Sunday, June 19, 2005

Presentations on Oracle's Support & Product Strategies for eBusiness Suite, Peoplesoft & JD Edwards

Oracle-Peoplesoft-JD Edwards Support Strategy, April 2005

Oracle-Peoplesoft-JD Edwards Application Strategy, April 2005



Sunday, June 12, 2005

Time Is Now for Banks to Rethink Payment Strategies

For banks to realize new revenue streams as payment transactions evolve, they need to redefine their value proposition to existing and prospective customers. Panelists here at Oracle Corp.'s OpenWorld session titled "Fueling Your Payments Revenue with High Octane Information" said banks must go beyond managing the movement of money and consider managing the information embedded in the payments that come in over multiple payment networks.

Preparation for implementing the Check Clearing Act for the 21st Century (Check 21) has prompted many banks to invest in IT. Michael Noble, executive vice president of bank operations at Wells Fargo Bank, said that although there hasn't been a lot of noise surrounding the implementation of Check 21 so far, he expects that to change in 2005. "We have to defend our franchise," Noble said. "There are lots of profits to be had in handling payments of various types."

Is Check 21 a door to mass fraud? Find out here.

One challenge banks are dealing with, Noble said, is the gradual phasing out of checks as a way to make payments. "Banks have been predicting the death of checks since the 1960s, but now we see evidence that they really are going away," he said. "The paper volume of transactions is dropping significantly, while the total payment volume is increasing."

Noble estimated that there were 42.5 billion checks processed in 2000, which is dropping to approximately 37.9 billion in 2004. By 2007, he expects checks to drop to 31.1 billion. At the same time, the number of electronic payments is growing—from 30.7 billion in 2000 to 45.1 billion in 2004 to an estimated 60 billion in 2007. Losses in paper check volume are being more than made up by electronic transactions.

The shift to electronic transactions is changing how banks process payments. They are moving away from the current hub-and-spoke arrangements, necessary when moving physical checks from bank to bank, to a more distributed mode of processing. "We're capturing payments on the desktop rather than running paper checks through mainframes," Noble said. "It's a sea change in the banking industry."

William Randle, CEO of Synoran, a software and services firm that offers Web service technology to deliver payment information across the enterprise, said the next generation of payment processing will go much deeper than Check 21 requires. "The opportunity goes well beyond checks," said Randle, "It's about image capture and transfer. It's an opportunity brought on by legislation that can go much further."

Randle cited the $490 billion spent on IT across global financial services firms, and estimated that only 27 percent of that expenditure went toward new development in 2001. Operations and maintenance gobbled up 63 percent, while 10 percent was spent enhancing existing technology. Banks need to move from hard-wired payment processing to distributed processing modes, and they need to adopt strategic IT models that bring them a competitive advantage, Randle said. He strongly recommends that financial institutions rethink their IT spending to support the rapid pace of business change. "Business agility and time-to-market are more important than cost considerations," he said. "An optimal payment strategy can generate additional revenue."

Next Page: Knocking down the silos.

Randle sees a broad and bold future for financial services firms, once they make IT a competitive advantage rather than merely a commodity. He said banks have a motivation to consolidate globally now, with risk as a driver to enterprise systems. The first thing banks need to do is change from a silo-based system to improve security and to streamline processes. "Banks are notorious for cannibalizing their own payment processes," Randle said. "They must understand total costs and revenues rather than treating each payment type separately."

Gary Cawthorne, vice president and managing partner for Unisys Corp., said banking IT is currently organized into silos around the various payment systems they support. A bank might support wire transfers, remittance and lock boxes, credit cards, ACH, and the traditional paper checks. These information silos create redundancies in supporting applications, modes of reconciliation, customer service, sales channels, management, and technology and integration. Cawthorne cited the example of a UK-based bank that he saw had 403 different payment systems—and a lot of costly redundancy. These redundancies provide little value to customers and generate no revenue.

"We believe image transfer is a catalyst to begin implementing a payments architecture," Cawthorne said. Through this architecture, a bank can consolidate metrics from payments into a data mart, complete with business analytics, he said. Consolidation of payment types can provide improved research, fraud detection and regulatory reporting. It can also allow a bank to handle domestic and international account transfers, which is becoming an issue in Europe with cross-border payments.

Cawthorne estimated that payments provide banks with 35 percent of their revenues, so it's important to understand the profitability of the various payment types. "How can a bank get a grip on profitability if the payments are buried within functional silos?" he asked. "We're moving to an age where it's all about the information, not just the payment." Cawthorne believes that image quality and usability should be high on a bank's priority list.

Peter Winner, Oracle's director of financial services, said payments are no longer about moving money, but about the information associated with the payment. "The industry must capture this information and move it across the enterprise," Winner said. The more a financial institution knows about a particular transaction, the more it can predict that client's behavior. "Technology improvements can make end-to-end integration possible," Winner asserted.

Winner recommended that banks consolidate on a customer hub approach to take a leadership position in financial services. He envisions grid software that balances servers, which are built on open systems. A data hub can create standard business definitions, and with a shift of the business focus to customers and their behaviors, banks can analyze buying habits and anticipate customer needs. For example, a customer who is seen making expenditures on auto repair can be presented with the possibility of an auto loan—to replace the junker that is costing so much money on repairs.

"Check 21 will have a profound effect on how we look at data," Winner said. "Banks risk losing control of their payments business without making changes in their IT infrastructure."

(From an article by Theresa W Carey in eWeek.com dated Dec 7, 2004)

Oracle Gets Zippy with Financial Services

By Lisa Vaas


Oracle's acquisition of TimesTen is a response to growing hunger for low- or no-latency data movement, coming from industries' growing hunger for fast movement of big chunks of data.

What does Oracle's intent to purchase zippy-quick TimesTen Inc., with its real-time, in-memory database technology, mean to you?

Plenty, if you're in the financial services industry, if you're looking for real-time access to data for logistics or high-speed transaction support, or if you happen to be the DBMS vendor that was once king of the financials—aka Sybase Inc.

First, a look at what Oracle's acquisition says about the push for real-time data. Basically, it reflects the direction in which all the database companies are either heading or will be soon: the ability to provide real-time access to data, whether for BI (business intelligence) or high-speed transaction support.

This is motivated by a number of things. One source is the fire hose of information being spewed from RFID (radio frequency identification) technology.

"One of the things people talk about as a driver in, let's say, inventory management, is the whole RFID thing, and the idea that you'll be able to track not just palettes as they come into the warehouse, but also item by item, and you'll be able to capture that information so you'll know where any item is at any point in time, and you can use this information to make highly intelligent, highly precise decisions about when to send things from, say, a regional warehouse to a store, or when to reorder, at a much more fine-grained level," said Carl Olofson, noted database expert and an analyst with IDC.

To do that, you're dealing with a blizzard of data. Other usages that would require high-speed data access include logistics: the movement of objects through a delivery system. With concerns over soaring gas prices, for example, the optimization of fleets has exploded in importance. With today's gas prices, you just don't want to send half-empty trucks.

And then there's the king of them all: financial services. According to Bob Iati, a partner with The Tabb Group, the past 18 months have seen a focus on volumes of data, data capacities and, probably most importantly, the ability to move data with no or low latency.

The driver in financial services has been, first and foremost, the advance and penetration of advanced electronic trading systems, Iati said. "There's been considerable take-up in the last 18 months in program trading—black-box trading, generically, where computers are doing more trading than ever before," he said. "The more that technology and programs are relied upon to find and execute on opportunities, the faster the market moves. That has logically turned the focus to data."

To read more go to:

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1826596,00.asp

Saturday, June 11, 2005

Oracle Acquisition Drive Continues

by Demir Barlas, Line56
Friday, June 10, 2005

Oracle's buying spree -- which began with PeopleSoft, continued with Retek, and most recently snapped up Oblix -- continues. This time Oracle has acquired TimesTen, a provider of high-speed data management technology, for an undisclosed sum.

TimesTen works best in environments that require data to be pulled from databases (in the case of many TimesTen customers, Oracle databases) in as close to real time as possible. That could be of value in call centers, stock trading systems, real-time billing of any kind, and any other environment in which, as TimesTen CEO Jim Groff once told Line56, a company wants to "avoid those 20-second pauses and holds with customers."

The most obvious demand is in telecommunications and financial services (always a pioneer for any e-business technology anchored in real-time), and those are the verticals Oracle will initially target. Existing joint customers will see a particularly valuable synergy, according to Andrew Mendelsohn, SVP of Oracle Database Server Technologies, "with TimesTen providing in-memory caching and Oracle providing the enterprise database infrastructure."

Call it part of Oracle's drive to own more parts of the middleware puzzle, which is part of the company's larger quest to dominate middleware (against the likes of IBM, BEA, and Microsoft) and applications (against SAP, its only frontrunner in that particular race) alike.

http://www.line56.com/articles/default.asp?ArticleID=6633

Oracle acquires TimesTen for real-time database

Oracle acquires TimesTen for real-time database
10th June 2005
By Timothy Prickett Morgan
Database maker Oracle yesterday announced that it has acquired privately held TimesTen, a database specialist that has carved out a niche for itself selling real-time, in-memory databases. Oracle did not disclose the financial details of the acquisition.

TimesTen was founded in 1996 by Marie-Anne Neimat, who was a researcher at HP Labs who managed various memory management projects for Hewlett-Packard and who worked at two other startups before founding TimesTen.

The company, which is based in Mountain View, California, has 90 employees and James Groff, the company's CEO, said in a conference call with Wall Street analysts on Thursday morning that TimesTen is growing and profitable, but declined to give any specifics.

Andrew Mendelsohn, senior vice president of Oracle's database server technologies unit, said that Oracle intended to offer employment to most of the employees at TimesTen and that he expected the deal to close by the end of July.

The name TimesTen reflects what it does: boost the performance of database-dependent applications by putting real-time databases that run in memory in the application layer of multi-tiered applications where talking all the way back to the back-end databases--such as those provided by Oracle on Unix, Windows, and other systems--would take too long and impede performance or, in some cases, not be possible because the real-time data needs of the application.

While Oracle, DB2, Sybase, SQL Server, and other relational databases can hold large volumes of data, they are not necessarily very fast at chewing through this data, particularly when they amass hundreds of gigabytes to tens of terabytes of information. In telephone networks, financial trading systems, or military applications, certain systems need much faster access to a key subset of information--perhaps only a 2 to 5 gigabyte subset of data to open up a cell phone call, initiate a stock trade, or acquire fire a weapon.

While such database caching sounds simple, it is fairly complex, which is why Oracle, which already has many of the 1,500 end user customers who buy TimesTen's products in common, hasn't created the products itself. In addition to the database caching software, called Times/Ten/Cache (which comes in a flavor just for Oracle databases), the company has also created its own in-memory relational database management system, called TimesTen/DataServer, and a real-time transaction processing system, called TimesTen/Transact. These will also be useful to Oracle as it beefs up the distributed computing capabilities of its database, application server, and applications.

Now that Oracle has acquired TimesTen, Mendelsohn said that Oracle could even more tightly integrate its eponymous databases and application development tools with the TimesTen products, which include a special real-time database cache for Oracle databases. Gross says that more than half of the TimesTen installed base is using Oracle databases on their backend systems, which is why it has not created database caches for DB2, Sybase, or SQL Server databases.

But Mendelsohn didn't preclude this from happening, pointing out that Oracle's application server supports databases from other vendors, and that if the market started demanding tighter integration with other databases, Oracle would consider supplying it.

But clearly the intent is to use TimesTen to muscle in on more business with embedded system suppliers, such as those who make telecom equipment, military systems, or any real-time systems where, as Groff put it, "milliseconds matter."

TimesTen is seeing an uptick in the financial services markets, where hot-shot programmers have typically created their own in-memory databases to front-end their back-end databases to speed up transactions, and now they just want to buy something from a company like Oracle and not build it themselves. Sybase has a strong installed base among telecom and financial services companies, and Oracle needs some ammunition to attack that base.

TimesTen had some needs, too, including a 6,000-person strong, global support organization. "I have been asked many, many times, 'Why doesn't Oracle just buy you?'" said Groff. "Well, now they have." And having done it, TimesTen now can attack the market with Oracle's money and sales force, and in a way that a company with only 90 employees could never do. Which is probably a big reason why TimesTen agreed to be acquired.

http://www.cbronline.com/article_news.asp?guid=E1803253-1D09-4F1D-80D5-C00A38444848

Wednesday, June 08, 2005

Noetix Presentation Sessions at the OAUG Connection Point at Grapevine (near Dallas, Texas)

WIN BIG at OAUG Connection Point!


Join Noetix as they host "Gambling in the Wild West" during the opening night reception at OAUG Connection Point on Monday, June 13th. Try your hand at blackjack, play a game of Texas Hold 'em, or pull the slot handle to win a number of great prizes including poker sets, t-shirts, and leather covered flasks.

Discover why more than 1,200 customers worldwide use Noetix's proven technology, empowering users to quickly create the ad hoc operational reports and dashboards needed to make critical and timely business decisions. For a complete demonstration visit Booth #1300.

Special Presentation:

Dashboard Development and Deployment – A Methodology for Success
Wednesday, June 15th
10:30 – 11:30am
Presented by: Daryl Orts / Noetix Corporation

Jump On Board the Trinity Oracle Express – A Case Study in Data Access
Wednesday, June 16th
9:45 – 10:45am
Presented by: David Akina / Trinity Industries

Learn how the Noetix solution can accelerate report development for your Oracle Applications. For more information please visit our Web site.

FIN-SIG meeting at the OAUG Connection Point at Grapevine, Texas (June 13, 2005)

The proposed agenda for the meeting is as follows:

· Introductions

· Discussion on Current FIN-SIG Charter: To bridge the gap between the Oracle Applications (E-Business Suite) and the business requirements of member customers in the Banking, Credit cards, Mortgage, Insurance, and Capital Market companies, collectively referred to as the Financial Services Industry.

· Solicit nominations for office bearers: We have openings for the following positions: Treasurer, Secretary, Newsletter Editor, Meetings Chairperson. This is your opportunity to participate in the SIG and help fellow users like you actively so please do nominate yourself or a friend who you think can contribute.

· Discussions on FIN-SIG Priorities for the year, frequency of conference calls

· Decide feasibility of a dedicated off-site meeting in 2005.

· OAUG Enhancements Request System

· Presentation: Oracle in the Financial Services Industry - Oracle Corp.

· Presentation: Customer case study: Implementing a Reporting Solution in a leading Financial Services Institution - Noetix

· Presentation: Customer case study :Implementing Oracle Lease Management at a leading Financial Services Institution - Gecis Software Solutions

Location: Grapevine 2/3

Date: June 13th, 2005

Time: 2:15 – 4:30 pm

OAUG Connection Point, Grapevine, TX

Oracle Featured Speakers

Texas Big - OAUG Connection Point®

Demonstrating the continued collaboration and partnership between the user community and Oracle Corporation, Oracle will be on hand at OAUG Connection Point® 2005 to provide direction and strategies to help you improve processes and manage your most critical information assets.

You won’t want to miss the following Oracle featured speakers:

Monday, June 13, 2005
4:45 p.m. - 5:45 p.m. General Session
John Wookey, Oracle Corporation Senior Vice President
Texas Ballroom A,B
Tuesday, June 14, 2005
8:45 a.m. - 9:45 a.m. Oracle Corporation VP Executive Session: Oracle Fusion Applications Platform Updates
Cliff Godwin, Oracle Corporation Senior Vice President, Applications Technology Group
Texas Ballroom A,B
10:00 a.m. - 11:00 a.m. Oracle Corporation VP Executive Session: What’s New in Financials, Procurement and Corporate Performance Management
Steve Miranda, Oracle Corporation Vice President, Financials Application Development
Dallas 5-7
11:15 a.m. - 12:15 p.m. Oracle Corporation VP Executive Session: Oracle E-Business Suite Update: Review of Release 11i.10 and a Preview of Release 12
Steve Miranda, Oracle Corporation Vice President, Financials Application Development
Grapevine B
2:30 p.m. - 3:30 p.m. Oracle Corporation VP Executive Session: Licensing Update
Jacqueline Woods, Oracle Corporation Vice President, Pricing and Licensing Strategy
Grapevine C
2:30 p.m. - 3:30 p.m. Oracle Corporation VP Executive Session: PeopleSoft Enterprise Update
Joel Summers, Oracle Corporation Senior Vice President
Texas Ballroom D
Wednesday, June 15, 2005
11:45 a.m. - 12:45 p.m. Oracle Corporation VP Executive Session: Maximize the Value of Your Support Investment
David Hare, Group Vice President of Support Services
Grapevine C
2:30 p.m. - 3:30 p.m. Oracle Corporation VP Executive Session: J.D. Edwards World Update
John Schiff, Oracle Corporation J.D. Edwards World Group Manager
Texas Ballroom D
3:45 p.m. - 4:45 p.m. Oracle Corporation VP Executive Session: J.D. Edwards EnterpriseOne Update
Lenley Hensarling, Oracle Corporation J.D. Edwards EnterpriseOne Group Manager
Texas Ballroom D
Thursday, June 16, 2005
8:30 a.m. - 9:30 a.m. Oracle Corporation VP Executive Session: Oracle Customer Data Management: Building a Customer Master in a Heterogeneous Environment
Steve Miranda, Oracle Corporation Vice President, Financials Application Development
Alan Adams, Senior Manager, Product Management
San Antonio 4-6

Register Now!

To register or view a complete listing of all Oracle sessions, pre-conference workshops, papers, panels, training sessions, Star Partners, exhibitors and keynote speakers, visit the OAUG Connection Point® 2005 Web site.

We look forward to seeing you in Texas!

Wednesday, June 01, 2005

Oracle Product Information Management Data Hub

Oracle Product Information Management Data Hub (Oracle PIM Data Hub) centralizes all product information from heterogeneous systems, creating a single product repository that can be leveraged across all functional departments. By centrally managing product information companies can reduce costs associated with poor data quality and data governance while improving your overall revenue potential on all products.

Oracle PIM Data Hub, a component of the recently announced Oracle Fusion Middleware brand, is helping customers eliminate product data fragmentation, a problem that often results when companies rely on nonintegrated legacy and best-of-breed applications, participate in a merger or acquisition or extend their business globally.

Meeting Industry Demands

Across industries the PIM Data Hub is helping customers better manage and leverage critical product information necessary for meeting industry regulations and demands. As an example, within the Consumer Goods industries, Oracle PIM Data Hub, combined with Oracle Product Data Synchronization for GDSN and UCCnet Services, is enabling companies to securely deliver product information to UCCnet and via the GDSN, and then to syndicate that data to other trading partners. This out-of-the-box solution is helping customers lower costs and ensure that they share only accurate data with their trading partners.

Oracle PIM Data Hub enables you to:
  • Centralize All Product Information
  • Lower total cost of ownership from having to integrate disparate systems
  • Provide Secure Access and Search Capabilities
  • Improve collaboration across enterprise and with trading partners
  • Improve Data Quality and Manage Changes
  • Lower overall costs associated with product data errors and inaccuracies
  • Import, Synchronize, and Publish Product Information
  • Strengthen trading partner relationships and improve sales effectiveness
http://www.oracle.com/data_hub/pim_data_hub.html