNS: What about open source? Schaper: Open source is a key contributor to Infor and we will be a key contributor to open source over time. It is one of the critical differentiators in our business strategy of how we will SOA-enable our applications.ADVERTISEMENTNEW IT SERVICES FROM IBM: EASIER TO BUY AND IMPLEMENTDiscover a simpler, more cost-effective way to get the solutions your company needs to grow more flexible and efficient.
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Company targets software-as-service businesses with Âon demandÂ database program.
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The combination of PeopleSoft applications with Oracle&#39;s database and middleware products could lead to a closer relationship between IBM and SAP.
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The door is open for Oracle to win its bid for PeopleSoft, and for midmarket ERP vendors to increase their business. By Elena Malykhina.
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San Francisco, December 7: Oracle Corp on Monday said it believes its business software applications, an area that has lagged the rest of the company, are gaining ground against market leader SAP AG of Germany.
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InfoWorld - Oracle at the OpenWorld conference on Tuesday is making several product rollouts, including a new version of its database and grid computing enhancements.
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While most of Oracle's recent purchases have focused on growing its applications business, the vendor's latest proposed purchase will beef up its growing identity management operation.
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Oracle Corp.  plans in a few years to combine Oracle and PeopleSoft business software products in a challenge to market leader SAP AG , Oracle Chief Executive Larry Ellison said on Tuesday.