UK Oracle user groups partner to build stronger network

Aims to grow influence on Oracle with combined membership of 38,000. The UK Oracle User Group (UKOUG) has announced a partnership with the UK Oracle Community Network (UKOCN), to build on the strength of the Oracle community in the UK.

The organisations will work together to ensure that their members have access to relevant resources, as well as forming a larger independent voice to have greater influence on Oracle at a strategic level. Established for more than 25 years, the UKOUG has more than 8,000 members, while UKOCN – a free-to-join, online community that started two years ago – has 30,000 subscribed members.

James Haslam, general manager of UKOUG, said: "UKOUG and UKOCN are very different Oracle community bodies. UKOUG focuses on face-to-face events, networking and lobby activities. "While we both operate in the Oracle space, we are not competing organisations." He added: "The Oracle community can only benefit from a partnership between the two organisations, which will inevitably lead to a louder, more vibrant, better informed community. The partnership will begin with UKOCN promoting UKOUG events to its membership and partners, starting with the UK OUG Conference in Birmingham next week. Meanwhile, UKOUG will promote UKOCN's online services and benefits to its membership base.

The annual UKOUG conference is taking place at the ICC in Birmingham from 5 to 7 December.

Source: http://www.computerworlduk.com

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Alight Planning Announces Oracle Gold Partnership

The developers of the first application that set the standard for Enterprise Planning software today announced that Alight has achieved Gold Partner status in the Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN). Alight is committed to delivering Agile Planning™ solutions to Oracle users, that add value at both the business unit and corporate levels. Alight LLC, developers of the industry-leading Alight Planning financial planning and reporting software, today announced that it has joined Oracle’s partnership program at the Gold level.

As the leader and industry spokesperson for budgeting and enterprise planning solutions, Rand Heer, Alight’s CEO was delighted to be selected as an Oracle Gold Partner. Rand, who founded Pillar, the first enterprise planning software package, reflects on some important history to frame this partnership, “In 1994, Hyperion acquired Pillar. With over 2,500 customers purchasing Hyperion Pillar, the deal proved to be one of the great cash cows of the decade. Ironically, though in 2007, Oracle acquired Hyperion and finally killed Pillar which was replaced with Hyperion Planning. Some Pillar users did not make the move to Hyperion Planning including Apple Computer which is still using Pillar at the time of our partnership because Pillar had some beautiful functionality especially around unit rate amounts.”
Jeffrey Walker who built Oracle's applications business and was also CFO at Oracle was pleased to learn of the partnership, “Looking back on it, it’s too bad we at Oracle didn’t pick up on Pillar and Rand’s vision before Hyperion. You can see the Pillar foundations for enterprise planning today in offerings from Oracle, IBM, and SAP. With Alight, Rand advances his vision to new heights and makes his planning tools accessible to companies of all sizes—not just big players with deep pockets. I expect the partnership with Oracle will lead to big things for both parties.”

The news of the partnership is quite exciting to finance and IT teams who are already working with both Alight and Oracle. Mark Brinkerhoff, VP Finance with Ultradent, is eager to reap the benefits of this new relationship, “Before Alight was selected as an Oracle Gold Partner, I have been able to get our financial data out of Oracle Financials and into Alight. We have a complex chart of accounts so we leverage Alight’s logfiles feature which gives us complete visibility if something slips during an import. While data integration from Oracle to our spreadsheet model often took several days, we can get our Oracle data integrated into Alight in about one business day. With Oracle Gold Partner status, Alight's import process with Oracle Financials is on track to get even better in 2012." In addition to Ultradent, dozens of companies who use both the Alight Planning solution and Oracle/Hyperion applications should benefit from this new partnership including mid-sized companies such as Atronix and larger organizations such as Siemens PLM Software.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com

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Oracle holds “Oracle Day” in Amman to inspire customer innovation

As part of its ongoing EMEA Oracle Day roadshow, Oracle today held “Oracle Day” in Amman, Jordan to share with local customers and the local IT community the latest innovations unveiled at Oracle OpenWorld 2011 event in San Francisco, California, earlier this month.

Held under the headline “More Expertise. More Innovation. More Insight”, the Oracle Day event was a powerhouse combination of C-level, functional, and technology tracks, all dedicated to one goal: showing Oracle customers and prospects how the power of simplicity can change IT to a force that drives business innovation.

Among the key unveilings of Oracle Open World which were highlighted during the event in Amman was Oracle Exalytics Business Intelligence Machine, the industry’s first in-memory hardware and software system engineered to run analytics faster than ever, provide real-time speed-of-thought visual analysis, and enable new types of analytic applications.


With Oracle Exalytics, organizations will be able to extend their business intelligence initiatives beyond reporting and dashboards to modeling, planning, forecasting, and predictive analytics. Planning applications can be scaled across the enterprise with faster, more accurate planning cycles.

The event in Amman also focused on Oracle Public Cloud, the only public cloud offering that provides customers with truly flexible deployment by enabling them to run the exact same business applications in the cloud and on-premise.

Oracle Public Cloud is a broad set of best-in-class, integrated services that provide customers with subscription-based, self-service access to Oracle Fusion Applications, Oracle Fusion Middleware and Oracle Database, all completely managed, hosted and supported by Oracle.

Source: http://www.albawaba.com

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