Oracle watched for further applications growth
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Oracle Corp.  posts  quarterly results next week with investors watching for signs  of further strength in its business applications software as it  chases industry leader SAP AG .
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The software company's investments are showing some promise.
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Oracle is expected to jump into the emerging market for content management software later this year. The database giant will announce a new product code-named Tsunami at its Oracle OpenWorld conference in
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The database provider continues to buy its growth.
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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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(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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Executive sees opportunities despite recent challenges to its position from Microsoft and Oracle.
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In the first major release of its flagship product in several years, Oracle unveiled 11g on Wednesday. The Redwood Shores, California-based company said that the new database software contains more than 400 features for improving database clustering, data center automation, and workload management.
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Oracle Corp.  promised to take  the Linux software world by storm last October, but the major  expansion by one of the world's largest software companies so  far has failed to show momentum.
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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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InfoWorld - Oracle Corp.&#39;s launch of new releases of its five application families was a surprisingly sober affair, designed to restate the vendor&#39;s May 2006 pledge to continue to enhance all of the software products.
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When Oracle executives in JanuaryÂ publicly described the vendor's Fusion projectÂ to create a new suite of enterprise applications as halfway done, they were referring to the completion of the smaller middleware piece of the massive multibillion dollar project, according to the man in charge of that undertaking. Much work remains to be done on the larger applications piece of Fusion.
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Oracle, the world's second largest software producer, saw profits jump 16% to $509m (Â£283m) in the first half of the year on strong sales of its core database products.
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(InfoWorld) - With Web 2.0, SaaS (software as a service), and open source grabbing all of the headlines, launches of enterprise infrastructure software that were once major IT events now sometimes seem like forgotten affairs. Certainly the new millennium marked a downturn in interest for traditional, monolithic back-end software. Yet, boosted by virtualization, there appears to be plenty of life in old-school offerings. According to its 2007 global IT market forecast, IDC predicts that spending on infrastructure software will grow 9 percent this year, faster than any other software category. In this 'diminished' environment, Oracle's pending release of its upgraded 11g database may not grab the imagination of the technorati, but it remains significant to a vastly underestimated group of IT users. The global database market grew 14.2 percent last year to total $15.2 billion, according to Gartner. Oracle, which released its last major database upgrade, 10g, four years ago, already holds almost half the market. That's more than double the share of second-place IBM. The official launch of 11g is set for next Wednesday, July 11, in a New York City ceremony overseen by Oracle President Charles Philips. Publicly, Oracle has for the most part avoided specifics, saying that 11g will offer improvements in high availability, performance, scalability, and manageability. Tidbits it has revealed include free migration and management tools that will let administrators oversee non-Oracle databases at the same time they manage their Oracle ones. Oracle has also said that 11g will have new compression technology that could potentially reduce customers' storage demands by two-thirds, the ability to store unstructured data faster than traditional file systems, and better partitioning. Fleshing out the details Web accounts by beta testers and others are now confirming those reports. According to what appears to be a presentation by Oracle Vice President of Technology Mark Townsend, many of the new features are in the area of "change assurance." These help companies save money and testing time when migrating to new hardware or making configuration changes. For instance, features like database replay and SQL replay let DBAs view how changes in the database or SQL code affect performance. 11g will also let users set up test environments using snapshot standbys and help automate rolling database upgrades. Other features include online table and index redefinition, support for online hot patching and continuous availability of online applications even when they are in the midst of an upgrade, and automatic diagnostic workflow to fix problems faster. In the area of information lifecycle management, 11g will allow DBAs for the first time to partition by interval, ref, or virtual column. It also adds a new composite way to partition. According to an article by Jim Czuprynski, an Oracle senior instructor at Fujitsu Consulting who beta-tested 11g, some of the best new features include in-memory caches for retaining widely used, slow-changing data; better diagnosis and repair features; and enhancements to Oracle's flashback tools for data recovery. Longtime Oracle watcher Donald Burleson notes in his list of 11g features support for schema-based Document Type Definitions for describing the internal structure of XML documents as well as more scalable Java for faster performance. On security, an area for which Oracle has been criticized of late, Burleson says 11g will include improvements such as case-sensitive passwords and an inviolable audit vault that protects against insider threats. Iggy Fernandez, editor of the NoCOUG Journal, the official newsletter for the Northern California Oracle Users Group, praises what he says is 11g's unheralded "learning optimizer" feature. "When relational databases replaced hierarchical and network databases in the 1980s, the promise was that programmers would no longer need to optimize their queries by hand," said Fernandez. While no database has "completely realized" that vision, 11g, says Fernandez, is a "great step -- the query optimizer simply learns from its mistakes -- in fact, it can stop a query that is already in progress and try a different approach!" "Performance tuning is the biggest component of database administration effort today, and the learning optimizer could produce tremendous labor savings if it works as advertised," Fernandez said. But will users upgrade? With 11g, will Oracle be able to extend its lead over IBM -- whose release of DB2 9 "Viper" last summer did not lead to mass early uptake, according to the Gartner figures -- by convincing users to rush and upgrade? Kevin Closson, chief software architect for clustering vendor Polyserve, says yes, based on how stable this release already is known to be. "From everything I've seen in this release, there should be no technical reasons holding back customers' adoption," Closson wrote in his blog. But Amy Stuemky, database administrator for travel tour operator Globus, says her organization is just starting to move its 50 Oracle databases to 10g. "Our philosophy with Oracle is that it is too bleeding-edge with any first release," Stuemky said. And the company is only moving now because Oracle's regular support, called Premier Support, is about to end. "Oracle almost pushes you [to upgrade] by desupporting its stuff," she said. Fernandez agrees that expecting users to rush to 11g any faster than they did with prior versions would be unrealistic. "There is just too much effort involved in testing and upgrading critical business systems and new releases can be plagued with software bugs," he wrote. "Speaking for myself, I would prefer Oracle to fix the bugs that still remain in the previous version instead of give us a feature-packed new version!" Oracle will go slow with one aspect of 11g. For its free Express Edition aimed at students and developers, which Oracle debuted in 2005, the company won't release an upgrade until the more stable 11g R2 comes out, according to an Austrian developer, Slavojub Krishan, who cited conversations with Oracle executives at a recent developer conference.
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The economy may be sputtering, but Oracle Corp. is still hitting on all cylinders. Brushing aside worries about a possible slowdown in the technology sector, Oracle soared well beyond analyst expectations in its fiscal second quarter and raised hopes for a strong start in 2008 with an upbeat forecast.
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It&#39;s been a good year for Oracle (Nasdaq: ORCL) CEO Larry Ellison. In all, Oracle posted breathtaking earnings gains, beat a Justice Department lawsuit, forced the firing of a key rival, and
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Oracle president Charles Phillips has issued a statement assuring PeopleSoft customers -- again -- that Oracle intends to continue supporting PeopleSoft products once its acquisition is complete.