FIN-SIG Blog

Oracle's FSI Product Roadmap

2006-12-09T20:17:00.000-08:00

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

Oracle releases single-ID products

2006-12-09T20:13:00.000-08:00

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

2006-12-09T20:11:00.000-08:00

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...

2006-09-17T20:20:00.000-07:00

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

2006-09-17T20:15:00.000-07:00

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

2006-09-03T11:43:00.000-07:00

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

2006-09-03T11:41:00.000-07:00

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

2006-09-03T11:34:00.000-07:00

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

2006-09-03T11:33:00.000-07:00

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”

2006-07-05T04:50:00.000-07:00

“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

2006-07-04T20:05:00.000-07:00

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

2006-06-24T06:49:00.000-07:00

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

2006-06-22T20:00:00.000-07:00

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

Oracle Expands Its Contact Center Solution With Telephony@Work Buy

2006-06-20T06:35:00.000-07:00

From Gartner:

On 13 June 2006, Oracle announced that it had acquired privately owned Telephony@Work, a provider of premise- and host-based multichannel contact center infrastructure solutions. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

For 18 months, Oracle has been offering Telephony@Work's contact center service through an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) agreement, as part of its Oracle On Demand (formerly "Siebel On Demand") customer relationship management (CRM) solution. Oracle will now sell the Telephony@Work offering as a hosted service (as a stand-alone offering or bundled with Oracle On Demand), a managed service, a customer-premises-based solution, or a hybrid solution including more than one of these options.

Analysis

Gartner's studies of end-users have consistently shown that contact center decision makers place a low value on procuring their contact center infrastructure and CRM software from the same vendor. Oracle will need to aggressively market the advantages of a combined solution to overcome the lack of demand for a synergized solution. In enterprise accounts, Gartner expects that Oracle will focus its contact center infrastructure sales efforts on those accounts that also require Oracle CRM software. In service provider accounts, we expect Oracle to sell contact center infrastructure as a stand-alone solution for hosted services, but to use this footprint to later sell CRM software. Gartner also expects that Oracle will continue to partner with other contact center infrastructure vendors, as failure to do so would upset large and influential mutual accounts.

Gartner's recommendations:

Current Users:

If you use Oracle CRM software solutions integrated with contact center solutions from other vendors (such as Avaya, Nortel or Cisco Systems), ask for a commitment from both vendors that integration will be maintained and will receive continued development investment.
If you use Oracle On Demand with or without contact center services from Oracle or Telephony@Work, you should ask Oracle for its development road map for contact center services, in light of Oracle's new ownership of the entire product set.
If you are using or considering Telephony@Work solutions you should ask for a commitment from Oracle that the Telephony@Work product will continue to be supported and developed as a stand-alone solution separate from Oracle CRM software.

Prospects:

If you are seeking a multisite contact center solution and need CRM software integration, but wish to avoid smaller, independent vendors, consider adding Oracle/Telephony@Work to your contact center request-for-information or request-for-proposal distribution list. The offering is available through On Demand or in an on-premises solution. Either way, ask for references.

Analytical Sources: Drew Kraus, Gartner Dataquest and Bern Elliot, Gartner

http://www.gartner.com/DisplayDocument?doc_cd=141468&ref=g_homelink

Oracle Launches Tools For Event-Driven Architectures

2006-06-20T06:21:00.000-07:00

June 19, 2006

Oracle Launches Tools For Event-Driven Architectures

By Antone Gonsalves

Oracles EDA Suite is based on its Fusion Middleware products that allow components to register the events they publish and see and subscribe to events published by other components.

Oracle Corp. on Monday launched a suite of applications for building event-driven architectures.

An EDA is a form of distributed computing in which applications respond to messages sent from other applications. An EDA often leverages service-oriented architectures, which companies use to link internal applications and connect them to computer systems of suppliers and partners.

Oracles EDA Suite is based on its Fusion Middleware products that allow components to register the events they publish and see and subscribe to events published by other components. The middleware also provides event handling.

The suite includes a design time environment, a messaging environment that handles data transmission and routing, a rules engine for defining business policies on events, and tools for analyzing and monitoring events. Oracle, based in Redwood Shores, Calif., also offers pre-built software for radio-frequency identification systems.

Among the industries Oracle is targeting with its EDA Suite are financial services, commercial banking, securities trading, telecommunications, pharmaceuticals, retail, government and manufacturing.

http://www.ddj.com/dept/webservices/189500577

Oracle to acquire Portal Software Inc.

2006-04-15T04:59:00.000-07:00

http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D8GUFF3G0.htm?campaign_id=apn_tech_down&chan=tc

Oracle's Business Intelligence Strategy

2006-04-15T04:58:00.000-07:00

http://www.oracle.com/solutions/business_intelligence/index.html

Oracle Fusion Architecture - Architectural Roadmap and Enabling Technologies

2006-01-20T20:01:00.000-08:00

Oracle's Outsourcing Play in India

2006-01-16T19:27:00.000-08:00

At a two-day conference in Bombay on Jan. 10, Oracle announced that it will be hiring an additional 1,400 employees in India -- not only in tech hotbeds like Bangalore, but across nine cities and rural towns throughout the country.

Given recent announcements that Microsoft, Cisco Systems, and Intel would each pump at least $1 billion into the country, Oracle might look like a bandwagon jumper. But make no mistake: It was in India long before that was the cool thing to do.

And executives from Oracle, the world's second-largest software company, will be the first to tell you so. Oracle has been in India for 19 years, and the planned hirings will increase its local staff to 10,000, representing about 20% of its global workforce.

That's considerably more than Microsoft, which now has 3,000 employees in India and plans to add 3,000 more in the next five years. All told, Oracle has invested $2 billion in India in the past half-decade.

Oracle President Charles Phillips underscored the reasons for expansion in a statement: "The fast rate of development, high literacy rates, and availability of I.T. skills in each of these cities represent an untapped reservoir of future economic wealth for India."

Symbiotic Relationship

It's not so bad for Oracle either. Getting bigger in India could boost both top- and bottom-line growth. The company is increasingly dependent on software-maintenance fees from existing customers -- and less so on clients taking out new licenses. That makes it all the more important that Oracle reduce costs to boost profits.

Oracle has been one of the more aggressive U.S. companies in moving jobs offshore, and India is alluring because its labor expenses are lower. Oracle relies on Indian staff not just for fixing software bugs but also for conducting high-level research and development. In fact, Oracle's largest R&D center outside the U.S. is in India.

Working for Oracle in India is a pretty nice gig, too, says AMR Research analyst Bruce Richardson. When he visited Oracle's Indian facilities two years ago, he was struck by amenities that were equal to or better than those offered at the company's Redwood Shores [Calif.] headquarters, be it ping-pong tables for relaxation or fringe benefits like company-sponsored health care for the whole family.

Local Competition

Oracle has added reason to expand its India presence. It's positioning itself to take advantage of a growing business-software market that often excludes outsiders, according to experts. The domestic market for software and services was $22 billion last year, up 32% from 2004, according to Nasscom, an Indian I.T. Chamber of Commerce organization.

Oracle has been doing pretty well in India, with 6,000 database and middleware customers, and about 400 clients using its business applications, which run corporate departments such as human resources and accounting. India has become Oracle's fourth-largest Asian market, up from tenth a few years ago. The bulk of those sales, however, are actually won by local partners and resellers, who better understand the Indian market, according to analysts. Oracle has more than 200 of these reseller relationships, according to its Web site.

As the already high-tech country becomes even more skilled at software development and attracts more of the West's venture-capital dollars, local companies could arise to challenge the likes of Oracle and SAP. "In many ways, the biggest competitors for the Oracles, SAPs, Microsofts, and IBMs in developing nations are the small, local, independent software vendors," says Evan Quinn, an analyst at market research firm IDC. That's especially true with business applications, because local business customs, languages, and laws are crucial to crafting software that employees will find easy to use.

M&A Activity

Oracle clearly understands that it pays to be local: Look no further than its $900 million purchase of a controlling stake in India's i-flex Solutions last year. One of the country's largest and most celebrated software companies, i-flex makes applications for the financial-services industry -- an area of the market that neither Oracle nor SAP dominates. The deal allowed Oracle to obtain a controlling stake and keep i-flex's well-regarded Indian management team, instead of buying the company outright. Among IDC's top software predictions in 2006: more arrangements like that.

With Oracle's penchant for making deals -- and cash of about $5 billion, once the Siebel purchase closes -- it could again become a suitor. Indeed, as Oracle battles SAP for application supremacy and looks to keep its core database market growing, it can't afford to lose out on lucrative emerging markets like India. Judging from this announcement, it doesn't intend to.

http://business.newsfactor.com/story.xhtml?story_id=1000001PZ47S

INTERVIEW - i-flex to grow with outsourcing, bank demand

2006-01-16T19:24:00.000-08:00

By Muralikumar Anantharaman

SINGAPORE (Reuters) - Indian banking software maker i-flex solutions ltd. expects growth in the next 5-6 years to be driven by booming offshoring activities and demand from banks for technology to tackle new capital adequacy rules, its chairman and managing director said on Monday.

i-flex, in which Oracle Corp. bought a 43 percent stake last year, said its employee headcount had risen about 13 percent from the end of September to more than 7,000 as it gears up to meet rising demand for offshoring.

The Mumbai-based firm, with a market value of close to $2 billion, was boosted last week when Citigroup, the world's biggest financial services company, chose its Reveleus solution aimed at helping banks meet capital adequacy norms under Basel II requirements.

"We believe that if this catches on and if we are able to deliver well, then Basel II is like a mini Y2K. There are still a large number of banks who have to start thinking about it, so for the next 5-6 years it's a huge growth market," i-flex chief Rajesh Hukku told Reuters in an interview.

Hukku said that besides Basel II, demand will also be spurred by banks adopting more anti-money laundering and compliance norms.

He declined to say how much the Citigroup contract was worth but said it was a "large, multi-million-dollar deal."

He said South Korea's Woori Bank, an arm of Woori Financial Group (053000.KS: Quote), was already a customer for Reveleus and i-flex was in the process of signing with Japanese and Singaporean banks.

i-flex, a trailblazer among Indian software firms with its flagship Flexcube banking product, has in recent years also built its services business of low-cost software development to cater to booming demand, especially from U.S. financial firms.

It hired more than 1,000 staff in the September quarter and Hukku says the group is currently setting up buildings and computers in India for 17,000 people.

The products and services businesses are split roughly equally in the firm's half-year revenue of 6.3 billion rupees ($143 million).

Flexcube, which now accounts for about 45 percent of i-flex revenue and is sold in 100 countries, was also poised to grow as 80 percent of banks worldwide were operating with old software which would need replacing, Hukku said.

It competes in the segment with Swiss Temenos, British Misys and local rival Infosys Technologies Ltd.

Hukku said i-flex had also recently made a "huge sale" in Asia of a variant of Flexcube for the asset management industry.

He also said the association with Oracle was already beginning to pay.

"Clearly the amount of references they are bringing us is far beyond the reach we had. We have already signed one or two deals, where they brought a customer and we convinced the customer and signed the deal," he said.

The i-flex chairman, while declining to comment on earnings for the December quarter, said costs of hedging a volatile rupee would have a minor impact on the bottom line.

"If we had done no hedging then it would have been very nice but because we were hedged there's actually a negative impact. But it's insignificant," he said.

A Reuters poll earlier this month forecast i-flex would double its net profit to 730 million rupees on a 33.4 percent rise in net sales to 4.07 billion for the October-December quarter. The results are due later this month.

i-flex shares closed up 0.6 percent on Monday after earlier hitting their highest level in more than two years. The stock rose 69 percent in 2005.

http://in.today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=businessNews&storyID=2006-01-16T173251Z_01_NOOTR_RTRJONC_0_India-232179-1.xml

Has Oracle inked the biggest deal in Indian M&A space?

2006-01-16T19:17:00.000-08:00

Raj Nambisan/Satish John
Monday, January 16, 2006 22:03 IST

MUMBAI: There’s again a whiff of a mega-deal brewing in the technology space, perhaps one of the biggest deals in the M&A space in India.

Oracle Corporation, the world’s second-largest software company, is said to have put in place a two-billion dollar deal to buyout, lock, stock and barrel an unnamed Indian technology company.

The deal, said to be anchored by Citibank, was signed on Thursday, sources said.

Charles Phillips, president of Oracle, who was in Mumbai last week, said he saw the financial services IT segment to be a bigger bet than even enterprise resource planning.

So who are the domestic financial services players? Patni Computer Systems (where promoters hold 45% stake), Satyam Computer Services, i-flex, Infosys, TCS, Polaris Software and Nucleus Software, among others.

Could the deal be about the rump of shareholding in i-flex solutions held by minority shareholders after Citibank sold its holding for $593 million, and Oracle unsuccessfully made an offer to buy the rest at Rs 882, or another deal as Larry Ellison, the ninth richest man on earth, wriggles into the happening world of Indian technology companies?

Sources said as many as two dozen Citibank officials were holed up in a five-star hotel in Bandra last week, sewing up the deal. Neither Oracle nor Citibank could be contacted for comment.

Who’s selling is the multi-billion dollar question, and it will be clear in the coming days. A lot of names did the rounds initially.

Initial speculation veered around the Sekhsaria and Neotia families selling Gujarat Ambuja Cement stake to Holcim. This was later struck off, as the deal is still a year away from crytallisation, said informed sources — if at all it has to happen.

Oracle’s appetite for Indian technocrats and technologies is well known. In August last year, it struck the biggest deal right under the nose of TCS and Infosys when it made an all-cash deal to buy i-flex Solutions for $593 million (Rs 2,582 crore).

Oracle paid Rs 800 per share to buy Citigroup’s 41% stake in i-flex, an Indian banking software product and services company.

Including the mandatory 20% open offer that Oracle has to make according to Sebi rules, the total size of the deal could go up to about $909 million (Rs 3,958 crore).

The deal heralded the first-ever buyout of an Indian company by a multinational behemoth and is viewed by analysts as a watershed event and the coming to age of India’s software industry.

Addressing an analysts’ conference then, Oracle president Charles Phillips who later took a seat on the board of i-flex, said that from a strategic perspective, the timing of the acquisition was just perfect.

i-flex is still retained as a separate entity by Oracle. According to merchant banking circles the deal could not be for the rump of i-flex shareholding amounting to 57%. This is because i-flex share was trading today at Rs 1142.75, which throws up a value of a little less than Rs 5000 crore for the balance shareholding in i-flex. Again it could also be construed that Oracle is making an offer i-flex shareholders cannot refuse? Or is it something else? Coming days will tell.

http://dnaindia.com/report.asp?NewsID=1007896

Oracle Starts To Cut And Paste From PeopleSoft Apps

2006-01-16T19:15:00.000-08:00

Interesting thoughts on Oracle's Fusion Project:

http://www.informationweek.com/software/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=177100329

Oracle India FSI Newsletter launched

2006-01-03T09:13:00.000-08:00

Go to:

http://www.oracle.com/global/in/fsi/FSI_Newsletter_Issue_I.pdf

NEWS ALERT: Oracle OpenWorld, Mumbai, India - Jan 10-11, 2006

2006-01-03T09:07:00.000-08:00

Follow the link below for details:

http://www.oracle.com/global/in/openworld/index.html

Consolidate Multiple Disparate Document Archives

2005-12-15T11:39:00.000-08:00

Xenos Group, Inc a leading provider of high-performance data, document and delivery solutions for eAdaptability, has unveiled the Oracle Asset Vault solution for financial services organisations at the Documation UK Storage Expo Show, Olympia, London.

The Asset Vault solution is an offering from Oracle and Xenos comprising Xenos d2e Vision software residing on Oracle Application Server 10g. It enables organisations to load, update and consolidate multiple disparate document archives into a single, high volume, high performance, Oracle database10g without changing existing legacy applications.

This enables customers, CSAs, agents and financial advisors to have Web access to multiple systems with dynamic retrieval and view customer documents such as statements, cheque images, signatures, invoices, policies and correspondence, as well as access to XML-enabled e-business applications.

“Cost reduction, the need to retire old legacy systems following M&As and the desire for faster, simpler access to customer information are key drivers for financial services organisations.

These factors are putting document and information management high on their IT agendas,” said Nicola Toombs, banking director at Oracle UK. “Oracle and Xenos are enabling financial services institutions to consolidate and streamline disparate document and image archives, while simultaneously allowing them to meet regulatory compliance requirements.

By improving how customer data is managed and accessed, firms can better comply with Sarbanes-Oxley, as well as FSA initiatives such as ‘Treating Customers Fairly’ and ‘Know Your Customer’.”

Peter Simpson, financial services business development manager, Xenos UK, stated, “Xenos and Oracle will provide the state-of-the-art Asset Vault solution to help address the complex requirements of large banking, credit card, insurance, brokerage and telecommunications companies for streamlined business processes to provide consolidated information from multiple disparate archives – and reduce the costs associated with maintaining multiple silos of information.

The Oracle Asset Vault solution with Xenos d2e Vision is designed to provide extremely high-speed, high-volume statement archiving and statement presentment in the formats customers require.”

Written 100% in Java, Xenos d2e Vision meets the scalable high-volume performance requirements of large and mid-size enterprises, by providing flexible electronic content management, archiving and dynamic e-business Web document presentment solutions with data extraction, document separation, transformation and repurposing capabilities.

Xenos d2e Vision version 2.1 processes IBM AFP and Xerox Metacode/DJDE printstreams, PDF documents and TIFF files to generate PDF, HTML/CSS, Image, TIFF, AFP, Metacode and XML output formats for critical e-business applications such as customer statement presentment.

Rapid application development with d2e Vision Developer Studio enables higher productivity and faster return on investment. Xenos d2e Vision version 2.1 runs on Windows NT/2000/XP, AIX, HP-UX, Linux, Solaris and IBM z/OS (running Unix Systems Services) with JVM 1.4.x.

Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) is the world’s largest enterprise software company.

For more information visit www.oracle.com

Xenos has provided data and electronic document transformation solutions for over 20 years. Its solutions are embraced worldwide, across a wide variety of industries, including healthcare, financial services and government.

Xenos improves the efficiency of information and data management while preserving investments in existing IT infrastructure, systems, applications and procedures. Its solutions provide the capture, composition, transformation, enhancement, repurposing, storage, retrieval and distribution of documents across the enterprise.

Xenos data solutions are used to integrate incompatible applications, business processes, enterprise systems, partners, structured data, databases and Web services. Its product offering includes Xenos d2e, Xenos infoWEB, Xenos terminalONE and GoXML. Xenos has offices in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom and France. Xenos trades on the Toronto Stock Exchange under the trading symbol “XNS.”

For more information visit www.xenos.com

http://www.s-ox.com/news/detail.cfm?articleID=1403

Oracle Closes Purchase of Citigroup's Interest in i-flex solutions

2005-12-15T11:32:00.000-08:00

http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/051214/sfw042.html?.v=38

Oracle President Charles Phillips Joins i-flex Board of Directors

Overview of Oracle's Financial Services Offering

2005-11-26T19:03:00.000-08:00

http://www.oracle.com/industries/financial_services/fin.svcs_feb05.pdf

Oracle Malaysia To Hold Technology Summit Next Week

2005-11-26T18:55:00.000-08:00

KUALA LUMPUR, Nov 25 (Bernama) -- Over 1,000 attendees are expected at Oracle Corporation Malaysia's Technology Summit at the Sunway Convention Centre on Nov 29, 2005.

Among them will be information technology (IT) professionals, software vendors and developers, database administrators, systems integrators, consultants, distributors and resellers.

Oracle said in a statement Friday that it would be leveraging on the event to update the local IT fraternity on the company's latest technologies, products and service offerings.

The summit, with the theme "Information Empowers", will feature keynote speakers from Oracle as well as leading IT companies like Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Sun Microsystems and IBM.

According to Oracle, the keynote speakers will discuss industry trends, challenges and solutions which leverage on the power of information to drive businesses to further success.

To provide a comprehensive overview of the latest Oracle technology offerings, the programme includes a variety of industry and technology tracks, it said.

The tracks will cover key areas such as analytics, security, infrastructure, content management, and major industries including communications, media, utilities, government, education, healthcare, manufacturing and financial services.

Oracle Fusion Middleware, one of the industry's leading middleware platform, will be unveiled locally for the first time at the event.

"This comprehensive middleware product family helps organisations achieve greater agility, make better-informed business decisions, and more easily integrate data and processes across disparate IT systems," said Oracle Malaysia's managing director V.R. Srivatsan.

The summit will also discuss how enterprises can manage their existing IT infrastructure at lower cost, improve manageability and gain better control over IT assets and resources, Oracle added.

Financial firms get ready for MiFID deadline

2005-11-03T18:18:00.000-08:00

Directive requires significant investment in data storage

James Watson, Computing 02 Nov 2005

Sixty per cent of investment firms have started budgeting for technology projects in 2006 to prepare for the upcoming Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID), according to research published this week.

This budgeting is occurring despite the fact that 80 per cent of those firms polled either do not have, or do not know if they have, a relevant compliance framework for the directive in place.

MiFID continues the process of creating a single European market for financial services, and will require investment firms to implement a number of changes in how they operate, such as keeping detailed information for up to five years on trades they have made.

For many companies, the directive will require significant investment in their ability to store, retain and analyse data.

But the MiFID Readiness Survey, produced by the MiFID Joint Working Group and sponsored by Standard & Poor’s, Oracle UK and BT Radianz, says just 20 per cent of respondents have a unified data storage strategy in place.

Not much time for preparation remains; although the regulations are not due to be completely finalised until March next year, the directive’s deadline is 30
April 2007.

Grids move mainstream with enterprise system deployments

2005-11-01T07:49:00.000-08:00

by Cliff Saran
Monday 31 October 2005

Companies have started deploying grid technology to run business systems, according to analyst firm Quocirca. Its Grid Index survey, commissioned by Oracle, found growing demand for the technology.

Although grid technology has been used to speed up applications in oil and gas exploration, pharmaceutical research and mathematical...

... modelling in financial services, the study showed it was now being deployed for enterprise resource planning.

Peter Condon, technology solutions director at Oracle, said, "We are seeing considerable interest in grid technology."

The main reason for users deploying grid technology is to make better use of existing IT assets. According to Quocirca, businesses typically only achieve 29% IT utilisation on their IT assets.

Clive Longbottom, service director at Quocirca, said, "Based on the greater understanding and acceptance of how today's virtualisation technologies and service oriented architectures can help create a more flexible infrastructure, we are seeing broad acceptance that effectiveness and efficiencies can be obtained by underpinning this with grid computing."

Longbottom said there was no reason why grids could not be used to run SAP or Oracle enterprise software.

He added that grid technology was moving rapidly from niche scientific and financial applications to more mainstream roll-outs. However, users needed to develop a standard IT environment before implementing grids, Longbottom warned.

The study found users were increasingly building more consistency and reuse into corporate platforms. "Achieving this consistency is an important first step towards adopting more modern, flexible and dynamic infrastructure solutions such as grid computing," said Longbottom.

The research found that 47% of respondents had standardised their e-mail and collaboration systems and 43% had standard application server platform environments.

To implement a grid, Longbottom said users needed a flexible IT infrastructure that enabled servers to be provisioned easily. This meant using virtualisation technology for servers and storage.

The study showed users were investing in such technology. Longbottom said that by deploying virtualisation technology, using a service oriented approach to engineering applications, and running blade server hardware, users were establishing an infrastructure that could support grid computing.

New survey reveals more than two-thirds of sell-side investment firms are not ready for MiFID

2005-11-01T07:44:00.000-08:00

London, 31 October 2005- A new research report, The MiFID Readiness Survey, produced by the MiFID Joint Working Group (JWG), reveals that more than two-thirds of investment firms surveyed do not have – or do not know if they have - a MiFID compliance framework in place.

Sponsored by Standard & Poor’s, Oracle UK and BT Radianz, the research, which canvassed the views of 35 London based investment houses, measures the state of readiness amongst these firms to meet the demands of MiFID. It also sets out to determine how these firms are seeking to address the technology hurdles posed by MiFID.

Key findings of the survey include:

- Almost half of the participants have started budgeting for MiFID technology projects in 2006; and 60 per cent of respondents have assigned full time staff to work on developing MiFID compliance frameworks.

- Despite the challenges posed by MiFID in terms of operational risk and continuous availability of service, 80 per cent of the participants in this survey do not know if they have a technology strategy in place appropriate for pre- and post-trade processing of shares traded outside the regulated markets.

- More than two-thirds of respondents are unsure how they are going to manage the pre- and post-trade data publishing obligations that are required by MiFID Articles 27 and 28.

This survey is the first that the MiFID JWG has undertaken. As the detail on MiFID becomes clearer, the JWG plans to roll out similar research amongst hedge funds, the Tier 2 & 3 broker/dealers and market participants across the EU.

MiFID, which now is expected to be transposed into national legislation and regulation by 31 January 2007, with the full implementation date now expected to be with effect from 1 November 2007, requires a broad level of organisational and business process transformation. The directive will apply to all investment firms operating in the EU and the EEA.

Commenting on these findings, Bob Fuller, Co Chair of the IT Subject Group of the MiFID JWG, said, "As awareness of MiFID gathers momentum, we felt that it was crucial to track investment firms’ readiness for MiFID. This research will help firms to compare their own state of readiness with their peers as well as provide us with valuable insights for our discussions with the European Commission and the FSA. The findings of our first survey demonstrate that getting ready for MiFID is far from ‘job done’ and the more one looks into the detail the more questions are raised as to what being ready really involves. However it is encouraging that firms are already thinking about the next steps by allocating resources to tackle the technology challenges posed by this directive."

Darren Purcell, Associate Director for European Securities Classifications at Standard & Poor’s, said, "The survey highlights instrument identifiers and the mapping issues that surround them as an obvious problem for companies complying with MiFID. As a leading provider of securities reference data, Standard & Poor's will use its experience in this field to listen and work with the industry to develop solutions to help firms fulfil their MiFID obligations."

Nigel Matthews, Head of Capital Markets at Oracle UK, pointed out that many investment firms will recognise MiFID as an opportunity to improve business performance and transparency. Mr Matthews added, "MiFID clearly creates new IT challenges particularly in respect of the increased information volumes and complexity of relationships, the enterprise-wide control of information auditability, integrity, quality and security, as well as increased complexity of information lifecycles. Oracle will be assisting these organisations with a coordinated, strategic approach to information management in order to protect existing IT investments, achieve sustainable compliance and secure competitive advantage."

Chris Pickles, Manager, Industry Relations at BT Radianz and Chairman of the MiFID JWG, said, “We recognise the pressure on the entire financial services industry to take a long hard look at how best to ensure that information flows efficiently among execution venues, data vendors and market participants in anticipation of the demands of MiFID. We are actively seeking to make our shared market infrastructure available as an industry enabler."

Oracle Financial Services Executive Forum

2005-10-30T06:00:00.000-08:00

Venue: JW Mariott, Dubai
Country: United Arab Emirates

Date: Dec 14, 2005

Event Description:
A unique opportunity to learn techniques and best practices on how to capture, measure, and use customer information to drive better business practices and increase profitability by channel and customer profile. Gain additional working capital by understanding how to manage and model potential capital strategies. Learn how Basel II compliance can help improve visibility and control, mitigate operational risk, and achieve higher risk-adjusted returns on equity. Discover how Oracle solutions for Basel II help financial institution grow stronger through compliance.

Visa and Oracle Partner to Deliver Enhanced Transaction and Payment Integration

2005-10-29T21:26:00.000-07:00

Collaboration to Bring Cost Savings to Visa and Oracle® E-Business Suite Customers through Enhanced Payment Functionality

ACTE Global Conference, LONDON 24-OCT-2005 Visa International and Oracle today announced a new partnership designed to streamline the expense management and reporting process by integrating Visa Commercial payment data with the Oracle(r) E-Business Suite. The resulting transaction and payment combination will provide joint commercial customers with improved operational efficiency, heightened financial control and increased cash flow visibility.

Through the integration of the Oracle E-Business Suite and the Visa Commercial Format (VCF), a standard data set containing enhanced spending details from all Visa Commercial payment cards, corporations and their employees will be able to receive unprecedented levels of information to better utilize spending data, significantly improve processes and lower operational costs.

Part of the Oracle E-Business Suite, Oracle Internet Expenses is a travel and entertainment (T&E) solution that streamlines and automates travel spend management. With the integration of Visa transaction data into Oracle Internet Expenses, employees will be able to enter and submit expense reports more quickly and easily through pre-population of hotel folio data and automatic assignment of expense types, ensuring timely expense report submissions. The resulting solution improves T&E information and accounting accuracy, reduces employee data entry, and provides greater visibility into T&E spend.

"Visa’s new partnership with Oracle marks the convergence of two global industry leaders committed to bringing cutting-edge, cost-effective solutions to our shared corporate customers," said Aliza Knox, Senior Vice President, Visa Commercial, Visa International. "The combination of our commercial payment solutions with the Oracle E-Business Suite will help deliver measurable cost savings, providing a significant opportunity for companies to increase their bottom line."

"The Oracle-Visa partnership is really a win-win for business owners and employees," said Oracle Vice President of Applications Marketing, Folia Grace. "With the help of Visa, we’ve enhanced Oracle Internet Expenses so users can easily approve, map or dispute expenses and then submit the expense report for management approval in a few mouse clicks, dramatically reducing the time to enter expenses. At the same time, financial managers can audit corporate spending trends and make adjustments that will impact the fiscal growth of the company."

The Visa and Oracle partnership will provide a variety of benefits to commercial customers, including the ability to:

* Pre-populate expense reports with VCF formatted commercial payment transactions;

* Map Visa Commercial payment types for automatic expense type defaulting; and

* Permit automatic hotel folio itemization based on Visa Commercial payment feed.

Visa and Oracle will collaborate to identify other potential integration points between Visa Commercial payment products and services and the Oracle E-Business Suite applications. The Oracle E-Business Suite will include interfaces that enable employees of Oracle licensees to import VCF data feeds generated by Visa Commercial payment products into the Oracle E-Business Suite.

The announcement was made at the annual Association of Corporate Travel Executives (ACTE) Global Conference in London. The ACTE Global Conference brings together the world’s foremost experts and educators in the international travel industry to explore solutions to today’s complex business, legal and regulatory environment. Travel and entertainment is an important aspect of organizations’ expense management solutions.

http://www.webwire.com/ViewPressRel.asp?aId=4945

2005 e-Financial WorldExpo

2005-10-04T04:03:00.000-07:00

October 27 - 28
National Trade Centre, Exhibition Place
Toronto, Canada

Featured Speaker of the Week

1:30pm – 2:10pm	Track: Enterprive / Payment Solution
	Realizing the Enterprise Value
	Andrea S. Klein Vice President, Financial Services Industry Strategy & Marketing Oracle

Event Overview

The 2005 e-Financial WorldExpo is the leading international event focused on enterprise applications and solutions developed for the financial industy including banking institutions, insurance providers, investment and brokerage houses,securities/mortgage providers and other financial institutions. This event focuses on new and in-demand applications and technologies, including Business Intelligence, Electronic Data Interchange (EDI), Outsourcing, Security, Systems Integration, CRM, Check 21 and EBPP. The 2005 e-Financial WorldExpo provides the best opportunity to learn, discuss and view how these new technologies are utilized to increase productivity and generate revenue in the financial industry.
Driven by this market need and teaming up with major IT vendors and service providers, the 2005 e-Financial WorldExpo provides you with the most interactive learning experience in the financial industry. Delegates can listen and engage in informative technology presentations, participate in interactive product demonstrations, and network with leading industry executives through corporate sponsored activities. Don't miss this highly anticipated international event.

Event Scope

The 2005 e-Financial WorldExpo will focus on the following hot areas:

Applications / Infrastructure / Architecture
Banking Applications
Business Intelligence
Business Performance Management / Business Process Management
Business Process Outsourcing (BPO)
Check 21 / Check Clearing & Settlement
Compliance / Security
Contact Centers
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Database Management / Document Management

Disaster Recovery
E-Commerce / E-Business
Electronic Bill Presentment / Payment (EBPP)
Electronic Data Interchange (EDI)
Enterprise Resource Planning- ERP / Enterprise Resource Management - ERM
Grid Computing
Payment / Processing Mechanisms
Risk Management & Analytics
Straight-Through Processing
Wireless & Mobile Solutions

http://e-financial.wowgao.com/

Tools that manage App access

2005-09-27T18:44:00.000-07:00

Oracle Corp. last week debuted new software that can be used to help grant -- or deny -- users access to information on PCs, and industry insiders told UPI's The Web the company's moves could provide momentum for a promising IT security concept.
The software tools are part of an emerging model called "federated identity," for which programmers are writing policies that discern the type of data each user can view and enforce that access with passwords or other identification requirements, such as biometrics.

The new software tools, called Security Developer Tools, are based on specifications written by the OASIS SAML and the Liberty Alliance Project. They enable companies to grant select customers and partners access to certain files -- and keep them out of files they don't want them to view -- via the Internet.

Rival Sun Microsystems also has developed a system-access-management technology. IBM, Microsoft and BEA Systems have been incorporating federated-identity concepts into their software as well.

Moreover, through the Liberty Alliance Project, about 150 other companies are working on SAML 2.0-based interoperability for federated-identity solutions and Web-based identity services, including the Electronics & Telecommunications Research Institute, Ericsson, Novell, Oracle, Reactivity, Sun Microsystems, Symlabs and Trustgenix.

"It's all about the reality of products that work together in actual deployments," said Earl Perkins, vice president of Gartner Inc., a research consultancy.

Other developers are building new viewer-access tools as well, though less broad in scope than the projects initiated by Oracle and industry consortia. For example, developers have created applications, such as "for my eyes only printing," which enable users to print confidential documents.

"If a user prints a confidential document, the printer will cue the print request, but will not actually print the job until the user is standing at the printer and authenticates the request," said Jeremy Kartcher, a spokesman for Silex Technology America Inc., a software and hardware developer in Salt Lake City.

Oracle said in a statement that companies, particularly in the financial-services sector, could use federated-identity solutions to create a "competitive advantage" for themselves. For example, if a firm has secure access to a supplier ordering management applications, a sales representative can log on to a supplier's network, then inform the customer about the exact status of a pending order.

With distributed computing, companies can expect to communicate between an array of software programs. Because much of the communication happens over the Internet, there are possible security threats, from malicious hackers to viruses to probes by intelligence-seeking rivals.

The move into federated-identity tools is a significant part of Oracle's middleware strategy and includes products such as Oracle Application Server 10g, Oracle Identity Management, Oracle Collaboration Suite and Oracle Data Hubs.

The company's $5.8 billion acquisition last week of rival Siebel Systems is seen by close industry watchers as a way to expand on the applications side of its business, while the Redwood Shores, Calif., company develops middleware applications organically.

"With this latest acquisition, Oracle is now in a position to set its sights on SAP, which now finds itself with a minority market share of 6.7 percent in the CRM space," said Chris Boring, vice president of marketing at Aplus.Net, a Web-hosting developer and consultant in San Diego.

Boring cautioned, however, that by chasing SAP, Oracle leaves itself vulnerable on other fronts.

"While the two are locked in battle over this space, opportunities may open up for the open source and Web services players to garner market share," he said.

http://www.physorg.com/news6651.html

Oracle: 25% of LatAm bank clients on Fusion Middleware by year-end - Regional

2005-09-27T18:41:00.000-07:00

US database solutions developer Oracle (Nasdaq: ORCL) expects to end this fiscal year with about 20-25% of its Latin America banking clients using Fusion Middleware products, Oracle Financial Services director Luis Arturo Díaz told BNamericas.

Fusion Middleware is the mechanism Oracle uses for talking between different components that may be from rival suppliers or its own subsidiaries, and the ultimate goal in the banking sector is to eliminate fragmentation of systems and platforms, integrating front office and back office systems.

By integrating the applications of recent acquisitions such as Retek and PeopleSoft, as well as companies such as i-Flex and Siebel, which are set to become subsidiaries, Oracle is going through a consolidation phase that the banks themselves need to go through, Díaz said.

Oracle plans to maintain the brand names of its acquisitions, chairman Charles Phillips said this week at a company event in Orlando, and according to Díaz, Oracle will continue to issue new versions of these subsidiaries' products until 2013.

From that year on, new products will only be in the mold of the Project Fusion plan announced this week, and will combine the best aspects of each component. The lifetime support pledge, also announced this week, means Oracle will always continue to support products issued prior to that date, the company says.

I-FLEX OWNERSHIP CHANGE

i-Flex is a financial services specialist and Oracle's plan to buy 41% from Citigroup (NYSE: C) plus 20% from private shareholders is particularly important for Díaz's division. The deal is still undergoing approval processes, which should end in December, he said.

The unit will continue to operate as an independent company, producing its own products, although Oracle will make the most of that technology.

"Independently of this deal we have been working with i-Flex for a year or so, in next generation core banking, to integrate its Flexcube offering in our range of services," Díaz said.

This would combine the functionalities of Middleware, Oracle 10g, its classic database solutions and its BPEL business process management technology. Some specific client needs may be to integrate Flexcube with Oracle GL, core banking systems with Oracle procurement platform, or core banking with BPEL services, Díaz added.

"This will benefit our established clients primarily, such as Banco de Chile, which is already a customer of both suppliers. There are also some clients in Venezuela in this category," he added.

The technological advantage is that there are fewer interfaces, new modules can be incorporated faster and there is more efficient use of investments, according to Oracle.

MARKET SHARE

Once the Siebel acquisition and i-Flex ownership deal go through almost all Latin American banks will be using some kind of technology related to Oracle, compared to more than 70% at the end of Oracle's last fiscal year in March, Díaz said.

Acquisitions apart, Oracle's market share in Latin America's banking sector grew 15% in the fiscal year ended on March 31, partly because of a drive on the part of the banks to upgrade their applications, Díaz said. This is a growth trend that Oracle expects to continue in its current fiscal year, he added.

"The idea is to help clients transition [through whatever upgrades they may seek] as smoothly as possible, without forcing them to upgrade before they're ready," Díaz said.

http://www.bnamericas.com/story.jsp?sector=1¬icia=330218&idioma=I

Oracle Financial Services Executive Forum

2005-09-27T18:37:00.000-07:00

Venue: Sheraton, Riyadh
Country: Saudi Arabia

Start date: Sunday, December 11 - 2005
End date: Sunday, December 11 - 2005

A unique opportunity to learn techniques and best practices on how to capture, measure, and use customer information to drive better business practices and increase profitability by channel and customer profile. Gain additional working capital by understanding how to manage and model potential capital strategies. Learn how Basel II compliance can help improve visibility and control, mitigate operational risk, and achieve higher risk-adjusted returns on equity. Discover how Oracle solutions for Basel II help financial institution grow stronger through compliance.

Special Announcement: OAUG FIN-SIG Meeting 18th Sept 2005, San Francisco

2005-09-17T04:55:00.000-07:00

Oracle Applications User Group, Financial Services Industry, Special Interest Group (OAUG FIN-SIG)

Special Announcement: OAUG FIN-SIG Meeting 18^th Sept 2005, San Francisco

Date/Time: Sunday 18^th September, 2005 (9:10am-12:30pm PST)

Venue : Room 3006 Moscone West

Moscone Convention Center (Oracle OpenWorld 2005)

San Francisco, CA

Agenda :

09:10-09:20 Welcome Note: Greg Fitzgerald, Ohio Savings Bank (FIN-SIG Enhancements Chair)

Introductions and review of recent FIN-SIG activity. Distribution of the second FIN-SIG Survey. Results to be shared at end of SIG Meeting

09:25-09:55 Keynote Address -Trends and Best Practices in Financial Services: V Senthil Kumar, CEO, i-flex Solutions b.v. , and VP, Marketing & Alliances, i-flex Solutions Limited

i-flex provides comprehensive IT solutions exclusively to the financial services industry. It has serviced over 570 customers in over 115 countries through a portfolio of products and services. These include packaged applications (encompassing consumer banking, corporate banking, investor servicing, asset management for mutual funds, internet delivery of financial services, business analytics and risk management), custom application software development, and, business and IT consulting services.

V Senthil Kumar leads i-flex operations in Europe, and also carries worldwide responsibility for Marketing and Alliances at i-flex. He devotes a large portion of his efforts in development of strategies which would enable i-flex effectively address the needs of financial institutions in the future. In this session Senthil would be speaking on some of the emerging trends in the financial services industry, as seen by i-flex.

10:00-10:30 Oracle Family Roadmap for FSI: Anita Brady, Sr. Director, Oracle Corporation

With the acquisition of PeopleSoft, Retek, TimesTen and many more solutions relevant for the financial services industry, this session will provide you an insight into Fusion and the Oracle strategy for the next few years as it relates to users in Banking, Insurance and Capital Markets. Apart from her responsibility as Sr. Director, Financial Services Product Development Strategy, Anita is also the current Oracle Liaison for the OAUG FIN-SIG

10:40-11:10 Oracle and TimesTen - enabling the Real-Time World: Tim Shetler, VP-Product Marketing TimesTen (now part of Oracle Corporation)

TimesTen brings a proven track record to time-critical industries and real-time enterprises with products that have been powering production systems since 1998 in networks, telecom services, operational support systems, contact centers, airline and reservation systems, and securities trading applications. Over 1,500 companies around the globe use TimesTen technology in real-time applications to increase customer loyalty and new customer acquisition, streamline operations, and avoid the costly alternative of proprietary software development.

11:15-11:40 Case Study from Financial Services: Samir Singh, GECIS Global (FIN-SIG Communications Chair)

Obtain insight including some useful tips and techniques from the project team that implemented Oracle at one of the largest financial services institutions.

11-45-12:05 Announcement of results of FIN-SIG Survey: Joseph Alldred, Wachovia Bank (FIN-SIG Secretariat)

12:10-12:30 Open House & Close: Subhojit Roye iGATE Global (FIN-SIG Coordinator)

Oracle Agrees to Buy Siebel for $10.66 a Share

2005-09-13T03:54:00.000-07:00

Vaults Oracle to Number 1 in Customer Relationship Management

http://www.oracle.com/corporate/press/2005_sep/monrls.html

Oracle's OAUG Enhancement Request System

2005-08-22T10:34:00.000-07:00

An overview of Oracle's Enhancement Request System has been posted on the FIN-SIG website at:

http://finsig.oaug.org/download.shtml

Why Oracle Has Its Eye on India

2005-08-05T03:33:00.000-07:00

NEWS ANALYSIS :TECH
By Steve Hamm

A majority stake in banking-software outfit i-flex gives the database giant more leverage against SAP

Software giant Oracle continued its acquisition binge Aug. 2 by purchasing a controlling interest in Indian banking software specialist i-flex Solutions for a price that's expected to top $900 million. It was Oracle's (ORCL ) eighth acquisition this year, and 12th in 18 months.

You can expect more of the same from the maker of databases and corporate applications. "We don't want to play our hand too much, but we're looking now in the telecom and public sectors. There's lots of complexity in the businesses, and no clear market leaders," says Oracle President Charles Phillips (see BW Online, 6/30/05, "Larry Ellison's Roving Eye").

"BUILD OR BUY." Oracle is ramping up its M&A activity in an attempt to make up ground on Germany's SAP (SAP ), the leader in corporate applications. Its strategy is to snap up leading software companies that provide product packages for specific industries. Those products compliment Oracle's databases and general business applications (see BW Online, 7/7/05, "Oracle's Small Step, Bigger Plan").

"Oracle has to do this to become more competitive with SAP," says analyst David Mitchell of market researcher Ovum. "It's build or buy, and I think build takes too long."

The i-flex deal is very different from others Oracle has done in recent months. Rather than buying the company outright, it's paying $593 million in cash for a 41% stake owned by Citigroup (C ), the original investor when i-flex started 13 years ago. Then Oracle is offering to buy up to 20% of the publicly traded shares from investors for a total price of $316 million.

UP TO STANDARD. In this way, Oracle will control the company, keeping it out of the hands of SAP, but i-flex will still be run by a team of successful Indian executives led by Chairman Rajesh Hukku. I-flex grew 42% last fiscal year, to $261 million, and produced net income of $46 million. News of the pending deal began to leak out last week (see BW Online, 7/28/05, "Oracle's Shopping Spree Isn't Over").

The two companies are a good fit. Already, nearly 90% of i-flex's customers use Oracle databases. I-flex's products are based on industry-standard technologies, and Oracle is rebuilding its entire suite of applications to industry standards in a massive three year project it calls Fusion. Having Oracle as a parent will likely help i-flex increase its business with tier-one banks, some of which have been reluctant up until now to bet their technology futures on a relatively small Indian software supplier.

The deal caused a wave of excitement in India. A handful of top Indian tech-services outfits are well known globally, thanks to their outsourcing expertise, but India has only a smattering of software-products companies. I-flex is the most formidable, with 575 customers in 115 countries.

BROWSING THE NEIGHBORHOOD. "This is a validation that one of the world's largest software companies has chosen an Indian software company," says Hukku. "It's a validation of the quality and complexity of Indian software, and it's a shot in the arm for other Indian software product companies." Other possible Indian software targets for acquisition include Polaris Software, another maker of banking software, and Ramco Systems, a maker of tools for developing corporate applications.

Don't be surprised if Oracle's M&A quest leads it back to India again. "We're convinced that a good portion of the next generation of software companies will be emerging from India," says Oracle's Phillips. He spent more than eight months working on the i-flex acquisition. But now he knows the country, so another deal could come much quicker.

http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/aug2005/tc2005083_4679_tc024.htm?campaign_id=nws_techn_aug5&link_position=link1

Oracle and i-flex

2005-08-02T06:21:00.000-07:00

Oracle and i-flex

On August 2, 2005, Oracle announced an agreement to buy Citigroup's 41% equity interest in i-flex. Oracle also announced an open offer to purchase up to an additional 20% ownership interest in i-flex. Following regulatory clearances, Oracle is expected to become the majority shareholder of i-flex through these transactions.

i-flex will continue to operate under current management and remain a publicly traded company. i-flex customers and partners are encouraged to continue using existing contacts for support, professional services and sales to address your ongoing needs.

This transaction underscores Oracle's commitment to the business critical functions of the banking industry, and is a strong endorsement of i-flex's success and tremendous growth. By aligning the talents of both organizations, we will be better able to address the evolving needs of the banking industry.

Follow this link to track details on this transaction:

http://www.oracle.com/iflex/index.html

Oracle To Buy Majority Interest In Indian Banking Software Maker i-flex

2005-08-02T06:19:00.000-07:00

Oracle To Buy Majority Interest In Indian Banking Software Maker i-flex 41% to be Purchased from Citigroup and 20% from Public Shareholders

REDWOOD SHORES, Calif., 02-AUG-2005 Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) today announced that it will buy a majority interest in India's largest applications software company, i-flex solutions (Bombay Stock Exchange: IFLX.BO and National Stock Exchange of India: IFLX.NS). Software products from i-flex support corporate banking, consumer banking, investment banking, Internet banking, asset management, and investor services. i-flex has provided software and services to 575 banks in 115 countries.

"i-flex is the hottest software company in the banking industry, signing more new customers than any other banking software company in each of the last three years," said Oracle CEO, Larry Ellison. "Banking is a strategic industry for Oracle with 9 out of the top 10 banks already running Oracle ERP applications. Oracle's overall application strategy is to go beyond ERP and offer customers richer industry-specific functionality. i-flex gets us there in banking."

The current i-flex management team will continue to run the company and will align product development, sales, marketing, and services activities with Oracle. The i-flex service organization will continue to provide deep domain expertise to major banks around the world. Oracle President Charles Phillips will join the i-flex board, and i-flex stock will continue to trade on the Bombay Stock Exchange and the National Stock Exchange of India.

"We have enjoyed a long, highly successful partnership with Oracle, and this transaction will be a logical evolution of our relationship," said Rajesh Hukku, Chairman and Managing Director of i-flex solutions. "Aligning with Oracle, we can jointly offer an excellent value proposition to our global customers with truly integrated solutions across the front, middle, and back office."

"This investment brings together our complementary technology to offer customers the most comprehensive banking solution for next generation applications, technology and services," said Phillips. "The inevitable transition from legacy systems to modern applications has created a multi-billion dollar opportunity, and because no single supplier has been able to meet customer needs, the banking software market is highly fragmented. Customers have been looking for a Tier 1 software partner to help modernize their systems and lower their maintenance costs."

Under terms of the agreement, Oracle will acquire Citigroup Venture Capital International's 41 percent ownership stake in i-flex solutions. As required by Indian law, Oracle will make an open offer beginning on or about August 3, 2005 to purchase an additional 20 percent of the shares outstanding from the remaining shareholders at a price of Rs882.62 per share, with total cash consideration of approximately USD $316 million if the entire 20 percent is tendered into the offer. Subject to regulatory approvals, the transaction is expected to close by the end of 2005.

IBM has been a key global partner for i-flex and Oracle. "The i-flex products will continue to run on IBM software and hardware, and our relationship with i-flex aligns us more closely with IBM solutions for our joint banking customers," said Phillips. "In addition, Citigroup remains a committed and loyal customer of i-flex, having recently entered into a 5-year product and services agreement."

i-flex applications have been optimized for Oracle's technology platform since 1997, with over 90 percent of i-flex customers currently running on Oracle technology. The i-flex portfolio of software products includes FLEXCUBE(r), the world's #1 selling core banking solution; Reveleus(tm), an advanced business analytic application; and Daybreak(tm), an enterprise consumer-lending suite. In addition, the i-flex PRIMESOURCING offering provides a comprehensive range of software, consulting, development and support services, differentiated by deep domain expertise. i-flex is headquartered in Mumbai, India and employs over 5,500 people worldwide.

About i-flex solutions
i-flex solutions (Reuters: IFLX.BO and IFLX.NS) is a world leader in providing IT solutions to the financial services industry. For more information about i-flex, visit the i-flex Web site at http://www.iflexsolutions.com.

Customer Data Integration: Where is the Next Generation of Master Data Management Headed?

2005-08-02T04:04:00.000-07:00

Article published in the August 2005 issue of the DM Review magazine. Key highlights include:

The customer data integration (CDI) market is in a state of considerable flux as a multitude of diverse technologies compete for large-scale, mission-critical projects. Analyzing data from a 150+ project database containing the vital signs of Global 2000 CDI projects, the CDI Institute is able to project future trends in mind share as well as current market share. During 2005, the average CDI software investment was $1.2 million with the typical large scale CDI project requiring systems integration (SI) fees ranging four to six times the amount spent on the CDI software. This demonstrates the increasing importance of application integration via master data management (MDM) as a catalyst for realizing ROI in large enterprises' multimillion-dollar customer relationship management (CRM) installations. Moreover, CDI is clearly one of the few remaining growth areas for both software vendors and systems integrators.

What is CDI?

The CDI market is comprised of process and technology solutions for recognizing a customer at any touchpoint - while aggregating accurate, up-to-date knowledge about that customer and delivering it in an actionable form "just in time" to touchpoints. Both IT vendors and executive IT management at Global 2000 enterprises need guidance in this fast paced, high stakes market that is the convergence of multiple overlapping middleware markets - e.g., customer recognition, data quality, real-time analytics, data warehouseing, business process management, enterprise application integration (EAI), etc.

While most enterprises have infrastructure initiatives based on the technology platforms of strategic IT partners such as Oracle/PeopleSoft, SAP and Siebel, more than 75 percent of the IT professionals surveyed by the CDI Institute are actively considering purchases "outside the family" to facilitate connectivity between customer-facing applications and processes. CDI strategies systematize a panoramic or 360-degree view of the customer by aggregating and analyzing multiple sources of master customer information into a master "system of record." Such "master data hubs" represent the holy grail of CRM products from Microsoft, Oracle, Siebel and SAP as they enable a single version of the truth across the enterprise's customer-facing processes. It is now a realizable goal for IT organizations to buy rather than build such infrastructure, with more than 95 percent of financial services and life sciences enterprises actively looking to replace homegrown CDI solutions. Additionally, the spate of mergers and acquisitions occurring in the communications service provider industries (telco, cable, satellite) is further creating a need to integrate customer-facing databases and processes as the newly minted mega telcos look to gain operational efficiencies and competitive marketing advantage via mergers. Lastly, many IT professionals are clearly looking to such long-term and large-scale IT initiatives as "career longevity insurance," given that such enterprise-scale infrastructure is not amenable to offshore outsourcing, etc.

Contemporary CDI solutions will vary by industry, for example, in terms of tactical approaches taken:

Pharmaceutical/life sciences adopt semi-batch, database-centric approaches to deploy master physician data to sales forces.
Financial services providers and online retailers require near real-time, business- and process-centric solutions to compete in the fast-paced B2C online world.
Governmental organizations are often restricted in the ways they are permitted to merge and analyze data on their citizens, thus skewing these architectures toward anonymous entity resolution.

For planning purposes, it is often important to know where you came from as well as where you are going. This holds true for an enterprise CDI strategy per the marketing mantra often recited by CRM vendors: CRM is a journey - an ongoing process - not a product or a way station. In that spirit, we outline the basic road map of CDI solution evolution:

First-Generation CDI. These solutions are most often standalone databases or files managed by monolithic applications such as IBM's Transaction Processing Facility (used by airlines), CSC's Hogan banking system or even early generation Siebel Systems' sales force automation installations.
Second-Generation CDI. These solutions are "uni-modal" in that they are specialized for either batch or online updates and are database-centric master customer files. Frequently participating in bidirectional updates, these are either "data-centric" in using ETL (extract, transform and load) solutions or "process-centric" in depending heavily upon workflow.
Third-Generation CDI. These approaches offer "multi-modality" and are flexible enough to support batch and online performance, loosely and tightly coupled application models, etc. Specifically, this variation supports a service oriented architecture (SOA) model in terms of Web services for a "business services" approach. This approach also increasingly provides support for the federation model whereby individual business units retain some autonomy in managing their "master" data assets yet participate in a "union" or "confederation." Additionally, a third-generation solution must support the tremendous scalability requirements, as well as reliability and availability, associated with mission-critical infrastructure.
Fourth-Generation CDI. These systems provide extreme scalability because they are of the architecture required to support massive numbers of users such as business-to-consumer e-commerce or self-directed service centers. The systems also are designed to support unstructured content such as free-form text, video and audio in addition to structured database records.

For more details, read this article at:

http://www.dmreview.com/article_sub.cfm?articleId=1033571

Oracle explains business applications market strategy

2005-07-30T05:54:00.000-07:00

At a presentation to analysts from the pan-European Software & It Services group at SG Securities on Wednesday, Oracle discussed its applications strategy and outlined just where it believes the most intense competition will be with rival SAP AG.

High on the list will be the battle for vertical industries with CFO Greg Maffei acknowledging there will not be a winner-takes-all situation as far as the horizontal market is concerned but that the situation will be very different in the vertical market. "Someone will get the lion's share of a vertical," he said. Sometimes that will be Oracle, other times it will be SAP.

As reported, Oracle has been active on this front, acquiring to gain or improve its foothold in the market as demonstrated by the $650m Retek purchase and the ProfitLogic deal, which was estimated at around $200m - both in the retail vertical market. These may be added to if Oracle buys up banking software provider I-flex Solutions, which will give it significant traction in the banking section of the financial services sector. Both verticals represent major growth opportunities, and are focus areas for Oracle and SAP, because neither is dominated by a single vendor capable of offering broad based horizontal application infrastructure and capabilities, plus vertical functionality.

So far the difference in approach is that where SAP has tended to build vertical functionality in-house, Oracle has taken a fast-track approach and acquired it. SAP is willing to buy to boost its assets, but only at the right price, as indicated by its withdrawal from the bidding war with Oracle over Retek. The scene is definitely set for further clashes as both vendors look to same group of vertical market players.

There is no question that with the Oracle Fusion initiatives and the SAP Business Process Platform, the two vendors have a similar strategy regarding the move to a SOA but Oracle maintains there is a difference in terms of the credibility of the two approaches.

Middleware is an essential component for anyone building an SOA, said president Charles Phillips, adding that Oracle has an advantage over SAP today because it has an established application server platform, with significant market penetration and recognition amongst the ISV and customer communities. "It is proven and endorsed by the market and is already available now in the Fusion middleware platform."

The second component of the Fusion initiative is Project Fusion, which refers to the plans for the business applications. This takes advantage of Fusion middleware to migrate applications toward a service-based architecture, said Phillips. He said new releases of the business applications, scheduled from September onwards, would start to take on more characteristics of Fusion.

Like SAP, the move to SOA-based Fusion will require multiple releases. The only questions are how transparent that is, if the platform is proven and whether it has been done it before, said Phillips. He believes a major difference between Oracle and SAP is the credibility of the application server. He stressed that Oracle has endorsement and proven technology whereas SAP's NetWeaver has not been proved in the market and lacks third-party signatures.

Maffei also took issue with SAP's growth potential, questioning whether its revenue increases were sustainable, maintaining that when SAP signs large deals the revenue is spread over two to three years. Although this is quite normal, he believes that much of the revenue SAP is enjoying is from deals it made two to three years ago which are taking time to roll through. The suggestion is that its current revenues do not reflect customer take up of its next generation developments.

http://www.cbronline.com/article_news_print.asp?guid=FD144E9E-0DCC-4400-8F45-8B323351D818

Oracle's Shopping Spree Isn't Over

2005-07-29T03:35:00.000-07:00

JULY 28, 2005

NEWS ANALYSIS :TECH
By Sarah Lacy

The database giant is said to be in talks to acquire a stake in an Indian banking-software company. And there may be more to come

Larry Ellison is at it again. After spending approximately $800 million to gain a foothold in the retailing software market, the chief executive of Oracle (ORCL ) is now turning his attention to financial services. The Silicon Valley software giant is in talks to buy Citicorp's (C ) 43% stake in i-flex Solutions of India, sources familiar with the discussions confirm.

The deal, said to be worth $650 million, is expected to result in Oracle later acquiring a controlling interest in the publicly traded company.

I-flex is the largest Indian application-software outfits -- and one of the world's largest makers of software for banks. It boasts more than 450 banks as customers, and has been gaining momentum, adding more than a dozen big U.S. financial institutions to its customer base in the last year, according to company Chairman Rajesh Hukku.

From a strategic perspective, the deal is similar to Oracle's recent purchase of two retail-software companies: Retek, for which it paid $650 million, and ProfitLogic, which analysts estimate cost about $200 million (see BW Online, 7/7/05, "Oracle's Small Step, Bigger Plan").

BUYING IN. Retail and financial services are two of the only remaining industries with no single dominant software player. Both sectors are prime growth areas for Oracle and its arch-competitor, SAP (SAP ), and both companies have stated publicly that they're going to expand their presence in those vertical markets.

"If you can buy them at the right price and execute right, there are dozens of companies we're looking at," Ellison told BusinessWeek in June (see BW Online, 6/30/05, "Oracle's Squeeze Play For Profits").

Oracle has been writing a lot of checks lately. With nearly $4 billion in cash, it has been buying its way into new markets. SAP, on the other hand, has taken the tack of building its own products in-house. If the i-flex deal comes through, Oracle will get a customer base filled with marquee names, the knowhow of the company's high-end consulting division, and instant credibility among bankers, says Bruce Richardson, an analyst with AMR Research.

BIG TARGETS. Richardson met with Oracle executives last week and says they made it clear the shopping spree isn't over. "They said most of the deals they were looking at round out specific parts of their application suites around services industries," he says. "They're looking to do surgical strikes in hopes of getting established [in markets such as retail and financial services] before SAP gets dominant."

Oracle is no stranger to India either, Richardson says. While the company doesn't break out employees by geography, it has north of 6,000 employees in India, Richardson estimates.

What's next? The most often talked about targets for Oracle are big companies like BEA Systems (BEAS ), Siebel Systems (SEBL ), and Hyperion Solutions (HYSL ). But as recent deals show, getting a foothold in untapped niches is just as important to the company's ongoing war with SAP.

http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/jul2005/tc20050728_6549_tc024.htm

Oracle pursues $650 mln deal for i-flex stake - FT

2005-07-28T04:37:00.000-07:00

SINGAPORE (Reuters) - Oracle Corp., the world's second-largest software maker, is in talks to buy Citigroup's controlling stake in Indian banking software firm i-flex solutions ltd, the Financial Times said.

The deal could be worth more than $650 million and would be one of the largest purchases in India this year, the paper reported on Wednesday, citing people close to the situation.

Oracle declined comment.

The FT said Citigroup's private equity arm had been looking to sell its 43.1 percent stake in i-flex, maker of the world's best-selling banking software, for several months.

"Citigroup has been shopping its stake round for some time now and Oracle appears to be the most determined buyer," the paper quoted an unnamed source as saying.

A sale of the stake would end a 20-year link between the U.S. financial services group and the Bombay-based firm, the FT said.

I-flex shares closed down more than 3 percent on Tuesday at 880.85 rupees, valuing the company at around 66 billion rupees ($1.52 billion).

http://in.today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=technologyNews&storyID=2005-07-27T071135Z_01_NOOTR_RTRJONC_0_India-210766-1.xml

Europe: Financial Services Companies Lead the Charge to Linux

2005-07-19T19:52:00.000-07:00

News Story by Carol Sliwa

JULY 18, 2005 (COMPUTERWORLD) - Return to the Special ReportOpen-source zealots may continue to play a part in instigating the spread of Linux across the European continent, nearly 14 years after Linus Torvalds hatched the operating system in Finland. But private corporations and public-sector users in Europe typically cite pragmatic reasons for taking up the open-source operating system. They point to price and performance benefits. They want freedom to swap out hardware. They find the operating system reliable. They like its flexibility.

"It was not that we just wanted to do open-source. We had to find a way to protect our investment in network computing," says Matthias Strelow, a technical project manager at LVM Insurance in Munster, Germany. "I'm not sure it would have been possible with any other operating system."

When IBM canceled further development of the network stations it owned, the insurance company needed an operating system to run its Unix-based applications and Sun Microsystems Inc.'s new Java virtual machine. So LVM customized Linux to meet its needs. Finally tiring of maintaining the software, LVM is now planning to move 7,700 Linux clients to Red Hat Inc.'s supported desktop distribution, Strelow says.

Servers Lead the Way

On the server side, perhaps no single industry has tested Linux's enterprise mettle more than the financial services sector. Companies were facing mounting pressure to cut costs at the turn of the millennium. The Internet bubble was about to burst. Prices were fluctuating wildly. Order volume and data traffic were spiking in the wake of the electronic trading boom. Revenue was not. The number of stocks being traded was the same, and the rising cost of processing orders was becoming a big problem. When the market slump hit in 2001, that only exacerbated the trouble. Financial institutions had to think out of the box - fast - and Linux became an obvious alternative to consider. Several of the largest firms started to dump their proprietary Unix systems and shift to cheaper x86 hardware running Linux.

"Linux in and of itself as an operating system was not the driver," says an IT executive at a major global financial institution who didn't want to disclose his name and company. "The fact is, Linux enabled us to use a commodity platform. Trading in very expensive [Sun] Sparc-based systems for much lower-priced commodity Intel systems was the biggest win." He says the "cataclysmic event" that paved the way for his firm to make the switch was the release of a more stable 2.4 upgrade to the Linux kernel in late 2000. The Linux/Intel server combination would ultimately enable the firm to save "tens of millions of dollars" in IT costs across thousands of servers.

"There's nothing we wouldn't run on it," the IT executive says.

Cost savings were making the decision a no-brainer. When the Amsterdam office of AtosEuronext looked to replace its on-floor trading operations with an electronic system about six years ago, calculations showed it would need 24 additional CPUs, at $1 million per processor, for its quoting system if it stuck with the Tandem NonStops it used for the main trading system, says Willem Gorter, manager of the project.

So Atos first decided to try Hewlett-Packard Co. Tru64 Unix servers for its quoting systems and IBM RS6000s running AIX for the data-dissemination servers. But it never finished the migration after discovering that the DDS application ran 10 times cheaper and four times faster on HP dual-processor Xeon boxes with Red Hat Linux. The quote servers doubled their performance on the Intel-based servers.

Plus, the DDS application port took just 15 days, and the quoting system took about 30 days. The total project cost checked in at $17 million, including 80 servers and labor, says Gorter.

"Most of the effort with porting it to Linux was convincing everyone that it would work," he says. The staff later marveled when the system ran for a year and half without interruption.

Strength in Numbers

Major financial institutions became one of the most powerful lobbies for Linux, pooling their clout to get their software vendors to support the operating system. They collectively urged their many software vendors to port applications to Linux. Reuters Group PLC was one of the first to step up to the plate, porting its Reuters Market Data System to Linux. Donovan Ransome, director of channel marketing for the RMDS, says more than half of the company's 20 biggest customers converted to Linux during the past three years.

Financial institutions became the No. 1 source of revenue for Red Hat in Europe, where the bulk of its sales come from the U.K., France and Germany, according to Werner Knoblich, Red Hat's director of Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Although Linux is technically free, few companies are willing to run it without a support and maintenance contract.

In Norway, every borough, department and school had been maintaining its own IT infrastructure, and the city of Bergen was anxious to consolidate systems into a central computing center. In 2001, Bergen's city council voted that open-source should be considered for all future software acquisitions.

The first big server project involved moving 100 schools from more than 100 aging Windows NT 4 boxes to fewer than 20 centrally managed IBM blade servers for Web, file-and-print, e-mail and directory services. The IT staff designed a test to pit Windows against Novell Inc.'s SUSE Linux. Linux won because the hardware performed better with it, and the cost was 30% less. Next up is the migration of 75 Oracle Corp. databases that run on 30 servers to about 10 Linux servers. That long-term project will keep Bergen in step with corporate trends, as Linux gains traction in the data center from its initial sweet spot at the edge of the network.

"We started these projects out of necessity, because we had outdated systems or systems that were too expensive to run," says Ole-Bjorn Tuftedal, the city of Bergen's chief technology officer. "We ended up finding that Linux was in every way a viable alternative as a server operating system in an enterprise environment."

On the desktop, Linux support vendors continue to struggle for a high-profile success story that might drive adoption. Red Hat CEO Matthew Szulik says he's getting more inquiries from corporate executives about desktop Linux. But on the sales front, the vendor is careful to target companies with limited numbers of Windows-based applications, Knoblich notes. He says one of two serious pilots with large German companies could produce a migration of 30,000 desktops.

Philip Dawson, a London-based analyst at Gartner Inc., says many projects have gone through the test phase only to encounter challenges with application support and integration when it comes time for the rollout.

"It's been the 'year of the Linux desktop' since 1998. It hasn't happened," says Chris Ingle, a London-based analyst at IDC. "You don't find CIOs saying, 'My biggest priority is changing all the desktops.'"

Europe may outpace the U.S. with Linux desktop deployments, but even there, Linux captures only a small piece of the Windows-dominated market. And when it does, it's often thin-client or limited-function deployments, as opposed to the thick-client, knowledge-worker setups that Windows commands.

Novell never positions its desktop operating system as a replacement for Windows, according to Brian Green, director of solutions management for Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Green says Novell has been able to stop Microsoft Corp. from winning data center business, particularly in Germany, where its SUSE Linux AG unit remains strong in its home territory. But on the desktop, Novell focuses on clients where Linux might be a good fit, such as call centers or retail stores.

There have been some high-profile desktop Linux wins in the public sector. The city of Munich, for instance, made news with its selection of Linux. And the German state of Lower Saxony has 11,000 limited-function Linux desktops for its police force and plans to migrate 12,000 Solaris workstations to Linux for its tax administration department, according to Michael Breest, head of client/server systems at the Lower Saxony IT center. But that will still leave Lower Saxony with 31,000 Windows desktops.

Government Stance

Despite government statements on the national, regional and local level in Europe, Linux penetration remains strongest on servers in the public sector. Dawson says the government directives tend to affect the evaluation of Linux more than adoption. "And it puts [users] into a strong negotiating position with Microsoft," he adds.

The European Commission has shown mixed signals with respect to Linux, according to Graham Taylor, director of U.K.-based OpenForum Europe, a not-for-profit organization that is funded by vendors such as IBM, HP, Novell and Sun. Taylor says he has been encouraged to see the commission promote choice and indicate support for open-source software. Yet the EC remains a heavy user of Microsoft software, he adds.

In general, Taylor says, it will be important for Linux to gain a foothold on the desktop, "where people see it and touch it in an organization."

"In the infrastructure," he says, "it's hidden away. Ninety percent of the users won't even see it." Practical considerations often make it tough for corporations to consider enterprisewide Linux deployments. For instance, Banca Popolare di Milano is rolling out 4,500 SUSE Linux desktops with a Mozilla Web browser, a Web client for Lotus Notes, Sun's StarOffice suite and a Java-based custom suite of banking applications to its 500 branch offices.

CIO Clive Whincup says the bank wanted to avoid the headache of maintaining a separate collection of Windows servers for the branches, because it was already using the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol on Linux servers for its security infrastructure. The Milan-based bank runs 70 SUSE Linux images on its three IBM zSeries mainframes. But it has no plans to replace its 3,000 Windows desktops at its home office. The bank's users are accustomed to Windows-based applications.

"There is too much to migrate," says Whincup. "And there's not really an efficient business case to do it."

http://www.computerworld.com/industrytopics/financial/story/0,10801,103198,00.html

Grid Computing: The Grid Is Going Mainstream Fast

2005-07-15T15:00:00.000-07:00

The systems have come far from their roots, and are now maturing. Ohio Savings, Wachovia and CSFB are getting their feet wet, as the GSEs use it to clean up regulatory trouble.

By Michael Dumiak

Grid computing may still sound fringe to buttoned-down comptrollers looking over technology budgets at small Midwestern thrifts. They've got a point-grids came into being out of academic research labs and NASA's need for physicists.

But when a mortgage player like Cleveland's Ohio Savings starts talking about the grid, maybe it's not just for the space age any more. The firm's enterprise information manager, Tony Miller, says Ohio Savings is using a grid network now at the database level, running an $800,000 Oracle 10g system. Even so, he and project manager Ed Kizys figure soon to move the vital retail loan and mortgage-origination systems onto the grid, putting it right at the center of the firm's reason for being. After all, if the likes of Goldman Sachs are investing in grid-computing software companies-then grids must be something financial companies can use.

A wide variety of financial companies are starting to get on board. Grid computing is basically about distribution and power-sharing, collecting servers into nodes, spreading computations among multiple machines. "It really comes down to speed, doesn't it?" says Steve Manning, vp of computer networks at mortgage giant Freddie Mac. And sure, grids are seen more often these days among Wall Street shops and options players. A big trading desk breaks up calculations into small pieces and distribute them along a grid of computer nodes. Then the individual answers are reassembled into a final result. The nodes collect the power from various computers to gain efficiency and use otherwise-idle capacity, gaining more power and speed. The idea conjures warehouse-sized server farms and UNIVAC research labs-IBM just opened a Deep Computing On-Demand grid for rent to financial companies, for example-but it doesn't have to be that way.

"All the servers sit in one rack," Miller says of his setup in Ohio. "That includes tests and production." Ohio Savings is a $12 billion operation; the system offers more than a terabyte of power. Miller says Ohio Savings' grid is made up of a three-node cluster. The firm is using its Oracle grid, running on Red Hat Linux on HP DL380 servers, to carry its call center for retail customers and on-line banking system, part of its internal portal and voice-response unit telephone system. It ties back in to a storage environment provided by EMC. "None of these are heavily loaded systems where we have a lot of concurrent usage," Miller says. "This was basically done to prove out the 10g environment, to make sure it worked."

As opposed to the more down-to-earth Ohio players, DataSynapse software is running on grid systems at massive institutions from Wachovia to Credit Suisse First Boston. It's running where one might expect a need for huge numbers of calculations fast-for risk management, for the options and fixed-income desks of worldwide trading operations. It's about the speed. Wachovia's fixed-income group, for instance, used to run 4,000 risk simulations a day for options, and those numbers would have to be crunched overnight. The processing power in grids allow 20,000 to 100,000 simulations daily. Chief executive Peter Lee says speed is compelling, but it's not everything. "Another part is availability," he says. "Uptime. When you move to a fabric of hundreds of nodes, or even dozens of nodes, one going down doesn't end your system."

It was a good enough proposition to interest the elite investment bank Goldman Sachs, long known as a technology innovator. After spending a year investigating grid technologies, Goldman decided to use DataSynapse software in its global risk management operation. It also decided to sink money into Lee's company. But it's not just risk and derivatives driving grid, which is seeing a rise in popularity along with Linux adoption-making the likes of LinuxWorld program director Dave Rosenberg declare that "grid has gone mainstream." It means more efficient use of servers, distributed systems allowing for greater security, financial players are adopting service-oriented architectures that dovetail nicely into grids.

But for Freddie Mac? Necessity was the mother of invention. Two years ago Freddie, along with its sister mortgage market-maker Fannie Mae, ran into serious accounting issues-Freddie wound up having to restate earnings from 2000 to 2002, finding that executives underreported income of $5.3 billion to make its numbers smoother, resulting in a flurry of heads rolling and $125 million in civil penalties. Fannie overstated its income by $11 billion, forcing high-flying chief executive Franklin Raines to step down. "It was to solve problems internally," Freddie vp Manning says about the firm's introduction to grid, a little wryly. "There was a lot of number crunching."

About the same time the firm ran into trouble, Manning had been hearing from software vendors about grid technology and, once a small test had been done, was amazed at the results. Freddie built its system in-house. "In reviewing the financials I can't tell you how many models we had," he says. "We had one that was running for a month that we ran in about a day when we moved over to grid. We just wouldn't have been able to get things done." Manning's talking about default capital modeling for the mortgage giant, by which the tracks its portfolio when taking on assets or running them off; these inputs constantly vary the default likelihood of the portfolio, changing the amount of capital Freddie must keep on hand to meet regulatory safety requirements against a crash. It's a massive amount of information to track.

Freddie runs its grid on two data centers in the Washington, D.C., area with between 500 and 1,000 nodes, depending on need, each between one and four CPUs. They run on Intel boxes of various shapes and sizes, mostly HP and IBM.

For Manning, the goal of grid is speed translated into faster answers for more questions-from pricing and evaluation, to risk and to whether a trader will buy loans. And he sees a lot of room to roam. "Right now the grid is in a data center," he says. "We really want to start using the desktop assets." He notes unused desktops can be patched into a grid to "lend" their idle power. "I've got 9,000 PCs sitting on people's desks at any one time. Our next goal is to make those part of the grid."

Still Andrea Klein, the financial services industry strategist at software giant Oracle, expects grid technology to reach further into everyday financial uses. The most immediate-and perhaps much further-reaching than the fixed-income desks of Wall Street-is replacing the aging software in cash machines. Just now those millions of machines are underpinned by even bigger machines-IBM mainframes and the like. "That marketplace is ready to be churned. It's high-cost," she says. Oracle technology marketing vp Robert Shimp says grids are less complicated to install and hardware vendors are simplifying the wiring and processing that grids need; software layers are also being integrated into single stacks.

Klein is bullish on grids running Linux, which she argues runs better on those systems than Microsoft Windows-based software. With money machines becoming more sophisticated and processing needs increasing, however, Klein may have her finger on a point where even the thrift down the road takes a look at running grid-based software.

"You're going to see a lot more features and functions because they're going to be able to deliver more to the machine," Klein says. "The features and functions you'll be able to do at the ATM itself will be far more varied. It takes a lot of power."

http://www.banktechnews.com/article.html?id=20050701DAJNGF4J

Oracle's Small Step, Bigger Plan

2005-07-08T03:37:00.000-07:00

The acquisition of tiny ProfitLogic is a major move into the retail-software industry -- one that ups the pressure on SAP

When Oracle (ORCL ) announced its acquisition of privately held ProfitLogic on July 5, the markets yawned. The value of the deal wasn't disclosed, and analysts estimate that the tiny company will sell only $50 million in software next year, at best.Even the most generous estimates peg the deal below $200 million. Compare that to the headline-grabbing $10 billion acquisition of PeopleSoft and the purchase of Retek earlier this year, and tiny ProfitLogic would appear to be just a blip on Oracle's consolidation roadmap.

Don't be fooled. What this deal lacks in size, it makes up in strategy.

ADVANTAGE, ORACLE? Along with Retek, ProfitLogic is Oracle's second retail-software acquisition -- one of the few industries with a market still largely up for grabs. It's also one of two verticals that competitor SAP (SAP ) has openly said it's targeting for future growth, along with financial services. "Retail is a green field for both of us," Chief Executive Larry Ellison said in a recent interview with BusinessWeek. "That's where we can beat them." (See BW Online, 06/30/05, "Larry Ellison's Roving Eye".)

Both the PeopleSoft and Retek deals were about Oracle playing catch-up with SAP. The German giant dominates business software, and had a six-month lead in the retail industry specifically. But the ProfitLogic deal, while small, gives Oracle something SAP didn't have: so-called profit-optimization software, which helps retailers crunch all the data they collect from scanning purchases. That information enables stores to better predict what quantities of particular products they need to stock and how much to charge for them, even down to single items in individual stores.

"I think SAP is letting the retail vertical slip through its fingers," says analyst Pat Walravens of JMP Securities in San Francisco. "Oracle has taken a big step forward here."

KEY NICHE. It's not like SAP is standing still, however. It bid $496 million for Retek earlier this year in an attempt to gain more market share. That prompted a bidding war, which Oracle won with its final offer of $650 million.

According to some analysts, a similar scenario played out with ProfitLogic. Since it's a private company, none of those involved will comment. But Peter Coleman, an analyst at ThinkEquity Partners in San Francisco, says that ProfitLogic received competing bids -- and Oracle's was higher. "I have some friends very close to this deal, and what I heard was there was some desire to do a deal with SAP, but Oracle provided a bid that was irresistible," he says.

Why are Oracle and SAP intent on bolstering their retail smarts? It's one of the few industries with no dominant software player.

UP FOR GRABS. The market for enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, which includes applications that automate everything from human resources to accounting, grew at 14% last year -- with one-third due to favorable currency exchange rates. Meanwhile, the supply-chain software market, geared toward warehousing and logistics, increased by a lackluster 6%, according to AMR Research. Simply put, that section of the market is saturated. Most big companies interested in these applications already have bought them.

Two big exceptions: the retail and financial-services industries, where most companies have built their own software with the help of pricey consultants and in-house developers. Currently, retailers spend $20 billion a year on technology, with a good $7 billion or so on software alone, according to AMR Research.

One of the hottest-growing applications is the profit-optimization software that is ProfitLogic's specialty. "It allows you to improve margins or revenue without really doing anything," Walravens says. "You don't have to build new warehouses or add square footage or be nicer to customers. All you do is change the prices."

"WAKE-UP CALL." ProfitLogic had built a base of about 30 customers, some 95% of which already run on Oracle's databases, with 25% also using Retek's software. That will make integration of all the products easier, company executives pointed out in a July 5 conference call. Most of ProfitLogic's customers are clothing and department stores such as Bloomingdales and Federated Department Stores (FD ).

In all, Oracle now has 1,900 retail customers. SAP still has the lead with 2,400 retail customers, including Fossil (FOSL ), JCrew, and Home Depot (HD ). And one retailer -- Samsonite -- has switched to SAP since Oracle bought Retek. "We will successfully meet any competitive challenge in this market segment," SAP said in a statement.

That will likely mean more deals from both sides. From private companies' perspective, the software rivals' bidding war is yielding better prices than they could likely achieve by taking the IPO route and going public.

Now close to being able to offer just about any software a retailer could want, Oracle doesn't seem to be pausing to digest its purchases. Meanwhile, analysts say SAP might want to rethink its acquisition strategy before the retail market slips away. "I think this is a wake-up call for [SAP]," ThinkEquity's Coleman says. "Oracle is a deal or two away from locking up the vertical."

NEXT MOVE? Either outfit could strike next by buying a point-of-sale software product, like 360Commerce, a privately held company that analysts say is about the same size as ProfitLogic. Before too long, they also expect to see acquisitions of software companies that specialize in financial services.

These deals may not grab the same attention as a $10 billion hostile takeover, but strategically they're key if Oracle is to challenge SAP and expand from the core database and application-server businesses that still drive 80% of its revenues. "It's another skirmish in the global war of ERP domination," says Alexi Sarnevitz, research director at AMR Research. And with each purchase -- small or large -- that war is escalating.

http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/jul2005/tc2005077_9406_tc024.htm?campaign_id=nws_techn_jul8&link_position=link1

Oracle to buy software maker ProfitLogic

2005-07-06T04:21:00.000-07:00

Tue Jul 5, 2005 11:49 PM BST

By Spencer Swartz

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Oracle Corp. on Tuesday said it is buying private retail software maker ProfitLogic for undisclosed terms in the latest in a string of deals by the world's No. 2 software company to raise the performance of its applications business through acquisitions.

Oracle, the leading maker of database software, is looking to boost its role in supplying applications that run on top of databases, as it competes with rivals such as SAP and International Business Machines Corp..

Oracle shares traded up slightly after hours after initially dipping almost 1 percent after the proposed acquisition was announced.

ProfitLogic makes software that helps retailers make more accurate sales forecasts and pricing decisions by analyzing customer demand patterns.

ProfitLogic, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has about 250 employees and around 30 customers, including upscale department store Bloomingdale's and the Toys R Us retail chain.

ProfitLogic and Oracle declined to provide financial details about ProfitLogic's business, but AMR Research estimates the company will have between $40 million and $50 million in revenues in 2005.

Oracle's proposed deal is expected to close by the end of July.

It follows four other Oracle takeovers this year, including its $11.1 billion acquisition of rival PeopleSoft and two other privately held software makers.

Bruce Richardson, a senior software analyst at AMR Research in Boston, said the deal helps Oracle boost its software product offerings in specific industries, such as retail and financial services.

The proposed deal will be Oracle's second recent buyout in the retail software "vertical," or industry, segment after it bought Retek in the spring for about $700 million.

Buying small companies also avoids the integration risks associated with large acquisitions, Richardson said.

"This is not a surprise. They want to flesh-out their vertical strategy ... (Buying) ProfitLogic allows Oracle to either integrate the products or sell them on a stand-alone basis," Richardson said.

Oracle and ProfitLogic executives said in a conference call that most ProfitLogic customers already use either Oracle's database or at least one of Oracle's application products. Oracle said most ProfitLogic executives and employees will likely be retained.

Redwood Shores, California-based Oracle is the world's biggest database maker, but is hoping to undercut market leader SAP in the market for software applications that automate business processes such as payroll, pension benefits and demand forecasting.

ProfitLogic has been funded by companies such as Bain Capital Partners and JP Morgan Partners.

Oracle stock traded up 2 cents in late after hours trade at $13.29 after closing down 2 cents at $13.27 on Nasdaq.

http://today.reuters.co.uk/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=technologyNews&storyID=2005-07-05T224959Z_01_N05159990_RTRIDST_0_TECH-TECH-ORACLE-DC.XML

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

2005-06-19T08:41:00.000-07:00

Oracle-Peoplesoft-JD Edwards Support Strategy, April 2005

Oracle-Peoplesoft-JD Edwards Application Strategy, April 2005

Time Is Now for Banks to Rethink Payment Strategies

2005-06-12T07:34:00.000-07:00

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

2005-06-12T07:26:00.000-07:00

By Lisa Vaas
June 10, 2005

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

Oracle Acquisition Drive Continues

2005-06-11T08:58:00.000-07:00

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

2005-06-11T08:47:00.000-07:00

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

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

2005-06-08T10:39:00.000-07:00

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)

2005-06-08T10:33:00.000-07:00

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 13^th, 2005

Time: 2:15 – 4:30 pm

OAUG Connection Point, Grapevine, TX

2005-06-08T10:32:00.000-07:00

Oracle Featured Speakers

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!

Oracle Product Information Management Data Hub

2005-06-01T20:58:00.000-07:00

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

Fidelity Information Services Continues Oracle(R) Integration with BPEL

2005-05-25T19:51:00.000-07:00

Press Release

Source: Fidelity National Financial, Inc.

Fidelity Information Services Continues Oracle(R) Integration with BPEL
Wednesday May 25, 7:30 am ET

JACKSONVILLE, Fla., May 25 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Fidelity National Financial, Inc. (NYSE: FNF - News), a Fortune 500 provider of products and outsourced services and solutions to financial institutions and the real estate industry, and its Fidelity Information Services ("Fidelity") division announce that Fidelity will integrate Oracle® BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) Process Manager into its Xpress Enterprise Services (XES) solution.

Fidelity XES is an integrated suite of standards-based banking components that provide robust functionality through a service-oriented architecture. With XES, financial services institutions can implement Business Process Management (BPM) capabilities and ensure system interoperability across the enterprise. XES provides an extensive inventory of services using the Interactive Financial eXchange (IFX) standard protocol and also supports proprietary XML and other legacy formats.

The integration of XES with Oracle BPEL Process Manager will allow financial institutions to streamline business processes and lower operational costs by providing best practice, enterprise-wide standards and consistency, and automating multi-step host application activities. "The high cost of maintaining multiple transaction processing systems plagues the financial services industry," said Dave Klebba, vice president, financial services for Oracle. "Additionally, these systems are often redundant. For example, multiple systems may have their own functions for accessing customer information or checking on credit history. Oracle BPEL Process Manager allows companies to begin the transition to lessen the costs of these systems by introducing a highly manageable 'integration layer' composed of common processes that can be shared by the transaction processing systems. We think FIS is out in front of the market with its application architecture and available content. Financial services institutions should gain from their thought leadership."

Utilizing a service-oriented architecture, XES delivers operational efficiencies by allowing financial institutions to leverage their services and business processes across the enterprise. In addition, XES provides the business process, transaction, and integration management framework that is essential to enabling BPM. Using self-contained business functions represented by discrete web services, organizations can leverage these functions across multiple processing systems. "BPEL is an evolving standard across the industry and we wanted a strong partner who would help us lead our customers with a technology solution and strategy," said Frank Sanchez, president, leveraged product development for Fidelity Information Services. "Oracle BPEL Process Manager delivers the capability and future that we needed for XES and our core banking solutions. Combining BPEL with the industry standard IFX provides a very leverageable and efficient solution to the financial services market."

http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/050525/flw009.html?.v=12

Fusion Platform Updates at OAUG Connection Point® 2005

2005-05-17T20:48:00.000-07:00

You won’t want to miss this year’s compelling featured speaker, Cliff Godwin, Senior Vice President — Applications Technology Group, Oracle Corporation. Godwin will be on hand during OAUG Connection Point^® 2005 to share Oracle’s vision for its Fusion platform.

During this session, learn about the latest updates for Fusion, which is the next generation of the technology stack that will, in the future, run all of Oracle’s Applications business. An open Internet standards-based applications product is the goal behind Fusion.

Godwin is scheduled to speak during the general session on Tuesday, June 14, 2005, from 8:45 a.m. to 9:45 a.m.

In addition, the OAUG and Quest International Users Group will be hosting two informational sessions regarding the recently formed Fusion Council, which exists to provide future users of Oracle’s Fusion software with an educational tool and forum for learning more about the product and act as a bridge between users and Oracle Corporation in the collection of business requirements for development of the Fusion product. Also learn how the OAUG’s Enhancement Request System will aid in the gathering of these requirements.

The Fusion Council sessions will be held on Tuesday, June 14, 2005, from 3:45 p.m. to 4:45 p.m., and Wednesday, June 15, 2005, from 3:45 to 4:45 p.m.

To register, view the tentative agenda grid (PDF format — subject to change) or view a complete listing of all papers, panels, training sessions, Star Partners, exhibitors and keynote speakers, visit the OAUG Connection Point^® 2005 Web site.

Please note: The advance registration deadline has been extended to Tuesday, May 31, 2005.

OAUG Connection Point^® 2005 will be held in collaboration with the Quest Conference & Expo 2005. Quest International Users Group is a global, not-for-profit association for the J.D. Edwards World and EnterpriseOne community.

Oracle FSI Product Map

2005-05-14T09:44:00.000-07:00

Oracle's FSI Product Map...

Oracle and Partners Announce Project MegaGrid

2005-05-14T09:34:00.000-07:00

In an effort to develop a standard approach to building and deploying an enterprise grid infrastructure that can outperform traditional big iron solutions at a fraction of the cost, Oracle, Dell, EMC, and Intel have partnered to form Project MegaGrid. By offering a single, validated set of deployment best practices for grid computing, Project MegaGrid addresses these and many other challenges:

	Reducing Cost: Predefined and pre-tested technology combinations help save money by minimizing downtime, and simplifying the deployment and management of grid infrastructures.
	Improving Quality of Service: End-to-end testing, validation, and documentation of clustering, load balancing, and high availability configurations enables IT to set reliable service levels for the business with fast response times.
	Reducing Risk: Validated solutions and cooperative engineering minimize downtime and expedite maintenance and support processes.
	Managing Growth: Joint Grid solutions revolve around scalability and centralized management to accommodate growth in hardware and users at a low cost.
	Accelerating Time to Value: Pre-tested, validated best practices simplify and accelerate deployment time for customers.

Next Steps

	Discover how Project MegaGrid can benefit your organization: Download the free Project MegaGrid FAQ. (PDF)
	Project MegaGrid: Practical Guidance for Deploying Large Clusters. (PDF)
	Project MegaGrid: Performance Collection and Analysis in Large Clusters. (PDF)
	Project MegaGrid: Capacity Planning for Large Commodity Clusters. (PDF)

New $4.3m centre aims to help firms enter the grid

2005-05-14T09:21:00.000-07:00

S'pore partners private sector to develop high-speed computing initiatives, reports RAJU CHELLAM

Business Times
12 May 2005

THE Infocomm Development Authority (IDA) of Singapore has teamed up with Oracle Singapore, Sun Microsystems and Dell Singapore to set up the region's first 'Enterprise-g Centre' to get more companies to adopt grid computing across the Asia Pacific.

The $4.3 million investment in the centre will help companies test pilot projects in enterprise grid computing, Oracle said.

Oracle and IDA have also partnered for another initiative called gMap - for Enterprise-g Manpower Progamme - to boost the development of grid capabilities among companies in the region. The aim is to tap a global grid-computing market that's set to cross US$12 billion in revenues by 2007, according to research firm IDC Corp.

Grid computing is an emerging technology that enables large-scale sharing of widely distributed computing resources to solve specific problems. In Singapore, for example, the National University of Singapore (NUS) is setting up a supercomputing grid that will initially link 800 personal computers to act as a single massive unit. The aim is to link more than 3,000 PCs in two years, which could make the NUS Grid the world's largest by then.

'The gMap initiative is part of a goal that we set for the Enterprise-g@Singapore project that we launched in July 2004 - to create a pool of 300 people in the grid-computing field the next two to three years,' said Stanley Chew, managing director of Oracle Singapore.

'Of these, about 60 of them may rise to become enterprise grid-computing architects, and will be highly sought after for their skills and experience.'

Enterprise-g@Singapore was a joint initiative between IDA and Oracle with a projected investment of $25 million - including the $4.3 million in the centre - over three years. 'Some of the sectors in Singapore that are exploring grid computing include financial services, manufacturing, engineering design and biotechnology,' Mr Chew said.

Late last year, Oracle teamed up with Dell Inc, EMC Corp and Intel Corp to form Project MegaGrid, a complete grid-computing solution that will help companies harness huge amounts of computing resources at a fraction of the cost.

Last month, Oracle and British research firm Quocirca compiled the first global index of grid computing and ranked Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand near the top for their readiness and capacity to adopt the technology.

'Grid computing presents great opportunities and benefits for Singapore as it brings a paradigm shift from the ownership of computational assets to the buying of computing services,' said IDA chief executive Chan Yeng Kit. 'In Singapore, apart from research and education, grid computing has found its way into growth sectors such as construction and manufacturing, digital media, business process outsourcing and financial services sectors.'

Financial services firm Charles Schwab, for example, uses grid computing to integrate data, analyse customer profiles and provide specific product offerings to customers. Lucasfilm - maker of the Star Wars films - uses grid computing to make high-definition films. Some movie production houses are using the technology to digitally restore old films, or provide layers of special effects to new ventures.

URL: http://it.asia1.com.sg/newsdaily/news001_20050513.html

2005-05-07T13:10:00.000-07:00

Oracle OpenWorld Amsterdam Presentations available for download:

Managing Corporate Performance: Dream or Reality? - John Schoenherr, VP – Analytic Solutions, Oracle Corporation (2.36MB)
Gaining Value from Business Intelligence: Integrating the Customer Data Hub with Your Data Warehouse - Nick Whitehead, Solution Sales - EMEA BI & Data Warehouse, Oracle Corporation (818KB)
Oracle Daily Business Intelligence Architecture - Jeffrey Kirk, Product Director - Apps Development, Oracle Corporation (2.62MB)
The many challenges of integration: processes, data, applications and platforms - Massimo Pezzini, Oracle Corporation (717KB)
Content Management for the Rest of Us - Rich Buchheim, Senior Director - Product Management and ECM Strategy, Oracle Corporation (4.30MB)
Real Time Collaboration in the Enterprise - Anindo Roy, Director - S/W Development, Oracle Real Time Collaboration Group, Oracle Corporation (3.70MB)
Location Technology and Applications with Oracle 10G - Euro Beinat, Geodan Mobile Solutions (1.38MB)
Increasing Control: Centrally Managing Statutory Requirements and Corporate Policy Compliance - Francis Veldeman and Olivier Arthus, Oracle EMEA (688KB)
Oracle Customer Service: Information Driven Service - Stephen Slade, HQ Product Director – CRM Service and Wilfred Sholman, EMEA Principal Consultant, Oracle Corporation (3.60MB)
General Ledger: Improve the Transparency and Auditability of your Corporation - Gerard Verton and Ad de Kievit, Deloitte (965KB)
Link Planning to Execution with Oracle Enterprise Planning and Budgeting - John Schoenherr, VP – Analytic Solutions and Dirk de Ridder, Principle Sales Consultant, Oracle EMEA (373KB)
Revenue and Receivables Management: ‘How to keep your boat?’ - Arno van der Weijden, Atos Origin (2.47MB)
RFID, Mobile and the Brave New World of Sensor based Computing - Simon Pollard, VP - EMEA Industrial Sector, RFID & Sensor Based Services and Edwin W. Kalischnig, Director - Business Development, RFID & Sensor Based Services, Oracle Corporation
Efficiency, Customer Service and Lean Agility with Oracle Discrete Manufacturing - Nick Arrowsmith, EMEA Supply Chain, Oracle Corporation
Advanced Procurement: Development Update on Oracle’s SRM Offering - David Hope-Ross, Senior Director - Procurement Applications, Oracle Corporation.
Unbundling Billing Complexity: Enabling a Convergent Process Architecture for Telecoms - Marc T. Stolte, Director - Telecoms, Oracle EMEA
Support Complex Business Models with Adaptive Order Fulfillment - Drew Campbell, Vice President - Order Fulfillment Products, Oracle Corporation

Software 2005 - Charles Phillips Key Note presentation

2005-05-07T13:05:00.000-07:00

Theme of presentation: Simplicity is the key organizing principle of the 21st century...view this presentation at:

http://www.sandhill.com/conferences/sw2005_proceedings/phillips.pdf

Oracle Financials 11.5.10 - Overview

2005-05-07T12:09:00.000-07:00

Sign-up at the FIN-SIG Yahoo Group to download this presentation at:

http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/oaug-fin-sig/files/Oracle%20Presentations/

Oracle execs talk up Fusion plans

2005-05-01T13:29:00.000-07:00

Two top Oracle executives met with analysts and customers in New York on Monday as part of an Oracle road show aimed at reassuring those nervous about Oracle's recent buying spree and its plans for a merged applications set, dubbed Fusion, incorporating its purchases.

"I know you're all wondering: is there some strategy behind all this bizarre behavior over the last six months, us buying all these companies, or is it just Oracle being Oracle?" company President Charles Phillips said at the event's start.

Phillips and John Wookey, Oracle's applications development head, reiterated the points Oracle first laid out in January, when it introduced its Fusion road map. Oracle will deliver one more major update, due in 2006, in each of its three applications lines -- its own E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft Enterprise, and EnterpriseOne (formerly J.D. Edwards) -- and release an applications set built on a new, Java-based architecture, Fusion, in 2008. Customers on all of the product lines will be able to smoothly upgrade to Fusion without any greater pain than they encounter in a standard applications upgrade, executives said.

Oracle 'Fusion' Sounds Good, but Will It Happen?

2005-05-01T13:21:00.000-07:00

"Fusion is a smart move. It is a response to the issue of how to get value (both to Oracle as well as its customers) from synergy from multiple code bases," Andrew White, senior analyst, Gartner, told CRM Buyer. The first product will be a Fusion middleware, which will eventually underlie all its applications. Due out in limited release at the end of the year, it will be Java-based and have a service-oriented architecture so its components can be easily broken out.

http://www.crmbuyer.com/story/Oracle-Fusion-Sounds-Good-but-Will-it-Happen-42539.html

Oracle Rebrands Middleware As Fusion

2005-05-01T13:18:00.000-07:00

Oracle is slapping a new "Fusion" moniker on its array of middleware and development tools.

"Oracle Fusion Middleware" to be formally announced Monday, will be the umbrella brand for some 32 products including Oracle's J2EE server, portal, data integration, application development, business intelligence, identity management, and collaboration offerings, said Rick Schultz, vice president of product marketing for middleware.

The products will also still carry their usual version designation, as in Application Server 10g, he added.

The group is borrowing the "fusion" moniker that has already been applied to a proposed next-generation applications that would meld the best features and functions of the current Oracle, PeopleSoft and JD Edwards portfolio.

Schultz also sketched in some more details of when Oracle will add integration between its middleware and its newly acquired applications from PeopleSoft and JD Edwards.

"When we acquired PeopleSoft and JD Edwards, their apps worked only on our competitors' middleware exclusively. We're committed to continuing that support on whatever middleware but it's natural that customers in this installed base have asked when Oracle middleware products will support them," Schultz said.

Oracle plans to roll out PeopleSoft integration in two phases starting in the second quarter of 2005 with certification for Oracle's BPEL process manager its LDAP directory servers. The second phase, slated for the fourth quarter of 2005, will add planned certification of its J2EE server, portal server and integration server, the rest of its identity management technology. All of this integration pertains to PeopleSoft Enterprise Versions 8.4, 8.8, and 8.9, he said.

For JD Edwards there is an analogous two-phase rollout planned. The first, due in the third quarter, will see Oracle's J2EE server, portal server, identity management and BPEL process manager certified for JD Edwards. The remaining components will be certified in the first quarter of 2006, he said.

http://informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=161501223

Oracle in the Financial Services Industry - Executive Overview

2005-05-01T09:07:00.000-07:00

See this presentation by Oracle executive Mark Smedley, Senior Industry Director, Financial Services

http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/oaug-fin-sig/files/Oracle%20Presentations/

FSI - Realizing a single source of financial truth

2005-05-01T09:02:00.000-07:00

See this presentation by Oracle executive Alan Payne, VP Financial Services Industry

http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/oaug-fin-sig/files/Oracle%20Presentations/

Corporate Performance Management & Governance in global Financial Services sector

2005-05-01T08:34:00.000-07:00

See a presentation by Oracle executives Andrea Klein, VP Financial Services Industry Marketing & Brett Kennedy, Solutions Director FSI Aus & NZ

http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/oaug-fin-sig/files/Oracle%20Presentations/

Oracle Introduces New Risk Management Offering to Help Financial Services Organizations Comply with Basel II and Capitalize on New Business Opportunit

2005-04-30T19:45:00.000-07:00

http://www.oracle.com/global/be/corporate/press/2004_11_08_uk.html

Oracle previewed its Oracle Regulatory Capital Manager, a new offering designed to help financial services providers comply with the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) Third Consultative Paper (Basel II or the Accord) requirements, scheduled to take effect January 1, 2007. The offering can also help financial institutions to leverage Basel II to increase profitability.

Comprehensive Approach to Risk Management
Oracle Regulatory Capital Manager, a pillar of Oracle's comprehensive set of risk management tools, allows financial services organizations to capture and analyze the data required under Basel II, and subsequently calculate regulatory capital using any of the methods prescribed by the Accord. Financial services institutions can also analyze, edit and review calculations and data to help them in pursuing their optimal regulatory capital strategy. In addition to ad-hoc reporting capabilities, the offering provides out-of the box reports that let institutions quickly and easily view key regulatory capital data and helps them meet mandatory external reporting requirements.

"Our vision for Oracle Regulatory Capital Manager extended beyond delivering a basic tool to help financial services organizations achieve baseline Basel II compliance," said Alan Payne, vice president, Oracle Asia Pacific. "Instead, we designed a broad, highly flexible product that enables financial institutions to incorporate risk management into their daily business processes as a driver for improved business intelligence and performance. For example, out-of-the-box integration with other Oracle E-Business Suite applications, such as Oracle Performance Analyzer and Oracle Funds Transfer Pricing, allows financial institutions to use regulatory capital results to determine account, customer, business unit and product profitability measures on a risk-adjusted capital basis. The integration with Oracle Internal Controls Manager, another Oracle E-Business Suite application, allows financial services companies to leverage their regulatory investment to decrease regulatory capital and compliance costs even further."

Oracle OpenWorld, Mumbai Presentations

2005-04-30T19:18:00.000-07:00

http://www.oracle.com/global/in/corporate/presentations/owmumbai/index.html

Look for FSI.....

Oracle to Integrate with SWIFTNet

2005-04-23T11:12:00.000-07:00

Oracle has announced its intention to enhance the Oracle E-Business Suite and Oracle Application Server to be compatible with SWIFT, the industry-owned cooperative providing secure, standardized messaging services and interface software to 7,650 financial institutions in more than 200 countries. Oracle plans to complete the first phase of the integration initiative in the first half of 2005.

The SWIFT community includes banks, broker/dealers and investment managers, as well as their market infrastructures in payments, securities, treasury and trade.

This integration into SWIFT's messaging platform, SWIFTNet, is part of an initiative designed to help enterprises improve operational efficiency and reduce risk by enabling seamless, back-office integration of critical information from numerous financial institutions. It is also expected to provide an opportunity for financial services providers to extend the information services and value they deliver to their business customers.

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1679896,00.asp

Oracle and Unisys to Collaborate on Enterprise Payments Solution

2005-04-23T11:00:00.000-07:00

Unisys payments engine and archive to run on Oracle® Database 10g to help financial institutions integrate data, improve visibility and maximize cost efficiencies
http://www.unisys.com/financial/news_a_events/all__news/02148509.htm

Identity and Web Services Management Solutions for the Financial Services Industry

2005-04-23T10:48:00.000-07:00

Some of the most pressing issues facing financial services companies today are security, privacy, data integrity, and regulatory compliance. In addition, every aspect of your company's operations may be open to government oversight or legal liability. Identity Management and Web Services Management Solutions help financial services firms deliver their customers a wide variety of eBusiness applications without sacrificing security, privacy, or regulatory compliance laws.

Read more at...
http://www.oblix.com/solutions/finance/index.html

Oracle Data Hubs

2005-04-23T10:11:00.000-07:00

Now Available — Oracle Customer Data Hub
Oracle Customer Data Hub centralizes, updates, and cleans all you customer data, then synchronizes the data with your applications for a true 360-degree view of your customers. And your can get the benefits of Oracle Customer Data Hub even if you don’t run any other Oracle applications. Find out more…

Coming in 2005
At Oracle OpenWorld 2004, four new data hub offerings were announced. Details on availability and pricing will be available in early 2005.

•	Oracle Citizen Data Hub Lets government agencies create and manage a comprehensive, accurate citizen data repository for better decision making, faster response times, and improved citizen service.
•	Oracle Financial Consolidation Hub Lets managers control the financial consolidation process by integrating and automating data synchronization, currency translation, inter-company eliminations, acquisitions and disposals, and more.
•	Oracle Financial Services Accounting Data Hub Enables financial institutions to address the complex demands of centralizing financial operation data, standardizing accounting and reporting, and accelerating regulatory disclosure and management reporting cycles. Can be deployed with Oracle Financial Services Applications.
•	Oracle Product Data Hub Centralizes product information from disparate systems to create a single global catalog that serves as the master for all other systems, departments, customers, and suppliers. http://www.oracle.com/data_hub/index.html

UBS Switzerland Proves Oracle Financials Can Run the World's Largest General Ledger

2005-04-15T13:37:00.000-07:00

"Particularly in the world of banking, high performance and reliability are critical system requirements. Our benchmark test shows that Oracle software can reliably deliver one of the world's largest general ledgers and still fulfill our stringent requirements for performance--an impressive result." -- Thierry Schaffluetzel, Project Director, GEAR CH, UBS Switzerland

Two-Terabyte General Ledger Runs on Oracle

As one of the world's premiere banking institutions, UBS Switzerland has always been at the forefront of developing new financial systems and technologies. In a recent initiative, for example, UBS is pioneering a new business solution that combines financial and management accounting in a single system. Called GEAR for Global Environment for Accounting and Reporting, the new system will address the growing array of business and statutory reporting requirements and at the same time boost the quality and efficiency of its accounting processes.

UBS's system breaks new ground in computing sophistication, adopting a multidimensional approach to accounting that enables the bank to process huge numbers of balance positions and millions of daily postings. The overall UBS accounting architecture includes a central accounting logic, ledger system, valuation processes, and reporting layer. For the ledger system, UBS selected Oracle General Ledger, a component of Oracle Financials.

Before launching the GEAR system, UBS needed to prove its viability under high-volume business conditions. As a result, UBS, Oracle and hardware-supplier Sun Microsystems commissioned a test at Sun's iForce Ready Center in Volketswil, Switzerland. The benchmark test simulated a real-life business environment with 500 million accounting postings and balances per month--involving more than two terabytes of data.

High-Level Project Goals

Import and post at least 10 million postings in less than one hour

Perform a period open at month end in less than 12 hours

Extract 500 million balances in less than 60 minutes and calculate the daily balance sheet in less than 30 minutes

Why Oracle?

UBS chose Oracle for its global leadership, expertise and proven ability to meet UBS' exacting requirements. Oracle and Sun also had the technical ability and size to design and install the test platform, which included a standard version of Oracle General Ledger software. Helping with the test were teams from Oracle Consulting Switzerland, Oracle Switzerland, Oracle EMEA, Oracle Product Development, Sun Switzerland, and Sun Oracle Applications Technology Center.

Testing the World's Largest General Ledger

The UBS benchmark test was a success, meeting all of the performance criteria established by the tream. In the sheer volume of data processed, it represented the world's largest implementation of Oracle General Ledger. As such, UBS's system presented huge challenges in terms of operability, manageability, and throughput. Even a simple update of a column can take hours. But with proper tuning--a key part of the benchmark test--the challenges were met.

Now, more than 20 million postings can be processed in two hours with the CPU running at a 90% usage level. Another major goal of tuning was to align the parallel long-running activities. By taking advantage of Oracle Database technology such as partitioning, hash joins and parallel queries, the team succeeded in extracting a 200-gigabyte table in less than an hour.

Future Plans

While the test used simulated data, it followed UBS' business rules as strictly as possible, and the results were successful in convincing UBS to proceed with a full implementation.

http://www.oracle.com/pls/cis/Profiles.print_html?p_profile_id=8082

GE Capital Bank France Unifies French and American Accounting Practices

2005-04-15T13:34:00.000-07:00

"Oracle Financials lets us automate our planning process and data consolidation. Our financial planning and analysis staff can fully perform their roles as analysts and work closer with their operational managers--with greater speed and flexibility." --Laurent Plumer, E-Finance Leader for Financial Process Digitization and Automation, GE Capital Bank France

For several years following its 1995 acquisition by U.S.-based General Electric, GE Capital Bank France struggled to simultaneously manage its books in dollars and euros, a situation that was compounded by the need to adhere to evolving French and American accounting regulations.

GE Capital Bank France faced increasing pressure to comply with a number of requirements from its corporate parent and its shareholders--as well as from French banking regulations mandating that the bank's different lines of business follow distinct accounting formulas in their reporting. On top of that, the bank had to provide reports based on two different close dates--one on the last day of the month to adhere to French banking laws; and another on the 20th day of the month to fit its parent company's requirements.

To remedy the situation, GE Capital Bank France implemented Oracle Financials and Oracle Financial Analyzer. Since then, the bank has seen a reduction in the overall complexity of business processes, improved overall management and reporting, and has created a single source data--consolidating duplicate data from disparate locations within the bank's system, while ensuring greater data accuracy.

Solving the Currency Translation Dilemma

Following the acquisition, GE Capital Bank France labored with manual procedures and spreadsheets to submit accounting reports that comply with U.S. GAAP (or generally accepted accounting principles) regulations. "In 2000, we decided to completely restructure our old financial management system, which was incapable of managing all of our constraints," explained Laurent Plumer, e-finance leader for financial process digitization and automation at GE Capital Bank France. "In effect, we had established one accounting practice in accordance with French standards and one in accordance with American standards. And our commercial entities had a different chart of accounts from our banking entities. We had to constantly make the connection between the statutory and regulatory accounts submitted in France and the reports intended for the United States."

Closing the accounts using GE Capital Bank's manual accounting efforts took an unacceptable 20 working days. It also failed to give management the dynamic reporting and financial modeling capabilities it needed to achieve better, faster decision-making.

Oracle Financials lets GE Capital Bank reconcile its French and American accounting standards and approaches, various charts of accounts, and budgetary sessions for each core activity. "It frees us from the mass of manual tasks, requests, and spreadsheets, and works in perfect harmony with our data security policies," Plumer said. Largely used by our financial planning and analysis (FP&A) department, Oracle Financial Analyzer generates dynamic and interactive reports that include drill-down capabilities applicable from net profit/loss accounting through the supporting accounts.

Closing Time Reduced 75%

Oracle Financial Analyzer also provides an outstanding audit trail: Users can switch from one accounting standard to another in just a few mouse clicks. "A lot of companies face constraints in this type of exercise and few can overcome them with such flexibility," Plumer said. "Oracle's capabilities enable us to present instantaneous reports on the transition from one standard to another within all our entities. This functionality is particularly highly valued by our internal auditors, who now have the total visibility they require." Closing accounts now takes only five days, giving management access to current information on which to base their strategic decisions.

Advanced Analysis

Oracle Financial Analyzer automates financial modeling processes for GE Capital Bank France, allowing users to compare proposals for credit programs, look at variations between anticipated and actual results, or carry out sensitivity analyses. And the information can now easily be reported to the parent company in a manner appropriate to U.S. or French regulations. Formerly, these reporting processes required approximately one week's work, compared with a half-day turnaround today.

Another benefit is the improved strategic role of the organization's FP&A department. As Plumer explained, "With all these tools, FP&A staffers can pass beyond the role of Excel spreadsheet creators to become real analysts serving the operational departments."

Why Oracle?

General Electric, the parent company of GE Capital Bank France, utilizes Oracle General Ledger as the standard for its own financial management and for that of its other subsidiaries. In September 2000, GE Capital Bank France adopted Oracle General Ledger for its American accounting practices, eventually deciding to extend its use to the organization's French accounting practices as well. GE Capital Bank France selected Oracle Financial Analyzer as the best solution for its financial modeling and analysis needs.

Implementation Process

GE Capital Bank France implemented Oracle Financials with the support of an internal team based in United Kingdom. Beginning with the implementation of U.S. accounting standards, and later followed by French standards, the implementation took approximately 10 months. Oracle Financial Analyzer was implemented with the assistance of Oracle Partner i-d6.

http://www.oracle.com/pls/cis/Profiles.print_html?p_profile_id=100315

What will Oracle do now that it's finally bought PeopleSoft? PeopleSoft customers want to know

2005-04-10T10:14:00.000-07:00

http://www.cfo.com/printable/article.cfm/3804677?f=options

What will Oracle do now that it's finally bought PeopleSoft? PeopleSoft customers want to know.
Russ Banham, CFO Magazine
April 01, 2005

Russ Banham is a contributing editor at CFO.

FIN-SIG Event at OAUG Connection Point (June 13-15th, 2005)

2005-04-08T19:16:00.000-07:00

Our next SIG meeting will be held in Dallas on Monday 13th June 2005. We would like to invite each of you to join us and contribute to making this super education and networking opportunity a grand success:

Date/Time : 06/13/2005 (Time - To be confirmed)

Place : To be confirmed

Address : To be confirmed

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. (See draft Charter as it stands today and more details on our web-site
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 early 2005.
OAUG Enhancements Request System
Presentation: Oracle in the Fin. Services Industry – Oracle Corp.
Presentation: Customer case study: Implementing a Reporting Solution in a leading Financial Services Instiution – Noetix (to be confirmed)
Presentation: Customer case study :Implementing Oracle Lease Management at a leading Financial Services Institution - Gecis Software Solutions

We look forward to your presence at this meeting.

Kindly confirm if you will be able to attend. In case you cannot make it to the meeting but are still interested in the FIN-SIG please do send us an email with your contact details so we can keep you updated on the SIG minutes/ proceedings.

Thank you all in advance for your help in making this second FIN-SIG meeting, a success!

Warm Regards,

The OAUG FIN-SIG

Subhojit Roye, Rich Maddox & Samir Singh

Registration is now open for OAUG Connection Point 2005

2005-04-08T18:58:00.000-07:00

Registration is now open for OAUG Connection Point 2005.

Connection Point has been moved up a few months in the calendar (from September) and SIG and GEO meetings will now be held on Monday 13 June. (as opposed to the past few years where SIG and GEO meetings were held on a Sunday)

Connection Point 2005 should be very interesting this year as Connection Point will be held in Conjunction with the Peoplesoft Quest Conference & Expo 2005.