Oracle Promises Easier Upgrade to E-Business Software Suite
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Oracle announced the first major upgrade of its business applications in six years, and company officials vowed that migrating won't be as difficult as it was the last time around.
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(InfoWorld) - On Tuesday, Unisys plans to announce an expansion of its relationship with Oracle to move mainframe and Unix deployments over to Linux and SOA. Unisys and Oracle have partnered before, but the new arrangement features joint engineering, sales, and marketing activities to boost system migrations. Featured in the expanded arrangement are specific blueprints that demonstrate how to redeploy applications. For example, the companies have been building a blueprint, or "proof point," on moving from an IBM CICS environment onto Linux running Oracle Fusion middleware and the Oracle 10g database on Unisys ES 7000/one Enterprise Servers. These servers are powered by Intel-based multi-core processors. Also in this particular mix would be Micro Focus MTO (mainframe transaction option) software for CICS compatibility. The blueprints are horizontal and not industry-specific. Critical to the arrangement is use of the Unisys 3D-VE (3D Visible Enterprise) methodology, which features a knowledge-mining and abstraction service. Through the extraction of business rules and policies, users gain a better understanding of their applications. "One of the key areas that's different about our approach compared to some of the others is our story is not just advocating moving the applications over from one platform to another. What we've seen from customers is a desire to understand what the applications do in the first place," said Ali Shadman, Unisys vice president and general manager of open-source solutions, systems, and technology. Through 3D-VE, users can see the impacts of applications changes at the technology and business layers more clearly, Shadman said. The bulk of Unisys's alliance with Oracle will be geared toward moving z/OS and MVS mainframes over Linux. But the company has seen instances of users moving over very large Unix systems, said Shadman. Unisys can move over applications without rewriting code in some instances. Code conversions can be done manually or automatically. There are tools, for example, to convert over Addabas code. Other Oracle products featured in the alliance with Unisys include Oracle applications and the Oracle Enterprise Manager tool for application management as well as Oracle On-Demand outsourcing services.
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Oracle Corp.  launched a  marketing effort on Wednesday to promote an upgrade to its  database software, its latest effort to maintain a market lead  against IBM  and Microsoft Corp.
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Oracle Corp. continued to release pieces of its PeopleSoft Enterprise 9 applications suite, turning its attentions to performance management. The move is part of Oracle's most substantial revamp of the suite since acquiring PeopleSoft in January 2005.
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Oracle Corp. plans to release the latest version of its CRM (customer relationship management) applications within the next two months, as part of an ongoing update of its E-Business Suite.
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Oracle plans to fix dozens of flaws in its software products next Tuesday, including critical bugs in the company&#39;s database, e-business suite, and application server.In its first security update of 2008, Oracle will ship 27 security fixes, some of which will affect several products. Oracle outlined some details of the upcoming patches in a pre-release announcement posted to the company&#39;s Web site Thursday afternoon.Oracle releases security patches every three months, a process known as the Critical Patch Update (CPU). January&#39;s bug-fix total is low by Oracle&#39;s standards. In October, the company&#160;patched 51 vulnerabilities.As usual, the company&#39;s database will be a major focus of the CPU. Oracle plans to ship eight security fixes for the Oracle Database, addressing bugs in the software&#39;s advanced queuing, core RDBMS (relational database management system), Oracle Agent, Oracle Spatial, and XML (Extensible Markup Language) database software.None of the database vulnerabilities can be exploited over a network without the attacker first obtaining a username and password for the database.Oracle&#39;s next most-patched product will be the E-Business Suite, which will receive seven updates, three of which are for bugs that can be remotely exploited by attackers who do not have usernames or passwords for the system.The Oracle Application Server will get six bug-fixes, addressing flaws in components such as the product&#39;s BPEL (Business Process Execution Language), Worklist Application, Oracle Forms, and Oracle Internet Directory software.Finally, Oracle is planning four updates for its PeopleSoft and JD Edwards products, as well as one fix each for Oracle Enterprise Manager and the Oracle Collaboration Suite.
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JasperSoft&#39;s next upgrade of its open-source business intelligence suite, due out Nov. 1, will improve the ability for users to create their own customized reports.
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SAN FRANCISCO -- Oracle at the OpenWorld conference here on Tuesday is making several product rollouts, including a new version of its database and grid computing enhancements.
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The business software maker hopes to prod rival Oracle into raising its current bid by $1.5 billion.
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(InfoWorld) - OracleÂ is hoping thatÂ new security, testing, and management featuresÂ offered in Oracle Database 11g, will lead users to migrate to the major release of the vendor's database sooner rather than later. Unveiled Wednesday in an event in New York, 11g is Oracle's successor to the 10g releases 1 and 2 of its database. The vendor shipped the first release of 10g in February 2004. The company has worked closely with customers over the course of a lengthy beta testing program, which began in September, and some of those users noted that it had been hard to pin Oracle down on a launch date for 11g. The vendor onlyÂ publicly committed to July 11Â as the database's coming-out party just over a month ago. "Oracle was a little bit more cautious, wanting to make sure they got the product right," said Ari Kaplan, president of the Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUG), which was heavily involved in the 11g beta testing program. IOUG members are bullish on their plans to move to the new database. A recent poll of around 400 of them indicated that 35 percent of respondents planned to upgrade to 11g within a year of its release, with an additional 53 percent looking to move to the new database in the next few years, according to Kaplan. This is an improvement on previous surveys about earlier Oracle releases, where the same percentage looked to migrate within the first 18 months following a new version of the database. Kaplan was particularly interested in the improved integration of 11g with Oracle's Audit Vault and Database Vault software. "There's a key flaw with all databases," he said. "If they're smart, a DBA [database administrator] can modify data and cover their tracks" since DBAs tend to have unlimited access to databases. The technologies in Oracle's vaulting software make that impossible since every action a DBA executes effectively "goes into a lockbox that they are powerless to modify," Kaplan added. Wachovia hopes to complete its internal process to certify 11g for use within the organization by the end of the year and then to have its migration efforts well under way in 2008, according to Ed Mulheren, senior database administrator at the financial services company. He said that the improved security features in 11g will help Wachovia meet the ever-increasing regulatory demands in the financial services market. Mulheren also welcomes smaller additions like 11g's support of case-sensitive passwords, which brings security for the Oracle database more in line with Wachovia's security policies for its Windows desktops. It also means that users have to remember fewer passwords, he said. Arup Nanda, senior director of database engineering and architecture at Starwood Hotels and Resorts Worldwide, expects his organization will move to 11g in 2008. The hotel chain runs its main business on the HP-UX operating system on top of Itanium-powered computers and the 11g beta wasn't available on that platform. "So, we will have to settle for the production release later this year and then at least six months of testing after that," he wrote in an e-mail comment. Starwood uses Oracle's database for almost all of its business processes including reservations, check-in and out processes and guest loyalty programs. He singles out the Database Replay and SQL Performance Analyzer features as giving customers "the biggest bang for the buck." Other useful functionalities include the Transparent Tablespace Encryption, Virtual Columns and Partitioning enhancements, Nanda added. There are several features he would've liked to see in 11g including the ability to make a tablespace read only when there are active transactions in the database on different tablespaces. Mike Amble, senior vice president of operations and engineering at Fidelity National Information Services Inc., sees the new Fast Files feature as particularly useful to his organization. The company provides technologies to financial institutions and handles mortgage loan processing. "We tend to deal with a lot of odd forms of information," he said. For instance, when a house is sold, all the documents related to the sale including appraisals and title documents are sent back to the mortgage company in paper form and then scanned and stored. Fast Files will allow users to store large objects like images in the 11g database as fast as storing such unstructured information in traditional file systems. Like other beta testers, Amble also welcomes Real Application Testing, the ability for customers to effectively record a segment of their database operations and then use and replay that recording as a testing environment instead of having to spend months creating a testbed. Amble hopes to migrate his organization over to 11g in 2008. "In the beta testing, we've not found a lot of issues, it should be a very easy transition," he said. One area where he'd like to see Oracle become more open is in enabling the management of multiple encryption tools, both Oracle and third-party software. Andy Mendelsohn, senior vice president of database server technologies at Oracle, estimated that more than 1,500 developers and technicians have worked on 11g. The company engaged in a "huge amount of testing," he said, running the beta software on Oracle's server farm of more than 2,000 processors. The company already has a parallel development project under way to work on 11g release 2. One area not mentioned in the listing of 11g's new features is grid computing, that's what the "g" in both 10g and 11g stands for. "We're doing a lot of work in grid technologies for the next release, which will make grid infrastructure even easier to adopt," Mendelsohn said. Mendelsohn also confirmed earlier reports that Oracle won't be rushing to bring out an 11g update for its free Express Edition (XE) database. The new version will likely come with the release of 11g release 2. According to Gartner Inc.'s latest figures released in June, Oracle was the worldwide market leader in the relational database management system market with a 47.1 percent share, trailed by rivals IBMÂ in second place with 21.1 percent of the market and Microsoft in third position with a 17.4 percent share. Back in April, fellow analyst IDC's initial 2006 figures painted much the same picture. "We don't really worry about the competition," said Charles Phillips, Oracle's president. "We have such a lead." Oracle's challenge is how fast it can meet its customers' needs, he added. He dismissed IBM as deriving 90 percent of their database revenue from mainframe and Microsoft as being "regulated to Windows." Oracle offers its database on a number of operating systems, including Linux. Â
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Customers will be able to get their hands on the delayed version of Oracle Corp.'s E-Business Suite 11i.10 within 60 days, the Redwood Shores, California, company announced Monday, at the opening day of its OpenWorld conference in London.
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This fourth priority&#39;s main focus has been improving or obtaining CRM and ERP software for the past year and a half. Oracle has begun selling business applications software to small companies in conjunction
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Application migration specialist ArtinSoft is planning tools to smooth customers&#39; transition from Oracle to Microsoft Corp&#39;s SQL Server.
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InfoWorld - Taking a page from major enterprise software providers like Oracle and SAP, Microsoft announced this week Business Ready Customer Care, an initiative that includes major enhancements to its maintenance and support program for Microsoft Dynamics, ERP and CRM, applications.
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Oracle wants to retain as many one-time JD Edwards developers as possible so that it can absorb the best of those products&#39; capabilities in forthcoming versions of Oracle&#39;s E-Business Suite.
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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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Software giant says the final version will be available next year.