Oracle issues BEA deal ultimatum

Oracle on Tuesday threatened to walk away from its proposed acquisition of BEA Systems by Sunday unless the embattled software company agreed to a deal.

While the threat wiped nearly 4 per cent from BEA’s share price by mid-afternoon, the stock still stood above the $17-a-share Oracle offer, pointing to a belief on Wall Street that the brinkmanship had not seriously damped the prospect of a deal and that Oracle or another buyer would still end up paying a higher price.

“Oracle has no interest in a long, drawn-out process to acquire BEA,” Chuck Phillips, Oracle’s president, wrote in a letter addressed to the company’s board on Tuesday. The letter followed what Oracle said had been another rejection by the BEA board of its all-cash offer.

BEA rejected the latest approach, repeating its earlier claim that the offer “seriously undervalues” the company and adding that it was open to “a transaction that appropriately reflects BEA’s value, reached through a reasonable process.”

The attempt to bring a quick end to the BEA battle is in stark contrast to the fight over PeopleSoft, the deal that launched Oracle’s ambitious attempt to force consolidation in parts of the business software market. That fight lasted 18 months, in part because Oracle had to persuade a court to overturn a US antitrust objection to the deal.

Though he started by offering $16 a share for PeopleSoft and insisting at one point that that was his “final” price, Larry Ellison, Oracle’s chief executive officer, eventually paid $26.50 a share to win over the PeopleSoft board.

Justifying the offer for BEA, Mr Phillips said it represented a 21 per cent premium to the price the day before the proposal was announced and a 44 per cent premium to the level before activist investor Carl Icahn disclosed in August that he had bought a stake in the company.

Mr Icahn, BEA’s biggest shareholder and a critic of the company’s management, has been pressuring BEA to find another buyer.

Author: Richards Waters @ www.ft.com

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Oracle wins CRM deal with Jafza

Jebel Ali Free Zone (JAFZA) has deployed Oracle's E-Business Suite in a bid to improve its customer service offering and achieve greater operational efficiency.

The free zone, which is located in the Jebel Ali area of Dubai, said the customer relationship management (CRM) solution would enable it to significantly enhance its customer service experience and boost the number of services that is it able to offer online.

"We needed a solution that could scale with our growth and be flexible in adapting to varied requirements of the different economic zones and logistics and industrial parks in our portfolio, while enabling a consistent business process model," Salma Hareb, CEO, Jafra and Economic Zones World commented on the implementation.

"Oracle's ability to meet our requirements efficiently made us choose this solution," she added.

Jafza expects to achieve a 300% return on investment from the implementation within a couple of years, Hareb told ITP.net.

Almost 90% of Jafza's customer services are now online, with the other 10% expected to go online over the next year, Hareb said.

Oracle said the implementation with Jafza was probably one of the most advanced integrations it has done in the region.

"Jafza is transforming itself to meet increasing customer demands and economic pressures to be more responsive, efficient and competitive," Sergio Giacoletto, executive vice president, Oracle, EMEA said.

Owned by investment company Dubai World, Jebel Ali Free Zone is one of the largest business hubs in the Middle East housing approximately 6,000 companies from 120 countries across the world.

Teo Chin Seng, group CIO of Dubai World, said that the Oracle implementation provided a strategic piece of its technology solution, enabling consistent business processes across diverse business units.

"Jafza's business model requires a seamless flow of information across financial, property management, customer relationship and human capital functions," he said. "We have used components across the Oracle E-Business Suite that are pre-integrated, allowing us to deploy a configurable workflow based process model," he added.

The free zone began implenting Oracle's E-Business Suite in 2005 with the final phase of the implementation taking place in fall this year.

Source: ITP.net

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Insurance firm migrates to Oracle 10G database powered by Sun servers

Grepalife, a Yuchengcoowned insurance company, has recently acquired a new generation server computing platform designed to provide faster processing systems and better service turnaround time for clients and its sales force.

The company is among the first in the country to migrate its main application systems from the previous Oracle 8i version to the Oracle Database 10G Enterprise Edition, the most ideal platform for enterprises that need to support high volume online transaction processing and query intensive data warehousing applications.

"Our goal is to make our service ever faster and better for our clients. Our advanced IT infrastructure, coupled with the excellent capabilities of our people, is among the most important springboards that will propel Grepalife to the top of the industry," said Grepalife president and CEO Victor P. Quisumbing.

This one-time multi-million peso investment enabled Grepalife’s online transactions such as logging in, policy inquiry, and loan processing to be faster by 100 percent.

This system has the clustering and load balancing capability that prevents long computer down time and clogging.

Systems running on the new server platform are already being used in Underwriting, New Business, Cash, Premium Accounting, Policyholder Services, Group Administration, Group Accounting, and other departments, with highly positive feedback.

The new server is powered by clustered central database servers consisting of three Sun Microsystems X4200 with X86 64bit Opteron technology processors, Red Hat Linux 4.0 Enterprise Edition, and a redundant array of data storage devices built around the Oracle Database 10G Enterprise Edition computing engine, all with enough capacity to support future expansion.

Author: Edu H. Lopez @ www.mb.com.ph

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