Oracle's FSI Product Roadmap

See Oracle's Product Roadmap for banking, insurance and capital markets industry solutions here.

Oracle releases single-ID products

December 07, 2006 (TechWorld.com) Oracle Corp. has launched a set of products designed to work across all its identity management software, which it says will help companies simplify and improve security.

Along with rivals such as CA Inc., IBM and Hewlett-Packard Co., Oracle sells identity management systems, which are becoming ever more important in an age when companies must comply with complex financial accountability regulations, and a market is expected to be worth $4 billion in the next three years.

Oracle Enterprise Single Sign-On Suite works across all Oracle software, including databases, e-business products, and the PeopleSoft and Siebel applications it has acquired, as well as some non-Oracle applications. It works across mainframe, client-server and web-based applications.

The suite is aimed at the financial services, health care, government and telecommunications industries, as well as any organization with legacy applications and compliance requirements, Oracle said. The goal of the suite, as with emerging single sign-on frameworks such as Higgins, is to keep users from having to remember separate passwords and authentication credentials for each system or application.

Password proliferation is considered a major security risk, since users tend to resort to insecure methods to remember their various log-ins -- such as writing them down or using weak passwords.

The suite comprises five parts, a log-on manager, a password-reset tool, an authentication manager, a provisioning gateway and a kiosk manager, Oracle said. Because of heavy demand for Windows desktop password reset capabilities, the company is also making that part of the suite available on its own.

The suite is part of Oracle Identity Management, other components of which include Identity Manager, Access Manager, Virtual Directory, Internet Directory, Identity Federation and Web Services Manager. It is available immediately in the U.K. and elsewhere, and is priced per user.


Original Post.

FLEXCUBE Leads Retail Banking Vendors, Says Forrester

i-flex, a provider of IT solutions, has said that i-flex was among the select companies that Forrester Research invited to participate in its November 2006 Forrester wave report, 'The Forrester Wave: Retail Banking Platforms, Q4 2006'. According to the report, i-flex’s FLEXCUBE scored 4.29 the highest for its current offering out of a possible score of five. Weightages were given to parameters such as functional depth and breadth, multi- channel enablement, platform agility and architecture and development.

i-flex and Financial Services Inc. (FSI) had launched FLEXCUBE as a hosted offering to Community banks in the United States mid November 2006.

FSI, a provider of data processing and item processing services to Community banks for more than 50 years, will now offer FLEXCUBE as a hosted solution.

The companies said the joint offering by claiming flexibility, improved efficiency, enhanced agility, better profitability and enhanced customer service.

"Banks are struggling to meet the concurrent challenges of increasing competition, rapidly changing market requirements, increasing regulatory complexity and the constraints imposed by inflexible legacy systems," said George Thomas, VP Customer fulfilment and Solution Architecture. "The combination of the FLEXCUBE platform and FSI's experience in supporting community banks will help banks in this segment achieve competitive advantage."

On the other hand, contrary to expectations, Oracle's acquisition of 55 per cent stake in i-flex Solutions has not yet translated into significant business growth for the latter. However, i-flex Solutions remains optimistic.

I-flex CEO Deepak Ghaisas, said that he saw strong traction coming from the sales team of Oracle.

Oracle had acquired Citigroup's 42.41 per cent stake in i-flex last year and had subsequently increased its stake through open market purchases. At present, Oracle owns around 55 per cent stake in i-flex and has made an open offer for 20 per cent more at Rs 1,475 per share, which has been delayed.

"Oracle hasn't started showing that impact on the core-banking side of the business. But in the case of Reveleus, Oracle has helped us clinch Wachovia Bank as a customer," he said. Reveleus is i-flex's risk management solutions portfolio.

However, South India based SyndicateBank has implemented Core Banking Solution (CBS) in 1001 branches with FLEXCUBE with IBM as the System Integrator and Implementation Partner.

The FLEXCUBE implementation has helped Syndicate Bank introduce several services to its customers such as 24x7 banking services, multi city operations, online fund transfers, online e-ticketing for railways, online utility bill payment and online payment of excise duty and service tax. The Core Banking implementation has also benefited Syndicate Bank by increasing productivity and reducing manpower, thereby enabling redeployment of man power to functions critical to the bank’s business, I-flex representatives said.

Original Post.

Another presentation on Oracle's offerings for FSI...

http://www.oracle.com/global/bg/news_events/presentations/b_hroch_oracle%20solutions_for_fs.pdf#search=%22oracle%20lease%20management%20%2B%20ppt%22

Link to Oracle FSI Product Strategy Presentation

Link to presentation by Charles Phillips, President of Oracle Corp on Oracle's FSI Product Strategy:

http://www.baft.org/content_folders/84th%20Annual%20Meeting/BAFTv2_phillips_final.ppt

Oracle Announces General Availability of Oracle(R) Identity Management 10g Release 3

Wednesday August 16, 8:00 am ET New Capabilities, Integrated Offering and Support for Heterogeneous Environments Drive More Value for Enterprise IT Infrastructure and Streamline Compliance Requirements REDWOOD SHORES, Calif., Aug. 16 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Oracle (Nasdaq: ORCL - News) today announced the immediate availability of Oracle® Identity Management 10g Release 3. Complete with a robust, comprehensive set of access control, identity administration, provisioning and directory services capabilities, this latest release enables organizations to manage the end-to-end lifecycle of user identities across heterogeneous enterprise resources within and beyond their organizational boundaries, while helping to streamline sustainable compliance policies and controls.

(Photo: NewsCom: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20020718/ORCLLOGO )

Oracle Identity Management 10g Release 3 integrates multiple key software solutions that Oracle has attained through a combination of acquisitions and organic development including Web access management, user provisioning, identity federation and directory services. Built on open-standards, Oracle Identity Management 10g Release 3 is hot-pluggable and interoperates with packaged applications including Oracle E-Business Suite, Oracle's JD Edwards EnterpriseOne, PeopleSoft Enterprise and Siebel applications, and SAP. The new release also offers support for 12 additional platforms, demonstrating Oracle's commitment to heterogeneity.

Each component of Oracle Identity Management 10g Release 3 features updates including enhanced internationalization and localization support for 28 languages. Key updates include:

    -- Oracle Identity Manager (formerly known as Oracle Xellerate Identity
      Provisioning) -- automates the process of provisioning IT resources
      across heterogeneous business processes and managed platforms; is now
      integrated into the Oracle Identity Management framework; features a
      new module for audit and compliance with expanded data capture, an
      attestation framework, improved reporting and comprehensive platform
      support;
   -- Oracle Access Manager (formerly known as Oracle COREid Access and
      Identity) -- provides Web single sign-on, identity administration and
      comprehensive reporting and auditing; now includes advanced password
      management capabilities, new performance enhancements, shared-secret
      enhancements to improve security between software components,
      additional authentication triggers and new third party platform
      certifications;
   -- Oracle Virtual Directory -- enables multiple LDAP directories or
      relational databases to look like a single, unified LDAP store;
      includes new audit and reporting features, and improved
      installation/configuration for use with Oracle Identity Management
      products, IBM Tivoli, and Microsoft Active Directory;
   -- Oracle Internet Directory Services -- an LDAP v3 directory that
      leverages the scalability, high availability and security features of
      Oracle Database; includes enhanced LDAP-based fan-out replication,
      tighter password integration with Active Directory, and OID
      synchronization support for Novell eDirectory and OpenLDAP; offers
      increased manageability capabilities through integration with Oracle
      Enterprise Manager 10g; and
   -- Oracle Identity Federation (formerly known as Oracle COREid
      Federation) -- a stand-alone, simple-to-deploy, fully functional
      federation server features enhanced support for SAML 2.0 and
      WS-Federation.

"Now more than ever, customers are looking for a comprehensive identity management software platform that can be implemented via a single license and supported by a single vendor," said Hasan Rizvi, vice president, Identity Management development at Oracle. "Oracle Identity Management 10g Release 3 provides customers with an identity platform, that increases business agility and helps to reduce costs and to achieve regulatory compliance so that enterprises can get the most from existing and future IT investments."

Organizations Benefit from Oracle Identity Management

Highmark Inc. is the largest health insurance company in Pennsylvania based on membership and is one of the largest health insurers in the United States. Faced with a growing user population and an increasing number of applications to access, the company needed an open, standards-based identity management solution that could scale to meet its changing needs. Highmark selected Oracle Identity Management to manage more than one million external users and 12,000 internal users who access more than 50 applications via IBM WebSphere portal.

"Our existing identity management application was not open or scalable enough to meet the demanding requirements of our heterogeneous IT environment," said Mike Dowling, Identity Management Project Manager, Highmark. "Oracle Access Manager and Oracle Virtual Directory were the most open, integrated and comprehensive offerings that meet our needs. We will leverage Oracle Access Manager to streamline access to our more than 50 applications via WebSphere portal while Oracle Virtual Directory will be used to centralize identities by integrating user information from a SunOne LDAP Server, Microsoft Active Directory and RedHat LDAP."

MphasiS, a global information technology and business process outsourcing (BPO) service provider to global 2000 companies that focuses on the financial services, telecommunications, and healthcare and technology industries, is using the provisioning capabilities of Oracle Identity Management to develop and implement best practices for its contact center.

"With more than 10,000 employees working on customer engagements at any given time, it is important for us to provide top-notch service to our customers, while strengthening security and increasing productivity. To do this, we need a best-in-class, standards-based provisioning solution," said Mitish Chitnavis, group chief security officer, MphasiS. "Oracle Identity Manager was the only offering that met our requirements. We currently use the software to provision and manage user accounts across Microsoft Active Directory and Exchange 2000, BEA WebLogic, Ramco HR and various other enterprise applications in a high-volume contact center. As a result, we have reduced the average lead time from request to fulfillment from 5 days to 15 minutes across 10 different applications."

About Oracle Identity Management

Serving as the security backbone for Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle Identity Management helps customers and partners decrease security threats across diverse IT environments while helping address compliance needs. Oracle Identity Management's support of industry standards such as WS*, XACML, SAML and SPML help enable customers and partners to more easily integrate applications with the framework. The family of best-in-class software includes Oracle Identity Manager, Oracle Access Manager, Oracle Virtual Directory, Oracle Internet Directory, Oracle Enterprise Single Sign-On Suite, Oracle Identity Federation and Oracle Web Services Manager. To learn more, visit http://www.oracle.com/identity .

i-flex to Acquire Mantas for $122.6 Million

August 17, 2006
URL: http://www.globalservicesmedia.com/sections/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleId=192201558

i-flex, an India-based IT solutions provider, catering to the financial-services industry will acquire Mantas, a U.S.-headquartered anti-money laundering and compliance software and services provider, for a cash consideration of $122.6 million.

After the conclusion of the deal, Oracle’s share holding will go up by three percent to more than 55% from the current 52.5%.

Through the acquisition, i-flex will gain access to Mantas’ behavior detection and compliance solution along with the financial-services’ industry expertise.

i-flex is targeting the risk and compliance requirements of financial institutions.

Mantas offers software applications that enable financial institutions to confirm to the global regulatory compliance mandates and ensure loss prevention and revenue generation. Its clientele include ABN Amro, Barclays, Bear Stearns, Citigroup and Merrill Lynch among others.

Mantas employs 150 people, and the deal will be concluded in 60 days.

PeopleSoft CRM Targets Comm & Financial Vertical

Oracle unveiled the latest version of its CRM software this week, the PeopleSoft Enterprise Customer Relationship Management 9. The enhancements come as part of Oracle's "Applications Unlimited" program, adding features aimed at attracting the financial and communications industry sectors.

The company says that the move to Internet Protocol (IP) services and 3G data networks has built a need for communications service providers to be more flexible in how they handle their customer and order management processes. The PeopleSoft offering aims to help lower the cost of service and time to market for new products.

Among the offerings is also support for wireless markets, mobile number portability, and lost or stolen wireless handsets.

Adding to Oracle's core CRM suite and to the financial services capabilities, the release includes sample processes for Financial Account Creation, Lead and Referral Management, as well as Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP) allowing for content currently available within the PeopleSoft portal to be visible by a third party portal.

Some of the PeopleSoft Enterprise CRM 9 enhancements include an actionable 360-degree view of customers with a work list and auto-save of recent searches, an auto- population of commonly typed text using hotkeys, and a bulk service management for order capture, calendaring enhancements, lead import performance improvements, and mobile sales support for Intellisync Mobile Suite (IMS) architecture.

"As with the other product releases within PeopleSoft Enterprise 9, PeopleSoft Enterprise CRM 9 incorporates customers' requests for improved usability," said Oracle Vice President of PeopleSoft Enterprise Application Strategy John Webb. "The release includes standards-based technology to ensure our customers may derive continued value from their technology investments without surrendering the IT agility required to capture new opportunities as they arise."

The new functionalities are intended to improve usability and productivity by streamlining processes through reduced clicks and page transfers. The release is a boon to DePaul University's productivity, says DePaul's CRM Craft Team leader Audrey Bledsoe.

"PeopleSoft CRM 9.0 will alleviate the need for several of the DePaul specific customizations and integration points we've developed in our CRM 8.9 environment. We are looking for ways to decrease maintenance time."

Oracle provided this list of enhancements for integration and reporting:

Expanded Web Services -- 19 new web service enabled transactions with over 70 service operations for easier integration with third party applications and plug into standards-based business processes

Oracle XML Publisher has been integrated specifically with PeopleSoft Enterprise CRM 9 for improved performance for generating documents, scalability; ability to create correspondence letter templates and real-time merge capabilities and preview of correspondence management.

Oracle BPEL Process Manager integrates Oracle BPEL Process Manager for a standards based business process management tool for organizations to quickly and cost effectively deploy new solutions and business processes across heterogeneous systems; and

Oracle Database 10g and Oracle Application Server 10g Certification

Jason Lee Miller
Published: 2006-08-17


http://www.webpronews.com/expertarticles/expertarticles/wpn-62-20060817PeopleSoftCRMTargetsCommFinancial.html

Oracle Malaysia to grow CRM business

22-08-2006: Oracle Malaysia to grow CRM business
By Kevin Tan

Oracle Corporation Malaysia Sdn Bhd will leverage on its parent company's acquisition of Siebel to grow its Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions in the country, its managing director V R Srivatsan said.

Using the domain expertise it acquired from the merger with Siebel, Oracle Malaysia would help companies to transform themselves into "customer-centric" organisations, he told a press briefing in Kuala Lumpur on Aug 22.

Srivatsan said Malaysian companies were already at the "forefront of thinking" with regard to using CRM to improve customer satisfaction and increasing customer base.

"The market is ripe; there is demand for "customer-centric" CRM in Malaysia. Strategically it's important for us," he added.

Among others, it could capitalise on efforts of telecommunications companies such as Telekom Malaysia Bhd to attract more customers as well as the banking consolidation such as the merger between Bank Bumiputra Commerce Bhd and Southern Bank Bhd, he said.

Meanwhile, Oracle CRM Southeast Asia managing director Norbert Kiss said the company would be bringing in more resources such as hiring more sales people in an effort to drive its CRM business in Malaysia.

"We are actively engaging with customers in Malaysia across key industries - government, financial services, telco and maunfacturing - and also in the high-growth mid-market segment, to help them build new strategies and opportunities for growth and profitability," he added.

According to Frost & Sullivan, the CRM market in Malaysia is expected to expand at a cummulative annual growth rate of 14.4% from 2004 to 2011, generating a market revenue of US$22.2 million (about RM80 million) in 2011.

“Adhering to Basel II norms is on the agenda of all major banks”

“Adhering to Basel II norms is on the agenda of all major banks”

S Ramakrishnan, Chief Executive Officer, Reveleus (an i-flex company), on the importance of Basel II and other regulations that will affect the adoption of IT in the banking and the financial sector.

Oracle Says Application Integration Efforts Are On Track

By Rick Whiting and Laurie Sullivan
InformationWeek

Jul 3, 2006 12:00 AM

Two years is a long time to wait for major applications to be integrated. But that's what users of PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, and Siebel software face as they wait for the first fruits of Oracle's next-generation Fusion development project.

So Oracle is scrambling to keep those customers from defecting. Oracle president Charles Phillips last week said the Oracle-Siebel integration, called Project Genesis, is on track to be completed in September, and the company last week also began shipping the first components of PeopleSoft Enterprise 9, a major upgrade of the software.

Phillips knows where the money is Photo by Daniel Acker/Bloomberg News

Oracle is battling to retain the customers it gained in the last 18 months through a series of acquisitions. "For big software vendors, most sales will come from the installed base," Phillips said in a teleconference, estimating that Oracle's existing customers account for 85% of its application sales. SAP claims that several hundred customers of those acquired vendors have migrated to SAP products.

But Oracle says its keep-'em-happy efforts are paying off. When the company reported fourth-quarter earnings late last month, application license sales were up 83% from a year earlier, to $641 million. And Siebel's application sales were $81 million in the quarter, nearly double what the company expected.

Oracle also said 2,200 owners of SAP's aging R/3 software had signed on to a program that offers 100% license credit for SAP license fees if they migrate to Oracle applications.

Under Project Genesis, Oracle is building workflow links between Siebel and Oracle E-Business Suite applications. The effort will link Siebel Order to EBS Order, Siebel Opportunity to EBS Quote, and Siebel's CRM On Demand apps to Oracle EBS. The technology, which will be built into Oracle's Fusion middleware, also will link the Oracle Financial Services Applications analysis software with Siebel Business Analytics, Phillips said.

Lifetime Support?

Application integration efforts like Project Genesis are a logical move since all these apps will be around for a while. At the Oracle Application User Group conference in April, Phillips promised that Oracle will maintain, enhance, and support the E-Business Suite and PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, and Siebel applications indefinitely, a change from the 2013 cutoff date it originally planned. Oracle's integration plans "are definitely being well-received by our members," user group president Patricia Dues says. "It makes sense for them to do this so all these applications can easily be integrated and work with each other."

The integration work also is part of a phased approach to moving customers to Fusion once those applications are ready, Forrester Research analyst Ray Wang says. Oracle can only migrate its acquired apps to Fusion Apps when it has standardized master data, business process, and middleware semantics. "Though customers may not be asking for this today, it's necessary for the largest enterprises," he says in an e-mail.

Included in the first PeopleSoft Enterprise 9 applications Oracle is shipping is Learning Management 9.0, which focuses on certification and regulatory compliance support. Other applications, such as PeopleSoft Enterprise Performance Management, will debut in the fall, with PeopleSoft Financial and Human Capital Management due by year's end.

Users of PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, and Siebel software want an easy upgrade to Fusion. Oracle says it has heard the message. Project Genesis will be the first proof.

http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=189900021&subSection=All+Stories

4th Oracle Grid Index Results

With the results of the fourth Oracle Grid Index showing yet another overall rise in Grid adoption, the idea of an IT infrastructure that drives innovation, flexibility and dynamism, while reducing costs and complexity, is clearly fast becoming a reality for many of the world’s most successful organisations.

Grid Computing, combined with a Service Oriented Architecture, creates an optimized infrastructure across the entire enterprise. It delivers reliable, flexible, always available computing, with applications delivered as services dynamically tailored to support the needs of the business.

To assess where your organisation is on the Grid Index journey we have devised ten questions that will enable you to benchmark your company's readiness and highlight where you sit compared to other businesses in your region.

Take the survey today and see how your company measures up on the journey that leads to responsive, business focused IT, that can meet current and as yet unforeseeable business demands.

Click here to start

http://www.oracle-gridindex.com/home.html

Oracle Debuts EDA

Oracle has announced the general availability of its EDA (Event-Driven Architecture) suite, which consists of business activity monitoring (BAM), an enterprise service bus (BUS), an event management server, Oracle Business Rules, and Oracle Enterprise Messaging.

Most of the components are native Oracle technology but Ashish Mohindroo, Senior Product Director of Oracle Fusion Middleware, notes that the BAM product was originally PeopleSoft code. Click here to find out more!

Mohindroo offered Line56 plenty of examples of EDA in action from a business perspective. "If there's a stock transaction delay, instead of waiting for an hourly batch report, the event capture system tells you instantaneously that the system is down, or that the credit report didn't meet the requirements."

EDA thus senses and diagnoses a business event (typically an operational exception like a transaction failure or a failed shipment), but that's only half the story. EDA can only automatically initiate a business process keyed to the event. If a shipment fails, for example, EDA can send instant alerts to all process owners.

EDA's relevance to your business is in direct proportion to the volume of events with which you're faced, and how important it is for you to automate responses to particular events (like exceptions). Mohindroo singles out financial services, telecommunications, retail (think of the vast volume of data created by radio frequency identification), consumer packaged goods, and the public sector as high event-volume environments.

Analyst Ian Charlesworth of Ovum identifies what he considers Oracle EDA's chief strength: "The EDA Suite, like the larger SOA [service-oriented architecture] Suite of which it is part, enjoys extremely good levels of technical integration. It gives organizations the key building blocks they need to 'event-enable' their infrastructure as part of a move towards SOA."

Mohindroo concludes by situating the value of SOA and EDA alike at the heart of business efficiency. "Business is moving towards who can define new business models faster, who can respond faster. EDA allows you to respond faster."

http://www.line56.com/articles/default.asp?ArticleID=7715