Oracle starts marketing drive on database upgrade
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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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Clarifying its application strategy, Oracle said it plans to release a new application suite that will serve as a migration point for customers on all three of its application platforms.
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InfoWorld - Oracle is making a number of moves to improve access management and other security features for its users.
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InfoWorld - Sybase Tuesday launched its strike in the cluster-database market, releasing Adaptive Server Enterprise Cluster Edition to compete with the likes of Oracle's Real Application Clusters.
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The company ships its first database update in more than four years. Was it worth the wait?
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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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Oracle  will release 46 patches on Tuesday for products including its Oracle Database 10g, Application Server and E-Business Suite.
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Oracle logged major gains in new license revenue for applications, which rose by 63%, and for database and middleware products, which saw a 28% increase.
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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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Recognizing the increasing importance of mobility in the enterprise, Oracle (Nasdaq: ORCL) has unveiled a database product that promises to extend the company's grid computing platform to workers on the move.
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Oracle Corp. released several high-risk vulnerabilities reported last month in its database software and other products, and urged customers to download and install them.
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Open-source database to jump from beta testing to production within three months.
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(InfoWorld) - While Wednesday markedÂ the official unveiling of Oracle's 11g databaseÂ and a look at its new features, pricing and availability information was pretty thin on the ground. All the vendor would confirm is that the Linux version of 11g will ship this quarter, probably in August. "It's our intention to do a pricing announcement closer to the release date," said Chuck Rozwat, executive vice president ofÂ server technologies at Oracle. "It's just a matter of weeks before we make that announcement." He was speaking during a question-and-answer session following a more than two-hour 11g launch event in New York. Oracle wouldn't comment on when 11g would be available for the other operating systems the database will support, including Microsoft's Windows. What also remained unclear was which of the 400 features on display would end up being part of 11g and,Â thus, free to customers upgrading from previous versions of the database and which functionality will Oracle charge users for as additional options for 11g. Rozwat said he couldn't make that call on Wednesday, but that the information would also be forthcoming next month. Earlier during the launch event, Oracle president Charles Phillips tried to set the 11g release in context. Oracle's currently celebrating its 30th year in business since beginning life as Software Development Laboratories, later Relational Software, a startup working on building a relational database. Since that time, Oracle has expanded, often through acquisition, into providing a wide range of other software, notably middleware and back-office applications. Databases remain an important source of revenue for the vendor andÂ provide a 275,000-strong customer base into which it can try to sell its other products. The name "Oracle" originally came from the code name for a project the startup was working on for the CIA, said Phillips, a comparatively recent addition to the company, who joined Oracle in 2003. He recalled an anecdote he'd been told by Larry Ellison, Oracle's co-founder and CEO. The startup had expanded to two offices but had no way to run cabling for its servers between the two rooms. It appeared an intractable problem, but Ellison picked up a hammer and banged a hole in the wall, resolving the issue. "That's why we're Oracle today, and he still carries that hammer around," Phillips quipped. Customers' data needs are highly diverse, and Oracle's trying to cater to all of those different requirements, Phillips said. He drew a comparison with modes of transport. Some users are riding tricycles while others are flying first class on a Boeing 747 jet, he said, so running the gamut from a basic need to store and access data up to highly sophisticated requirements around database security, management, storage, and compliance issues. All customers are struggling with an explosion in the amount of data their IT systems have to handle and an increase in the number of people wanting to access that data more frequently, Phillips said. For some time customers have been requesting the ability to apply patches to Oracle's database while it is still up and running, and that's now available in 11g, Phillips said. "They don't want to stop what they're doing and take the database down," he added. It took Oracle several years to develop that functionality, Phillips noted. IT users are also being pressured to do more with less resources, so 11g includes advanced compression and partitioning capabilities so that customers can choose where they store their data and can opt to put less accessed, older information on cheaper storage devices, he added.
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Under threat of hostile takeover, PeopleSoft offers freebies to customers that migrate to latest software release
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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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Oracle is expected to unveil updates to its software's content management and business intelligence functions, as well as other enhancements at next week's Oracle OpenWorld user event.
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Oracle unveiled an information lifecycle management tool today for users of its database.