Oracle tops corporate software usage study

Fresh from its annual OpenWorld conference, Oracle has earned top rankings in a corporate software usage study released recently by ChangeWave, an investment research firm.

The study, which was conducted during October, surveyed 1,780 people involved with IT spending in their organisations.

It found that 36% of respondents use Oracle's business intelligence software, up eight points from the last survey, which was conducted in July. However, Microsoft followed closely behind with 35%. Hyperion Solutions, which Oracle acquired this year, was counted separately from Oracle in the survey and also showed gains for its BI offerings, moving up five points to 19%.

For CRM software, Oracle maintained the 26% usage rate pegged by the July study, followed by SAP and Microsoft with 17% and 16% respectively. Oracle also made modest gains for ERP, rising two points to 32% behind leader SAP, which had 38% usage. Microsoft showed much stronger momentum here, however, shooting up 15 points to 29%.

ChangeWave also asked respondents to reveal from which vendors their companies planned to purchase software in the next three months. Oracle showed a 5% uptick, while SAP remained flat and Microsoft dipped by five points.

"Oracle is showing surprising strength in an otherwise calm macro environment," says Paul Carton, director of research at ChangeWave.

The study also found that 18% of respondents planned to spend more money on software within 90 days of answering the survey and 14% planned to spend less.

Carton says the findings regarding increased software spending are a positive sign for the industry overall. "The fact is we've seen this downtick all year, and to see it stabilising now is interesting," he says.

Carton says 83% of ChangeWave's pool of about 10,000 potential respondents are in the US and 17% are in Canada and Europe, and the survey results should be viewed accordingly. "Essentially, you're looking at the Nasdaq economy and how it buys stuff," he says. But, he asserts, "It's always been great at measuring market share."

The study findings arrive several days after the conclusion of OpenWorld in San Francisco, during which Oracle previewed its next-generation Fusion applications and launched a virtualisation product, Oracle VM.

Author: Chris Kanaracus @ computerworld.co.nz

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Microsoft more open than Oracle? Who'd have thought it?

Oracle may be signalling its intention to strong-arm customers over to its new virtualisation platform, but Microsoft is doing just the opposite.

As part of news announced recently regarding its virtualisation-enabled Windows Server 2008 and its new standalone Hyper-V Server software, Microsoft also unveiled its Server Virtualisation Validation Program.

The programme, which will become available next June, is intended to help companies using Windows Server in conjunction with third-party server virtualisation platforms get support if technical problems arise, according to a posting late last week on Microsoft's official Windows Server division blog.

The program allows companies such as VMware, or Xen provider Citrix Systems "to self-test and validate a specific virtualisation stack (hardware + hypervisor) to provide customers out-of-the-box support for Windows guest OSes," Alessandro Perilli, an Italy-based consultant, wrote on his Virtualisation.info blog.

Previously, Microsoft would only try to support Windows Server users using non-Microsoft virtualisation if they paid for pricey Premier Support, according to Frank Artale, vice president of business development at Citrix, who confirmed the vendor's plans to join the program.

"Now, Microsoft and Citrix can work together to jointly support customers, exchange bug info and solve problems," he said.

Until now, Microsoft only had a joint support relationship for non-Microsoft hardware virtualisation software with Novell

Virtual Iron Software also plans to join the programme, which will enable joint support for Windows Server 2000, 2003 and 2008. Other vendors expressing support are listed online.

Market leader VMware, which has been tangling with Microsoft all year on virtualisation, "intends to review and participate" in Microsoft's programme when more details emerge, wrote Dan Chu, vice president for emerging products and markets at VMware, in an e-mail.

"VMware and Microsoft have extensively discussed joint support for our mutual customers in the last year," Chu wrote. "We're currently working to ensure that customers receive the support they need, and that VMware environments are optimised for Microsoft operating systems and applications.

"Microsoft and VMware already handle customer support issues together through TSAnet and the direct relationship between our companies," he wrote. "The development of this programme further extends Microsoft's support policies and enhances customers' ability to choose the right virtualisation platform for their environment without worrying about the artificial constraints of support policy."

The programme does not apply to Microsoft applications such as SQL Server, although the Windows Server blog hinted that could change.

Oracle executives, in contrast to Microsoft, said last week during the OpenWorld conference that customers running Oracle applications in non-Oracle virtualisation platforms break their enterprise support contract.

VMware asserted that Oracle has been supporting their joint customers since 2006. Despite Oracle's "marketing spin," VMware is confident that Oracle will continue to its support, pointing to statements by CEO Larry Ellison and language in Oracle's own support contracts.

Citrix's Artale noted that this is "an interesting case where Microsoft appears to be much more open than other vendors" such as Oracle. He said he had not yet spoken with Oracle about Oracle's support plans, though he said any pulling of support would affect Citrix less than VMware. Most of Citrix's customers for XenServer virtualise Windows Server rather than Linux, upon which Oracle applications tend to run, he said.

In any case, some Oracle users are unfazed.

This "is nothing more than a 'good cop, bad cop' ploy'" from Oracle, said Karl Ehr, IT operations manager at Golden Gate University in San Francisco. The school plans to move some of its Oracle applications to VMware within half a year. Oracle pulling support for big users such as Golden Gate, he says, "is not going to happen."

Author: Eric Lai @ Computerworld.com

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Oracle scores with partner portal

Oracle has reaffirmed its commitment to the channel by unveiling a range of new tools to help its partners drive business forward.

At its Oracle Partner Network Day event last week at the Arsenal Emirates Stadium, the database software vendor unveiled its Oracle Marketing Services for Partners portal that will offer tools and services to help VARs carry out effective and targeted marketing activities.

The vendor also launched a new Oracle Business Accelerator Authoring Tool based on its JD Edwards software, which will give partners the ability to design and build new interactive questionnaires.

Stein Surlien, vice president of EMEA alliances and channels at Oracle, said: “Partners are very important to Oracle. About 44 per cent of our total licence revenue last year came through the channel and it has been showing double digit growth for the past five years.

We are spending $40m in partner development every year. Partnering excellence is one of our five key drivers and profitability is key.”

David Forrest, director at Oracle certified partner Percipient, said: “Over the past five years there have been changes in our relationship with Oracle. It has been a great relationship in terms of marketing, lead generation, advertising and exhibitions.”

Author: Sara Yirrell @ www.channelweb.co.uk

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How Oracle can lose by winning

If you want to have a good laugh, take a look at Oracle Corp.'s complaint against SAP AG, SAP America and the recent SAP acquisition, TomnorrowNow. It almost humorously describes the efforts of SAP to create a third-party support program aimed at current Oracle users, especially the ones sick of paying for Oracle's support and never-ending upgrades. View the complaint. Nobody can be certain how such lawsuits turn out, but I can't see how Oracle does not have SAP over a barrel.

The chief executive of Bryan, Texas-based TomorrowNow didn't help matters by resigning. See related story.
The crux of the case stems from Oracle's ability to track down what seems to have been a spidering operation, where TomorrowNow allegedly sent a crawler into the Oracle support site and downloaded every document it could find. That appears to be a clear violation of the terms of service of the support site. Curiously, it looks like Honeywell International Inc. was one company with alleged access to the site.

Oracle charges that TomorrowNow, using Honeywell's and other customers' accounts and passwords, went on the support site and downloaded what it could. Oracle also says that this was to be used for providing the exact same support services sold by SAP.

Normally, these sorts of tech lawsuits are dry and boring, but the writer of this particular complaint makes the story exciting -- employing the radical concept of plain English to explain the situation in detail. Apparently SAP, via TomorrowNow, thought it would be able to reproduce the entire Oracle support database for its own use. The legal filing also claims the company wanted to do a "cut-rate" service; it also includes unlawyerly-like terms such as "50 cents on the dollar" and "bankrolling." I found the whole thing to be a hoot. More importantly, by using common language it's an excellent PR vehicle. When you read it, you are convinced that Oracle is 100% in the right and SAP is bad.

I'm certain that this legal document was written to be read by the public, which is an interesting concept. A good proportion of the document is blatant self-promotion as would be presented by a PR person. But there is a subtext within the document that presents a problem for Oracle. It sounds as if the various licenses and terms of service lock users down so much that a prospective customer will have to think twice about using the Oracle products. I mean, the message is clear: Nobody is going to be able to provide "cut-rate," third-party support for companies too cheap to pay the full fare. What's more, once on the Oracle treadmill, you'll never be able to get off it.

This translates into pricey support and endless upgrades. To Oracle, support and upgrades add up to $2.1 billion in revenue, according to the corporate-software giant's third-quarter earnings report. If customers feel cornered by Oracle and these expenses, will they shy away from Oracle in the first place? Winning this suit sends a bad message. The company is going to have to license third-party support for its products somehow. That is the only way that a long-term safety net can be created to assuage users. Because Oracle has created a gravy train for itself with no escape routes for the clients, it will not be able to give up any of the free money. Who would? Generally speaking, I'm not jazzed about software plans where, like it or not, you are wedded for life. It cannot be a good decision to choose such a route. This complaint, ironically, spells that out.

Author: John C. Dvorak @ Marketwatch

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Oracle is RP’s top middleware vendor

Its high-profile buyout of smaller software companies seems to be paying off well for database king Oracle Corp. as it recently cited a newly released report showing it is now the top middleware vendor in the Philippines.

The report by research firm Gartner said the portal, process, and middleware (PPMW) offering of Oracle posted 170-percent revenue growth in the country in 2006 as it grew seven times faster than the market as a whole and more than doubled its market share while the top two vendors lost share.

In Asia Pacific, Oracle grew 70 percent, the fastest growing PPMW vendor among the top three in 2006, according to Gartner. The statement issued by Oracle did not mention the other two middleware vendors.

Gartner’s definition of the PPMW market segment includes general-purpose portal products, Business Process Management-enabling technologies, application integration and platform middleware.

The family of Oracle Fusion Middleware products is composed of Oracle Applications including Oracle E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft Enterprise, JD Edwards EnterpriseOne, Siebel CRM, Oracle Transportation Management, Oracle Retail, Demantra, and i-flex.

The company said its Oracle Fusion Middleware has more than 50,000 customers, spanning the financial services, retail, telecommunications, manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, health care, transportation and public sector industries.

"In the Philippines, Oracle is gaining strong traction with customers. Oracle Fusion Middleware enables customers to solve their most critical business challenges while providing a clear path to service-oriented architecture," said Leo Liang, vice president of SOA sales for Oracle Asia Pacific.

Oracle said other research firms have also validated the leading position of its middleware offering with Forrester Research "recognizing Oracle as a leader across the board in its evaluation of application server platforms."

The Redwood Shore, California-based software giant said its middleware product is supported by 9,000 partners, including independent software vendors (ISVs), value added resellers, and system integrators.

The definition and scope of middleware has changed significantly during the last three years in line with the need for greater flexibility, better information, productivity, and tighter controls.

Author: Melvin G. Calimag @ www.mb.com.ph

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It's All Gravy For Oracle's Ellison

Oracle CEO and multi-billionaire Larry Ellison wrapped up what was, perhaps, the most important week of his company's year by selling off another 1 million shares of Oracle stock.

According to a Form 4 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Ellison sold the shares as part of a prearranged trading plan on Friday, one day after Oracle's OpenWorld conference concluded in San Francisco.

The shares were sold for $20.68 a share, netting Forbes's No. 11 wealthiest person in the world another $20 million and change. His net worth was estimated at roughly $21.5 billion.

Oracle last week unveiled a series of new products to more than 43,000 OpenWorld attendees, including Oracle VM, the company's first virtualization software offering.

On Wednesday, IT consulting and research firm Saugatuck Technology issued a report suggesting Oracle and other virtualization software vendors still have plenty of time to gain ground on industry leader and Wall Street darling VMware.

"Easier management of virtual infrastructures is critical to broader and accelerated adoption of virtualization," analyst Charlie Burns wrote in the report. "Oracle offers single-source support which addresses some of the challenges of problem management when running Oracle on Linux in a virtual server."

Oracle VM will support Linux and Windows servers and is based on the Xen open source hypervisor. Oracle, which isn't charging for the software but plans to sell service contracts for updates, bug fixes and other support for either $499 or $999 a year, has tacked on a Web-based management console for server administrators to easily migrate and manage applications and operating systems running on both virtual and physical servers.

Oracle shares dipped 32 cents, or 2 percent, to $20.37 a share in Wednesday trading. The stock has fluctuated between $15.97 a share and $23 a share in the past 12 months.

Author: Larry Barrett @ internetnews.com

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SAP axed TomorrowNow execs to avoid black eye over Oracle suit

Analysts on Tuesday said that SAP AG's move to part with key executives at its TomorrowNow subsidiary is likely an attempt to repair a public image that has been tarnished by allegations that TomorrowNow employees illegally downloaded confidential data from Oracle Corp.'s Web site.

The alleged activities of workers at Bryan, Texas-based TomorrowNow are at the epicenter of a lawsuit filed by Oracle in March over alleged illegal software downloads of customer support materials by workers at the subsidiary.

SAP officials declined Tuesday to comment on the resignation of TomorrowNow executives beyond Monday's statement that it is weighing "several options" for the subsidiary, including its possible sale. TomorrowNow, which provides services-based support and maintenance for Oracle-owned PeopleSoft Inc., Siebel Systems Inc. and J.D. Edwards & Co. technology, was acquired by SAP in January 2005.

Noting that SAP is the type of company that "doesn't like to look bad in public," Marc Songini, an analyst at Wellesley, Mass.-based Nucleus Research Inc., said this week's actions show that the ERP software vendor is making a concerted effort to wash its hands of TomorrowNow's suspect actions.

"Whether or not there's any real culpability from the parent company [SAP] as far as illegal downloading, they don't want the black eye," Songini said. "So you had to figure somebody's head was going to roll. Obviously, it doesn't look good for SAP that it's doing this."

Ray Wang, an analyst at Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Research Inc., said the departure of TomorrowNow top executives allows SAP to create a "fresh start" and reassures customers that such activities won't occur again.

"SAP's decision to remove the [TomorrowNow] management team is really just another part of the process of building credibility and accountability in that organization," said Wang. "Going forward, I think this really helps with the customers."

Wang did call departing TomorrowNow CEO Andrew Nelson and some other officials "pioneers" in third-party software maintenance. In particular, Wang said Nelson -- and his former TomorrowNow colleague Seth Ravin, who left the firm in 2005 to found another third-party support firm, Rimini Street Inc. -- should be recognized for helping to expose unfair costs and practices historically attributed to third-party software maintenance.

"[Nelson] really had a place and a role to play in terms [of] helping customers see 'what am I really getting for my maintenance dollars.' Too bad it had to end this way for [him]," remarked Wang.

Wang said that Rimini Street could be a viable alternative for existing TomorrowNow customers if SAP sells its subsidiary. He also speculated that Rimini Street could be a potential buyer for the firm.

Author: Brian Fonseca @ www.computerworld.com

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Five Reasons Why I Think Oracle Will Buy Salesforce.com

Marc Benioff says Salesforce.com is on target to hit $1 billion in revenue next year, but I don't think it will happen. I predict that before Salesforce.com hits that run rate as an independent, publicly traded company,Oracle (NSDQ: ORCL) will buy it.

This is nothing more than an educated hunch, but a strong enough one that I'm willing to put my name on it. Here's why I think it will happen.

1) The troika of Larry Ellison, Charles Phillips, and Safra Katz has indicated it's going to keep on acquiring, and some of those acquisitions will be big companies. I think Marc plans to eventually sell Salesforce.com, and I think Oracle is one of few companies that could afford it. There's Microsoft and IBM, but….

2) Oracle "gets" Salesforce.com, and Salesforce.com "gets" Oracle. I lived many years in Silicon Valley and San Francisco, and I've talked to many folks at IBM and Microsoft over the years. Salesforce.com's culture wouldn't fit well with either. Marc, who came out of Oracle, is outspoken, flamboyant, yet casual, while also unnervingly quick and cutthroat. Kind of like Larry. That's the Silicon Valley executive personality, and I don't see it meshing with the folks at IBM and Microsoft.

3) But would Oracle even want Salesforce.com, you ask, considering its teeny profit margin? I admit, that's not a great selling point. Ellison even said in a conference call with investors a few months ago that "no one has figured out how to make money off of SaaS." Still, Salesforce.com has other things to offer, and the first is mindshare. Most customers have been happy with Salesforce.com, and happy with the savings they get from the software-as-a-service model. About 5 out of 6 CIOs I talk to have at least some passing interest in SaaS. Whether it makes vendors high profits or not, Larry isn't going to stop the tide of SaaS, if that's what customers want. Salesforce.com has the reputation for quality SaaS, and has succeeded where others have failed. (By the way, what the heck ever happened to Siebel On Demand?) The second thing Salesforce.com has is ...

4) Customers. Salesforce.com keeps piling them on, adding another 2,800 in the quarter to a total of 38,100. Benioff said in a conference call yesterday that Citigroup had signed on for 30,000 users of Salesforce.com sales and marketing software. Which gets us to how I think Ellison will make money off SaaS: By buying Salesforce.com and up-selling and side-selling those customers with other things in what vendors like to call the "software stack." I don't know how much Oracle stuff Citigroup uses, but I'm sure Larry's got new things he could offer up from his growing bag of tricks. And some of that stuff in the bag is pricey licensed software, not that low-margin SaaS stuff.

5) Going back to point No. 1, I think Marc would consider a reasonable offer because he hasn't said he wouldn't. I've talked to several CEOs who’ve vehemently declared they're "not for sale" and then sell a few months down the road. When I sat down with Marc at the Software 2007 conference in May and asked him if Salesforce.com was an acquisition target, he said: "We're probably too big forSAP (NYSE: SAP). It's hard to say [about other possible suitors]. We're a very different company, very unique. Whether it's our distribution model or our philanthropy model, it's very different than a traditional software company. It would take a lot of work." When I asked specifically about Oracle, he waved it off as a no comment.

In fact, I bet Marc and Larry and/or Charles already have had some talks, and Benioff is conflicted over whether he'd want to sell Salesforce.com. He's a strong personality who wants to make his mark in the world, whether it's leading the charge on changing the traditional licensed software model to SaaS or showing other software companies, like he refers to above, how to be generous with their money to those in need. He wants to make a difference in the world, the sure sign of an idealist.

But while Salesforce.com reported a 48% year-over-year growth in revenues in its third fiscal quarter announced yesterday, growth has been steadily and consistently declining. Some analysts insist the stock is over-valued. As Neil Young sang, "It's better to burn out, than to fade away." Idealists who want to change the world don't fade away. Unless Benioff has a sure plan to reverse that growth and grow margins, and stave offMicrosoft (NSDQ: MSFT) and SAP in the world of SaaS, he'll sell before Salesforce.com fades into something less meaningful, and with less mindshare than it's got today. Oracle -- if it can make the purchase make sense for its shareholders -- is the most logical buyer.

Author: Mary Hayes Weier @ www.informationweek.com

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OPENWORLD - 1,500 companies adopt Oracle Unbreakable Linux

Oracle on Wednesday said that 1,500 companies have signed up for its Unbreakable Linux discount support program since it was announced one year ago.

The number of customers is impressively greater than the number Oracle announced six months ago -- 26. And that was with "virtually no selling at all" of Unbreakable Linux, bragged CEO Larry Ellison during his keynote speech at OpenWorld on Wednesday.

"We did all of this while just building up our Linux sales team," he said.

Unbreakable Linux includes enterprise support for applications running on either Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) or Oracle's close clone, all at half the price of Red Hat's.

"It doesn't matter which Linux distro [Red Hat or Oracle] you're on, Oracle will support you," said Cole Crawford, IT strategist at Dell, during a Tuesday panel at OpenWorld.

Dell is running a 16-node megagrid with Oracle's new 11g database on RHEL for which it is getting Unbreakable Linux support, Crawford said. Dell is also running Red Hat and Suse Linux.

Customers announced by Oracle in March included Yahoo, videogame maker Activision, the IHOP restaurant chain, and others.

Besides Dell, new customers of Unbreakable Linux include clothing store chain Abercrombie & Fitch, newspaper chain Cox Enterprises, McKesson, Mitsubishi, Nissan, Stanford University, and others.

Despite Oracle's fast growth, Red Hat remains the top dog in the enterprise Linux market, with tens of thousands of subscribers to its support business. During its Q1 2008 call with analysts, Red Hat CEO Matthew Szulik said it added "multiple of thousands of customers" in that quarter alone.

For its most recent quarter, subscription revenue, including support contracts, was $109.2 million, up 29% year-over-year. All 25 of its largest support customers renewed its contracts at 122% of their prior contract's value, the company said.
Yet, Red Hat appears vulnerable. Multiple users at OpenWorld -- both on Oracle panels and not -- cited dissatisfaction with the quality of Red Hat's support.

"The price is half of Red Hat. And we feel we get twice the attention," said Brad Maue, CIO of Stuart Maue Co.. The St. Louis, Mo. legal auditing firm switched its Linux support wholly from Red Hat to Oracle a year ago.

Maue said Oracle is even willing to help with problems involving third-party software that Oracle has not technically certified to run on Unbreakable Linux.

"There were some bugs in Linux that, beyond Red Hat introducing RHEL 5, we weren't able to get the pressure to get them fixed," said Tim Heath, senior database engineer at Yahoo.

Yahoo has about 50,000 servers running RHEL 4 out of a total of 150,000 servers. Yahoo continues to get support from Red Hat even while subscribing to Oracle.

"We like to pit the two against each other, to see who submits fixes faster," Heath said. While he declined to say who was winning, Heath said "We are very very happy with the support we've received from Oracle."

The biggest advantage of Oracle support, says Heath, is that getting support from a single vendor eliminates the "fingerpointing" between the applications and platform departments when a problem arises.

"Is it the I/O elevator or a bug in the Oracle database? It's no fun to prove who's right or wrong," he said.

But is bigger better?

Oracle has said it has more than 9,000 developers working on software that runs on Linux, many of whom as a practical matter fix bugs and do QA for Unbreakable Linux. That dwarfs the 2,000 total employees at Red Hat.

But, Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens said, to infer from that Oracle brings more technical resources to bear than Red Hat is "crazy."

"I used to know every developer on their Linux team. They could fit into this room," he said, in an interview in San Francisco on Tuesday.

At most, said Stevens, Oracle is making its own applications run faster or more bug-free on RHEL/Unbreakable Linux.

"This is not about offering better support. This is about ownership of the IT stack for Mr. Ellison," Stevens said.

As an example, he pointed to Oracle's decision to only certify and support its applications if they are running on its own recently introduced flavor of virtualization.

Stevens also disputed the notion that Red Hat's support customers are unhappy, pointing to third-party studies showing the opposite. Or that customers can expect better service from Oracle.

"No one is going to say that Oracle knocks it out of the park on technology or service," he said.

Author: Eric Lai @ www.computerworld.com

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Ellison on Oracle's Future

Near the close of his keynote speech at Oracle's biggest conference of the year, the ever-colorful CEO Larry Ellison reminisced about the software company's "stressful" early days. Ellison said he'd work until 1 a.m., "come home, open up a can of pea soup, turn on CNN Headline News to see what was going on in the world, have my soup, and go to bed."

About a quarter-century later, Ellison is worth $21.5 billion, and Oracle (ORCL) is one of the world's largest technology companies. And while his diet has no doubt improved, the company still faces pressures any CEO would find stressful. In particular, customers and investors showed up at Oracle's annual OpenWorld conference in San Francisco with questions about a critical product launch due next year and the threat of a deepening slump in corporate tech spending.
Aiming at VMware

During the Nov. 14 speech, Ellison tried to put those anxieties to rest, pledging to deliver a key piece of the ambitious new product a half-year early—in the first part of 2008. He also took one of his trademark shots at an emerging rival. Oracle is nearing the home stretch of a period when, according to analysts, the company shrugged off an economic malaise that's causing customers to curtail IT purchases and prompting investors to unload tech stocks.

The accelerated product timetable is for Fusion, a project that aims to knit together the best parts of Oracle's homegrown software and the array of products amassed through its acquisitions of PeopleSoft, Siebel Systems, and dozens of other companies. Until now, Oracle had maintained the suite would arrive by late 2008 despite market speculation the complex launch might slip into 2009. But on Nov. 14, Ellison said a key element will arrive during the first half of 2008, though he conceded that customers will move to Fusion products over a "long transition period." With Fusion, Oracle is trying to close ground on archrival SAP (SAP) in the market for the software companies use to plan budgets, manage payrolls, and track customers.

Ellison is stalking new quarry as well. On Nov. 12, Oracle introduced a virtualization software product, dubbed Oracle VM. The new software will help companies make more efficient use of their servers—much like the software from industry highflier VMware (VMW). "It's a direct assault on VMware," says Brian Stevens, vice-president of engineering at Linux vendor Red Hat (RHT). Said Ellison: "Some companies say, 'We're the only ones that can do that.' …Not any more." VMware shares declined in the wake of Oracle's announcement.

A buy?

After giving his sales spiel at the convention hall, Ellison headed a few blocks uptown to address analysts at a swank hotel. Wall Street is on the lookout for any indication that a pullback in U.S. companies' technology spending (BusinessWeek.com, 10/15/07) will effect Oracle's fiscal second quarter, which ends Nov. 30. So far, that appears unlikely. Oracle's tight rein on expenses and strength in the flush energy sector could immunize it from the ills that have afflicted companies more closely tied to the beleaguered financial and automotive industries. Oracle also benefits from the quarterly maintenance fees customers pay to keep their software up to snuff. During the meeting, Chief Financial Officer Safra Catz said Oracle is poised to increase revenues faster than the 20% a year Ellison promised investors three years ago. Contract sizes are also getting larger, she said.

Some tech titans aren't faring as well. Tech stocks took a dive after Cisco Systems (CSCO) CEO John Chambers said Nov. 7 that soft IT spending—particularly in banking—would likely slow the company's growth (BusinessWeek.com, 11/8/07). Made during a conference call with investors after Cisco's fiscal first-quarter earnings announcement, Chambers' comments triggered a sell-off in shares of tech companies, including Oracle, Apple (AAPL), IBM (IBM), Intel (INTC), and Dell (DELL).

But analysts expect Oracle to meet its second-quarter targets, and some are telling clients to buy the stock. Peter Kuper, a vice-president and research analyst at Morgan Stanley (MS), expects Oracle to meet, though not exceed, its forecast that new software license bookings will grow by 15% to 25% during the second quarter, and that earnings per share will come in at 20¢ or 21¢, up from 18¢ a year ago. That could be good enough for investors who have already built the risk of lower-than-expected earnings into Oracle's stock price.
Keeping it together

"If they put up a decent quarter, the stock's going to snap back very nicely," says Kuper. "As an investor, your downside is very low." Oracle shares tumbled about 15% in the days following Chambers' comments; the shares hadn't lost more than 13% during a two-month period during the past five years, according to Kuper's analysis. Shares of Oracle closed Nov. 14 down 34¢, or 1.7%, at $20.18. The shares pulled back 20% compared with their 52-week high of $23 on Oct. 11. Oracle's stock could recover, to $24, if the company meets second-quarter expectations, Kuper says. "If you bought at $19, you've just made yourself a very nice 25% return" if the stock returns to its levels before the November tech sell-off.

Other analysts moved Nov. 14 to upgrade Oracle's stock. Analysts at CIBC World Markets and Broadpoint Capital (BPSG) said the company is equipped to ride out a possible downturn in technology spending due to its recurring revenue streams from software maintenance. They cited lower stock prices as a potential benefit for Oracle, since cheaper shares could mean cheaper acquisition targets for the software giant. Oracle has acquired 41 companies, for more than $24 billion, since the beginning of 2005.

Oracle's prospects for future growth may hinge on whether it can keep its largest customers in the fold as it launches the Fusion project. Analysts and customers have questioned how robust the first version of Fusion software will be (BusinessWeek.com, 11/5/07) and whether compelling Fusion products will be delivered on time.

Ellison's remarks on Nov. 14 may quell those concerns, making life for Oracle investors a lot less stressful, at least for now.

Author: Aaron Ricadela @ businessweek.com

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Sun to herald virtualization plan at Oracle show

The strategy to be described at the OpenWorld conference enables multiple OSes and apps to run on same computer. Sun President/CEO Jonathan Schwartz will focus on Sun's virtualization strategy during a keynote presentation at the Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco on Wednesday.

Schwartz will emphasize software to run multiple operating systems on the same computer and increase the percentage of compute cycles in use. Specifically, details will be shared on products in Sun's xVM (x Virtual Machine) line, including the xVM Server hypervisor and xVM Ops Center, providing management software, Steve Wilson, vice president of xVM at Sun, said. A hypervisor provides a virtualization layer for running more than one operating system and applications simultaneously, Wilson said.

With its hypervisor, Sun looks to aid users who might have a datacenter full of small servers, each running a separate application and perhaps in use only at a certain time of the day or month, said Wilson. The average utilization of these machines is very low with customers only using 10 percent of available compute cycles.

"The idea is that the xVM Server software, which is the hypervisor software, will allow customers to take various workloads, including applications written to Solaris and Linux and Windows, and run them simultaneously on the same hardware," Wilson said.

Featured in xVM Server is work from the Xen open-source community. Through xVM Server, Sun will extend Solaris technologies, such as Predictive Self-Healing and ZFS (Zettabyte File Server) to Windows and Linux.

Sun previously has offered its Logical Domains (LDOMs) hypervisor, but it only supported SPARC CPUs. The new hypervisor extends to x86/64 systems.

Ops Center enables management of multiple operating systems and the attendant hardware, including systems from Sun, IBM, HP, and Dell.

Sun also plans to announce support of its strategy by vendors, such as Microsoft, MySQL, AMD, and Quest Software. "We have an agreement with Microsoft where they are going to be supporting Windows running inside our hypervisor," Wilson said.

A preview version of xVM Server will be available from the new OpenxVM.org community this week; general release is planned for next spring. The Ops Center product is due for a general release in December.

Also, Schwartz plans to tout the company's efforts in "eco-computing," involving microprocessors, servers, and storage, during his keynote.

Author: Paul Krill @ InfoWorld

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Cisco protocol to boost Oracle

Cisco has launched a protocol it has jointly developed with Oracle that it claimed would help users running databases over larger server clusters.

The two vendors developed the RDS (Reliable Datagram Sockets) protocol and will make it part of an industry-developed open-source software distribution called Open Fabrics Enterprise Distribution, said Pramod Srivatsa, a product line manager for Cisco server fabric switches. It is intended for Cisco switches using Infiniband high-speed data-centre technology.

Growing data centres and demands for processing have driven the development of new forms of connectivity, such as Infiniband and 10-Gigabit Ethernet, between servers in data centres. But pure networking speed - up to 20Gbit/s in the case of Infiniband - isn't all that's needed to make data centres run faster.

Enterprises that want to set up a very large deployment of the Oracle 11g database software once had to do it on a single large server, Srivatsa said. Oracle already offers RAC (Real Application Clusters) 11g software for distributing that deployment over multiple, smaller Intel-based servers running Linux. But that only works up to a cluster of about four servers, and RDS makes it more scalable, he said. RDS has been tested successfully with as many as 16 servers and is designed to work for clusters of as many as 64 using Infiniband, according to Srivatsa.

Infiniband is well-suited to Oracle database software because it has to quickly exchange many messages of varying sizes, Srivatsa said. Mellanox, which supplies some of Cisco's chips for Infiniband switches, helped develop RDS. In the future, customers will probably be able to use RDS with 10-Gigabit Ethernet too, Srivatsa said.

RDS was designed for clusters of servers in one data centre, which could include blade as well as rack servers, he said. Customers of both Oracle and Cisco can request the software from the companies now and start testing it. Cisco will start providing RDS for commercial use in its Infiniband servers after it is certified by Oracle, probably next month, Srivatsa said.

Author: Stephen Lawson @ Techworld.com

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ADWEA selects Oracle to automate billing and customer service

Abu Dhabi Water and Electricity Authority has implemented Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing, which is expected to enhance customer service, streamline business processes and accelerate revenue collection.

Oracle provides a modernized user interface that helps the Abu Dhabi Water and Electricity Authority (ADWEA) call center representatives to process customer requests. The bilingual Arabic-English capabilities inherent in the Oracle application provide the ADWEA with flexibility that simplifies hiring and training new staff.

With Oracle, the ADWEA provides its customers with accurate utility bills based on systematic meter-reads that include supplementary consumer information concerning rates and other services. The ADWEA has also improved its business processes to accelerate bill printing and distribution and shorten its payment collection cycles.

Saeed Nassouri, project manager at the ADWEA, said: "Oracle offers us the flexibility to access a single customer view and use that information to accelerate our service delivery and billing processes. Even more importantly, Oracle provides a scalable foundation for us to fully automate our metering and billing operations."

Source: Datamonitor

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Oracle rolls out CRM features ahead of OpenWorld

Oracle has issued a number of CRM-related announcements ahead of its OpenWorld conference being held next week in San Francisco.

The database and business systems behemoth is taking its PeopleSoft and Siebel CRM applications mobile and issuing a new release of Contact Center Anywhere.

In partnership with Jersey City, N.J.-based Antenna Software Inc., Oracle is releasing a mobile application for organizations running PeopleSoft Enterprise CRM on BlackBerry, Palm or Windows mobile devices. AMPower Sales for PeopleSoft Enterprise includes out-of-the-box account, opportunity, contact, lead, calendar and task management, one-click calling/email and over the air application deployment and updates. The application is available for both on-demand and on-premise licensing and runs on PeopleSoft Enterprise CRM 8.9 and 9.0.

Oracle's latest Siebel CRM application on the BlackBerry platform now enables Siebel CRM Mobile users to access Siebel CRM applications securely from BlackBerry smartphones. It provides an additional level of integration beyond the existing BlackBerry Browser access, a result of collaboration between Oracle and Research In Motion.

The latest release of Oracle's hosted contact center software Contact Center Anywhere 8.1.1 includes administration and platform management enhancements. It also features better bandwidth usage between client applications over the Internet and LAN and optimizes network usage by routing voices through the core systems as needed. New system level reporting allows administrators to better monitor and track changes to the system configuration and user interface enhancements.

Author: Barney Beal @ SearchCRM.com

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Hong Kong's City Telecom Ltd. Selects Oracle Communications for Next-Generation Billing and Revenue Management Platform

Oracle today announced that City Telecom (HK) Ltd. (CTI), a leading provider of telecommunications services in Hong Kong, has selected Oracle(R) Communications Billing and Revenue Management software to provide a billing and revenue management platform that will help address rapid business growth and increase variation in service offerings and pricing options. The new platform will help CTI centralize and manage revenue streams across services, networks, partners, technologies and payment methods, ultimately enabling faster time-to-market and enhanced quality of service.

Since the introduction of broadband Internet services by its wholly-owned subsidiary, Hong Kong Broadband Network Limited (HKBN) seven years ago, CTI has strived to provide end-to-end, world-class residential and corporate voice and data services. In September, CTI launched Hong Kong's first residential Fiber-To-The-Home (FTTH) broadband services at symmetric 100 megabits per second (Mbps), 200Mbps and 1 billion bits per second (Gbps). Earlier this year, CTI introduced bbBOX, a multimedia sharing application converging Internet, television and computers. As CTI continues to expand and innovate, the company needs an integrated platform to provide an immediate, comprehensive view of all company revenue with the ability to drill down into detailed customer service preferences, usage patterns and transaction histories. "Service innovation is key to our company's development of new revenue streams and the group's sustainable growth. For this reason, it is vital that we understand our customers so we can provide more value-added, personalized services to boost their satisfaction. A highly reliable, scalable billing and revenue management platform is a critical part of our strategy for staying ahead of the competition and embracing growth opportunities," said Stephen Chang, chief technology officer of CTI. Chang added, "We chose Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management for its functional richness, flexibility and scalability, as well as Oracle's proven track record for delivering an end-to-end software solution for many of the world's largest and most innovative service providers. When the implementation is complete, we plan to leverage the full 360-degree view of the customers to support further innovation in service offerings while reducing the total cost of ownership. This will enable us to decrease our time-to-market in rolling out innovative services and offerings."

In addition to Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management's support for the entire revenue management lifecycle and its ability to recognize revenues from service usage in the balance sheet, CTI will also benefit from the application's rich support for partner accounts. The
application will manage royalty calculations and revenue sharing agreements and create various settlement and sponsorship arrangements to optimize relationships with business partners, such as content service providers. This functionality will help CTI simplify partner settlements and support the company's rapid triple-play service expansion. "Oracle is committed to providing best-in-class applications that deliver next-generation capabilities for communications service providers. We are pleased to work with CTI to deliver a comprehensive, innovative solution that will enable the company to maximize customer and partner value and drive profitable new business in the years to come," said Dr. Weiming Li, vice president, Japan and Asia Pacific, Oracle Communications. Established in 1992, City Telecom (HK) Limited (SEHK: 1137; Nasdaq:
CTEL) provides integrated telecommunications services in Hong Kong. City Telecom's wholly owned subsidiary, Hong Kong Broadband Network Limited (HKBN), is in the process of expanding its Metro Ethernet from 1.4mn to 2.0mn homes pass. HKBN has achieved an aggregate Voice, Broadband (symmetric 25Mbps up to 1Gbps), IP- TV and Corporate data services base in excess of 640,000 subscriptions. Additional information on City Telecom (HK) Ltd. can be found at http://www.ctigroup.com.hk.

Source: Oracle Corp.

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Eight Ways to Hack Oracle

Oracle is touted as being unbreakable, if talk weren't so cheap. Well as with any computing system, there are ways to hack it, and Oracle is no exception. In this piece, we'll talk about some of the ways that you can get at data you're not supposed to. We'll start by taking the perspective of the hacker, and we hope as a manager of databases yourself this will illustrate areas where your infrastructure may be vulnerable. We'll then follow that by discussing ways to protect against the vulnerability.

1. SQL Injection

With many Oracle databases these days, they are the backend datastore for a web application of one sort or another. The thing about web applications which makes them vulnerable and relatively easy targets for us are threefold. One, they are complex, composed of many components making them difficult to test thoroughly. Two, the barrier to entry for programmers is lower. You don't have to be a C programming guru to hack together some webpages. We'll show why that matters to us shortly. The third reason is urgency. Web apps are always in development mode, so they're constantly changing, rolling out new features. So, security is necessarily a lower priority. Ok on to the good stuff.

SQL Injection is simply entering information in a web form, and secretly adding some unexpected code, tricking the application to execute that on the database, and return results the programmer had not foreseen. For example, you have a user login form which requests username and password. In the username field, you enter:

sean'); select username, password from all_users;--

Now if the programmer was not smart enough to "sanitize" our input, i.e. check for things like this, then this will execute on the remote db and this sensitive data will be dumped back to our browser. Wow!

Here's a great comic which illustrates this quite well: http://xkcd.com/327/

You may think this is scary, but there's more. David Litchfield in his book "Oracle Hacker's Handbook" calls one particular pl/sql injection the "holy grail" because it is vulnerable in Oracle 8 all the way through the current 10g release 2. If it's not obvious, that means you can use it on almost *any* Oracle database out there.

How's it work you ask? You make use of a package called DBMS_EXPORT_EXTENSION, use injection to get our code to execute an exception handler that grants some user or for that matter all users, DBA privileges!

This was what the famous Alert 68 was all about, and according to Litchfield was never really properly patched.

Defending Against This Attack

In a word, diligence. There is no bulletproof solution, as it involves all the subtleties of applications that face the internet. There are various SQL Injection Testing techniques available. There is an excellent 3-part article at Security Focus called "Penetration Testing for Web Applications"

It is also possible to *detect* SQL Injection to some degree with various intrusion detection tools. Learn more over at Pete Finnigan's security site (search the page for "detecting sql injection") http://www.petefinnigan.com/orasec.htm

For developers there are packages that help you *sanitize* your inputs. If you call the various clean and sanitize routine on every value you receive from a form, you are much more protected than otherwise. But of course be sure to test and verify by hitting the application with SQL Injection tools. That's really the only way to be sure.

Pete Finnigan has reported that Steven Feurstein is working on SQL Guard, a pl/sql package to provide this type of library to developers. Read more here: http://www.petefinnigan.com/weblog/archives/00001115.htm

2. Default Passwords
Oracle is such a huge product and there are schemas created for everything. Most of these logins have default passwords. Is the database administrator diligent? One way to find out. Take a gander at some of the more common ones:

Username Password
applsys apps ctxsys change_on_install dbsnmp dbsnmp outln outln owa owa perfstat perfstat scott tiger system change_on_install system manager sys change_on_install sys manager

What's more even if these are changed, sometimes they are quite easy to guess, give "oracle", "oracl3", "oracle8", "oracle9", "oracle8i" and "oracle9i" a try as well.

Pete Finnigan has a very comprehensive and up to date list of default users and passwords for you to try out. This list also includes hashed passwords, so if you've queried all_users, you can compare against this list.

http://www.petefinnigan.com/default/default_password_list.htm

Defending Against the Attack

As a Database Administrator, you should audit all your database passwords regularly. If there is business resistance to changing easily guessable passwords, explain calmly, but with a clear and visual illustration of what could happen, and what the risks are.

Oracle also provides password profile security. You can enable profiles that enforce a certain level of complexity in your database passwords. You can also enable regular password expiration. Beware enabling this for logins that only happen through a webserver, or middle tier application server, as the application may suddenly break, if no one directly sees the warnings and notifications.

3. Brute Force

Brute force, as the name implies, is the method for banging away at the lock, or keyhole until it breaks. In the case of Oracle it means trying every username and password by automating the process with a little bit of code to help you.

For years now, a piece of software called John the Ripper has been available to unix administrators for exactly this task. Now there is a patch available for you so you can use this handy software for banging away at Oracle passwords. Want to speed this process up even more? Prepare in advance a table of all password hashes. Such a table is called a Rainbow table. You will have a different one for each username because the password hashing algorithm uses the username as the salt to the function. We won't get into that in too much detail, but here's a resource for further study: http://www.antsight.com/zsl/rainbowcrack/

Oracle servers default to automatically lockout a particular account after ten failed logins. Normally though "sys as sysdba" does not have this restriction. The thinking I guess is if you lockout the administrator, then everyone is locked out! Fortunately, for us this means programs like OraBrute make our lives much easier! Author Paul Wright has put together a great program for banging on the front door of your fortress all day and all night until it opens. Head on over to Paul's blog and download a copy for yourself! http://www.oracleforensics.com/wordpress/index.php/2007/03/04/oracle-passwords-and-orabrute-paper-update/

Defending Against the Attack

Defending against this type of attack can be done with the methods describe above for default passwords. A curious and proactive DBA might also go the extra step to download these tools, and attempt to hack into his own system. This will help illustrate your real risks, and better educate how safe you really are.

4. Sneaking Data Out The Back Door

(I was going to have a section called Auditing, but that makes more sense for the article on prevention).

In the security world, this concept is known as data exfiltration. It comes from the military term, opposite of infiltration, it means getting out without being noticed. In the context of getting data from a target database, it could be as simple as picking up some tape backups and restoring the database, or getting a copy from a retired crashed disk. However, it can also involve snooping network traffic for relevant packets of data.

Oracle has a package called UTL_TCP, which can make outside connections to other servers. It could be used with a little programming magic, to sending a low bandwidth stream of data from the database to some remote host. Oracle also comes with some useful packages to hide what might be inside your secret stream of data, so make ample use of those if you think an intrusion detection system might be monitoring your activities. They include DBMS_OBFUSCATION_TOOLKIT and DBMS_CRYPTO.

Defending Against the Attack

The best way to defend against these types of attacks is to setup an intrusion detection system. These can watch incoming and outgoing packets on the network. Some provide "deep packet inspection" which actually tests for certain SQL, and based on a set of rules, triggers alarms in certain circumstances. These tools can look for telltale signs like added UNIONs, various types of short- circuiting, truncating with a comment "--" and so on.
Conclusion:

So, as you can see there are a lot of ways to plan your attack, and get into a target Oracle database. DBAs should keep in mind that for each vulnerability, there is a way to defend against it, so vigilance is key. In Part II of this series, we will cover the insecurities of the Oracle Listener, privilege escalation to get more access from a less privileged login we already have, executing operating system commands, which can be very powerful, and under appreciated, and lastly filesystem security. If you can read the raw data out of the binary data files making up your database, you can completely circumvent any security measures put in place by Oracle

Author: Sean Hull @ www.databasejournal.com

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Chesapeake Energy Deploys Oracle Grid Computing

REDWOOD SHORES, Calif., Nov. 5 -- Chesapeake Energy Corp., the largest independent and third-largest overall producer of natural gas in the United States, has deployed Oracle grid computing to enable greater performance and scalability of enterprise-wide online transaction processing (OLTP) and decision-support applications.

Chesapeake Energy implemented Oracle Database 10g, Oracle Real Application Clusters, Oracle Automatic Storage Management and Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g on three-nodes of four-way, dual-core Dell PowerEdge 6850 servers running Linux to power Oracle's PeopleSoft Enterprise Human Capital Management. The company migrated to PeopleSoft Enterprise on Jan. 1 to increase efficiency and operating performance and better serve their growing work force. Using a foundation of Oracle Database and Oracle Real Application Clusters, PeopleSoft Enterprise Human Capital Management is available to 6,000 Chesapeake Energy employees.

Since January, the company has incorporated various packaged applications -- both new and existing -- into their Oracle grid computing environment. Oracle's Hyperion Data Relationship Management was deployed to manage master data in the Team Table, a tool that leverages maps and spatial data to pinpoint team members based on their location and roles. In total, Oracle grid computing helps deliver enhanced performance, fault tolerance and scalability to five core enterprise applications and a centralized, corporate data warehouse with additional applications scheduled to be deployed on the grid.

Chesapeake Energy employs Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g to manage and monitor the performance of its applications and grid environment. To manage its storage environment, the company uses Oracle Automatic Storage Management, a database volume manager and file system optimized for database access and automates and streamlines performance and storage management for related systems. This has enabled the company to consolidate management tools for database storage and reduce the amount of manual intervention related to database storage management.

"Oracle grid computing has enabled enhanced overall application and system availability translating into less downtime for users," said John Marks, database systems supervisor at Chesapeake Energy Corp. "We have the flexibility to conduct hardware maintenance on an individual server as needed without impacting business users and taking a system offline. And we have the option of adding a server to the cluster before scalability becomes a problem."

Grid Computing Supports Reduction in Energy Consumption

By deploying an Oracle grid, Chesapeake Energy has a single environment to support various applications and databases previously running on stand alone servers. As a result, the company has:

* standardized its applications and databases on a common hardware platform.

* reduced the amount of servers used to support these applications.

* reduced hardware- and maintenance-related costs.

* lowered overall energy consumption by servers.

"As a leader in green initiatives, we're constantly seeking ways to be more energy efficient," said Stephen Taylor, IT infrastructure director for Chesapeake Energy Corp. "Oracle grid computing helped us reduce power consumption rates by enabling us to use fewer physical servers in our environment."

For more information on Oracle grid computing, including Oracle Database 11g, go to www.oracle.com/database.

About Chesapeake Energy Corp.

Chesapeake Energy Corp. is the largest independent and third-largest overall producer of natural gas in the United States. Headquartered in Oklahoma City, Okla., the company's operations are focused on exploratory and developmental drilling and corporate and property acquisitions in the Mid-Continent, Fort Worth Barnett Shale, Fayetteville Shale, Permian Basin, Delaware Basin, South Texas, Texas Gulf Coast, Ark-La-Tex and Appalachian Basin regions of the United States.

Source: Oracle Corp.

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Oracle Fusion Gets a New Boss

Thomas Kurian is taking over the pivotal effort to make sense of the bevy of business software products acquired during CEO Ellison's three-year spree.

Oracle's (ORCL) fastest-rising executive has just stepped into a job that could determine how successful the world's second-biggest software company will be during the next decade.

Thomas Kurian, described by turns as thoughtful, charismatic, eloquent, and ambitious, took the helm of Oracle's Fusion project on Oct. 15 amid growing worries that the pivotal, complicated initiative may underwhelm customers and investors when it arrives in late 2008. The aptly named project is a grand plan to stitch together the wide array of business software products Oracle has acquired in the course of a three-year, 35-company takeover binge costing $24 billion.

Kurian, previously the chief of Oracle's fast-growing middleware application business, has big shoes to fill. He's taking over for John Wookey, a well-regarded veteran beloved by developers and customers, who has been reassigned within the company. "There are lots of stars inside Oracle, but they put multiple stars next to [Kurian's] name," says Brent Thill, director of software research at Citigroup (C).
Will Fusion Deliver?

For customers and investors, a lot riding is on Fusion's success. So they'll be listening closely for rare public clues about the potential financial and technological impact when Kurian gives a speech on Nov. 13 at the Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco.

The new suite of applications—used for functions such as managing a company's books, keeping track of customers, managing payrolls, and planning manufacturing schedules—is supposed to cherry-pick the best of Oracle's software collection. That includes applications from Oracle's homegrown line, as well as from PeopleSoft, J.D. Edwards, Siebel Systems, and smaller acquisitions such as Retek and i-Flex Solutions. The first version will likely include what Oracle considers its biggest guns—its own accounting software, PeopleSoft's human resources product, and Siebel's customer management application—melded together with a unified approach to storing data and interacting with the programs.

Many Oracle customers and Wall Street analysts are skeptical that Fusion can deliver what the company has promised. Corporate IT departments have been left in the dark about what to expect since Oracle has eschewed the usual practice of testing a major product upgrade with select customers at least a year or two before it's released. "No one knows because no one's seen anything," says Charles Di Bona, a senior equity analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. And some chief information officers still have a hangover from a buggy version of Oracle applications released in 2000.

For now, Oracle's customers are stuck with a passel of aging products for which they pay hefty annual technical-support fees, and which aren't particularly easy to combine with one another or the latest Web technologies. The first Fusion version of Oracle's applications will attempt to solve those problems using the Java programming language and "Web services," an industry term for a set of Internet communications protocols. If successful, Fusion will lower customers' IT costs, yet keep them doling out lucrative support and maintenance fees to Oracle for years to come.
Diamond or Dud

Oracle is already tops in database software. But with all the acquisitions, culminating in Fusion, it wants to unseat archrival SAP (SAP) for control of the applications market. SAP controlled 20.8% of the $56.4 billion market for enterprise applications in 2006, nearly double Oracle's 10.7% share, according to industry consultancy AMR Research.

If Oracle gets Fusion right, delivering cutting-edge technologies that make it cheaper for customers to build on its platform, the company may add to its applications market share. It would also help extend Oracle's reach into new markets such as retailing and transportation. And with one underlying software code to support instead of the current five, the company could make better use of, or cut, its $2.2 billion in annual research and development spending.

If Fusion's a dud, Oracle risks losing ground to SAP and Salesforce.com (CRM), both of which have been quicker to deliver Web-based versions of enterprise software. The Web-based approach has grown in popularity because customers can lower the cost of keeping software up-to-date.

Worse, Oracle could lose customers to rival offerings from SAP, Microsoft (MSFT), and other competitors, a risk software companies face when they overhaul the code underlying their products. "In any technology architecture shift there are winners and losers, and you clearly want to be on the right side of that," says Peter Kuper, a vice-president and research analyst at Morgan Stanley (MS).
Unclear Road Map

It may take years and multiple generations of Fusion before the outcome is known. Murray Beach, president of investment bank Boston Corporate Finance, says he expects Oracle will have a strong offering in several years, by perhaps its fourth version of the software. "You're not going to see the best product the first time around," he says. Recent analyst speculation about a potential Fusion delay has died down, but some think Oracle simply readjusted its target. "Oracle will ship something in 2008 and declare victory that they got it out the door," says Citigroup's Thill.

At Oracle's annual shareholder meeting on Nov. 2, CEO Larry Ellison said some Fusion products will appear in 2008, and more in 2009. Customers will move to them "over a very long period of time," he said. Oracle declined to comment for this story.

But IT executives say Oracle's Fusion road map—the multiyear plans tech vendors publish to show customers what to expect and when—has been fuzzy at best. "Other than a lot of hype and hot air about Fusion, how is it really going to work?" asks Allen Emerick, IT director at Skanska USA Building (SKAB), a construction firm involved in projects such as the new NFL stadium at New Jersey's Meadowlands sports complex. "The timing has been all over the place." Skanska runs applications from J.D. Edwards, which Oracle picked up when it bought PeopleSoft. It remains unclear, Emerick says, how Oracle will get that software and its customized elements working with Fusion products.
The Uncertainty of Transition

Further complicating matters is the chance that Oracle could make another bid for middleware vendor BEA Systems (BEAS) (BusinessWeek.com, 10/30/07), adding another alien product line that would need to be integrated into Fusion at some point.

SAP is trying to exploit the uncertainty, telling customers that Fusion's goal of tying together Oracle's various applications could be a red herring to get them to stay on board. "Maybe they were being a little naive" in thinking they could pull off the integration, and "maybe they were being a little marketing-oriented" in selling the Fusion concept to customers, says Bill McDermott , SAP's president and CEO for the Americas, Asia Pacific, and Japan. In September, SAP introduced an Internet suite of software (BusinessWeek.com, 9/19/07) for small and midsize companies called Business ByDesign.

Oracle could quiet its critics with a strong early version of Fusion, or at least erode their arguments over time. Either way, the company has played its hand deftly while it makes the transition. First off, nearly all Oracle customers have been signed up for multiyear licensing agreements that will hold regardless of whether they choose to upgrade to Fusion. The company also has held onto customers of PeopleSoft, Siebel, and other acquired vendors by offering them lifetime tech support.
Kurian's Ascension

The aftermath of the power struggle between Kurian and Wookey could go a long way toward streamlining Fusion. Kurian's middleware group and Wookey's applications team were working on overlapping Fusion projects, and the two were fighting over pieces of Hyperion Solutions, the data-analysis software vendor Oracle bought in March, analysts say. In addition, Kurian was being recruited by other tech companies and needed a promotion to stay on board, according to sources.

To be sure, marginalizing Wookey, who had a reputation for holding onto key developers and fixing projects that went off track, could set Oracle back. "He was a tremendous asset," says Citigroup's Thill. "He's not someone who's easily replaceable." Wookey is staying on at Oracle to assist with the reorganization, according to an Oct. 15 e-mail Ellison sent to employees. Messages left at Wookey's office weren't returned.

A couple of years ago, Oracle president Charles Phillips introduced Kurian at a customer event in Boston as Oracle's potential next CEO. There's a long list of former highfliers and potential successors who are long since gone from the company, though, including venture capitalist Raymond Lane, former PeopleSoft CEO Craig Conway, and onetime heir-apparent Gary Bloom.

People who know Kurian say he's got the smarts and savvy to get even further ahead in Oracle's rough and tumble world. Shipping a winning version of Fusion would go a long way toward proving them right.

Author: Aaron Ricadela @ businessweek.com

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Oracle PartnerNetwork offers training, industry-specific resources

Oracle Corp. today expanded two of its PartnerNetwork programs, the latest move in an ongoing effort to give partners the same opportunities as its direct sales staff.

The Oracle PartnerNetwork Competency Center, previously offered only in Europe, is now available in North America, providing customized training curriculums for channel partners. The Oracle PartnerNetwork Industry Initiatives, which offer Oracle training courses and sales resources to partners who work in specific vertical markets, has also expanded. The program now covers 20 different industries, up from 12 previously.

Both programs are available to all Oracle PartnerNetwork members, at no additional cost, and are accessible on the network's online portal.

Employees at CD Group, an Oracle software reseller and technology partner in Norcross, Ga., already use the standard Guided Learning Paths that Oracle provides, vice president Don Landrum said.

"If they are enhancing those, it's all good for partners," he said.

Oracle has increased its partner training by 50% in the past year, thanks to the work of a task force formed two years ago that identified easy access to training as a problem in the channel, according to Doug Kennedy, the company's senior vice president of worldwide channels and alliances. Oracle has added more training courses, improved access to the courses and nearly doubled its number of training curriculum offerings, called Guided Learning Paths.

Oracle's revenue from products and services sold or co-sold by partners is up 50% this year, an improvement Kennedy partly attributes to better-trained partners. About 40% of Oracle's revenue came through partners, and of the other 60%, partners helped co-sell a "significant" amount, he said.

The Competency Center gives an assessment test to partners, then uses a content management system to analyze what Oracle training courses they have already taken and customize a curriculum called a Guided Learning Path. The paths are lists of courses that partners should take to function more effectively in their specific areas of business. Oracle internal salespeople and partners can also use the Competency Center to track their progress on the Guided Learning Paths.

Participating partners will have access to Oracle solutions kits, live and online training courses, webcasts with industry experts, industry discussion boards and additional sales and marketing resources.

Aerospace and defense, engineering and construction, financial services, healthcare, life sciences and the public sector are some of the vertical markets covered by the program. Landrum said his staff will be able to take advantage of the additional resources for working in the wholesale distribution and industrial manufacturing markets.

The Industry Initiatives are designed to give partners the same training, sales and marketing resources that Oracle's direct staff receives, Kennedy said.

Author: Colin Steele @ SearchITChannel.com

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Oracle to implement billing management for Sun Direct

Enterprise software solutions provider Oracle on Wednesday said it has bagged a contract from Sun Direct to implement its communications billing and revenue management, which would provide real-time billing for its Direct to Home (DTH) services.

The first phase of the project would be completed in 90 days, a Oracle statement said here. It would allow Sun to consolidate billing operations, enable powerful new service offerings and improve visibility into customer information across services.

With the implementation, Sun Direct would be able to accelerate service delivery and reduce time-to-market of new services and enhance operational efficiency, it said.

Source: economictimes.indiatimes.com

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