Oracle Flies High Above Wall Street's Carnage

With little exposure to the financial crisis, the software giant faces threats from SAP and the U.S. dollar. An economic slowdown could hurt.

Turmoil in American banking and recent gains by the U.S. dollar have left investors jittery over the potential impact on tech companies such as Oracle (ORCL). The world's second-largest software company allayed some of those concerns Sept. 18, when it reported fiscal first-quarter results in line with analysts' estimates and assured investors that its exposure to the problems of Wall Street financial firms is minimal.

Oracle said first-quarter profit rose 28% to $1.1 billion, or 21¢ a share, vs. 16¢ per share a year ago. Excluding expenses for stock options and acquisitions, profit in the period that ended Aug. 31 was 29¢ a share, beating analysts' expectation for 27¢. Revenue rose 18% to $5.3 billion. Including revenue from acquisitions not counted in its GAAP revenues, sales for the quarter were $5.4 billion, matching analysts' estimates. "Oracle is a great sales organization and very cost-conscious, and that's showing through," says Andy Miedler, a senior technology analyst at Edward Jones Trust, who rates Oracle a buy.

Evidence that Oracle is weathering the economic slowdown came as a relief to money managers, who regard its results as a barometer of the industry's health. "Investors are in a frenzy trying to gauge the exposure of Oracle and other technology companies to a slowdown in financial-services spending," says Mark Murphy, a research analyst at Piper Jaffray (PJC), who has a neutral rating on Oracle's stock. "There really is no firm consensus on that."

Little Dependence on Banks

Within the past week, Merrill Lynch (MER) has been acquired by Bank of America (BAC), Lehman Brothers (LEH) has begun liquidating its assets, and the Federal Reserve bailed out insurer American International Group (AIG). More consolidation among financial-services firms is likely. Those events, and the shocks they have sent through markets, have tech investors trying to calculate the effects on information technology spending. Piper Jaffray estimates financial-services firms account for about 20% of U.S. IT spending.

Oracle Co-President Safra Catz said the percentage of Oracle's sales to U.S. banks was in the "low single digits." Also reassuring to investors was news that sales of new software licenses, a yardstick of future revenue, increased 14%, to $1.2 billion, within the conservative range (BusinessWeek.com, 6/26/08) Oracle had told analysts to expect. Shares of Oracle rallied more than 6% in extended trading on Sept. 18 after having risen 65¢, or 3.6%, before the earnings report was released. Still, the stock is down 16% since reaching an at-least-52-week high in August.

Oracle has been on a tear for the past year, posting increases in sales of its database software and business applications, used by companies to manage payrolls, inventory levels, and billing. Today's news aside, some analysts question whether Oracle will remain immune to the economic slowdown and the forces roiling the financial-services sector. Dell (DELL) on Sept. 16 warned of weakening demand, just weeks after reporting a disappointing quarter. And Goldman Sachs (GS) on Sept. 8 cut its IT spending forecast for the year to 4% growth, from 6%.

Rising Dollar Cuts Revenues

Oracle's sales of new applications licenses fell 12%, to $331 million, during the quarter. Oracle is fighting a pitched battle for applications market share with German rival SAP (SAP), which held 22.4% of the $62.8 billion market in 2007, compared with 12.5% for Oracle, according to tech industry consultant AMR Research.

A stronger dollar is also taking a bite out of revenue. During a Sept. 18 conference call discussing the results, Catz said overall new license sales will rise just 5% to 15% during the second quarter, which ends in November, and that the dollar's appreciation since July will lop another 3% off those estimates. The company expects overall revenue to grow 9% to 12%, including currency effects. Excluding the effects of currency, Oracle's sales may be $6.03 billion, at the midpoint of the company's guidance, compared with analysts' expectation of $6.23 billion. Oracle expects to earn 35¢ or 36¢ a share, compared with analysts' estimates of 35¢.

After more than two years of declines, the dollar has rallied against the euro (BusinessWeek.com, 9/16/08), hitting an all-time low of $1.604 per euro on July 15. That means overseas sales by tech companies amount to less revenue when translated back into dollars. Conversely, SAP will likely benefit from the trend.
Maintenance Fees Add Up

So far, though, Oracle's acquisition machine and flagship database business have continued to fuel sales and profit growth. Oracle has purchased more than 40 software companies for more than $25 billion since the beginning of 2005. New license sales of databases and middleware, which connect other pieces of software, grew 27% during the first quarter, to $906 million, helped in part by Oracle's $8.5 billion acquisition of BEA Systems in January. At Oracle's annual customer conference that begins Sept. 21 in San Francisco, the company plans to announce a new database-related product, Co-President Charles Phillips Jr. said during the conference call.

And Oracle is expanding its profit margins by adding to its revenue stream more of the lucrative "maintenance" fees customers pay for software updates and technical support. The fees now account for nearly 56% of Oracle's sales and yield higher margins than other parts of Oracle's business. "That's a reshaping of our business—the highest-margin portion of our business is now the largest portion of our business," Oracle Chief Executive Larry Ellison said during the call.

Edward Jones analyst Miedler says Oracle has proved deft at integrating the companies it's bought. "They can acquire a company and plug it into the Oracle machinery with few hiccups," he says. "And they can squeeze more profit out of these targets." Amid the Wall Street meltdown, economic malaise, and currency drag, Oracle will need to keep that machine as well-oiled as ever.

Author: Aaron Ricadela @ www.businessweek.com

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Oracle and the X-Men

Oracle has just announced the Oracle Exadata Storage Server and the HP Oracle Database Machine as its answer to the likes of Netezza and other appliance vendors. The project went under the codename of Sage and, while Oracle didn’t tell me more than that, I am guessing that this actually relates to the Marvel character of the same name, pictured right, a member of the X-Men and X-treme X-Men. She is described on the official Marvel site as “a mutant who possesses a cyberpathic mind that functions like a computer with unlimited storage capacity. Sage is able to record and analyze vast amounts of data… and can also calculate complex statistics in mere seconds… like a computer, Sage is able to perform multiple tasks at once by allocating a partition of her brain to each task.”

Anyway, down to the serious stuff. Briefly, the Database Machine is the data warehouse offering and the Exadata Storage Server provides massively parallel capabilities that back-end onto your conventional Oracle database to enable the Database Machine. What happens is that when a query is processed, data is read from disk, unwanted rows and columns are filtered out by the Storage Server and the remaining data is passed to the database for processing. This will provide significantly better performance for queries where you retrieve a lot of extraneous data from disk but will have less impact where that is not the case.

Oracle is claiming up to 10x performance benefits and this seems reasonable. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean that Oracle will be able to compete effectively with other products. Take a query where you need a full table scan and suppose that that table has 1 million rows each consisting of 60 columns and suppose that you only need to retrieve data from 3 of those columns. Then a column-based database such as Sybase IQ or Vertica only reads those 3 columns so it has 20x less work to do than Oracle. And that doesn’t mean that Oracle will be only half as slow (assuming 10x performance enhancement) because the filtering process (unnecessary if using columns) is still required.

To take another example, Netezza doesn’t just filter the data close to the disk but processes it there too—it is only collation that is done centrally—so you would still expect appliance vendors to outperform the HP Oracle Database Machine.

The margin of performance benefit from appliance vendors will be reduced in some instances but you also have to consider the impact of the Oracle environment as a whole. The key to getting good performance out of Oracle is defined indexes, materialised views and so on. It is when you have unplanned queries or complex analytics where no such structures have been defined that you can run into a performance black hole when using Oracle and which appliance vendors are particularly good at. You may get some benefits from using the Database Machine in these environments but I expect them to pale in comparison to what the appliances offer.

It is noteworthy that no benchmarks have been presented by Oracle in terms of performance: I suspect that this is because, while it is much better than it was before, it still can’t compete across the board with all the new boys on the block. It could probably have put out good benchmarks against IBM and Microsoft but everybody would have spotted the absence of Greenplum, Netezza, ParAccel and the rest, so it wouldn’t have worked as a marketing tool.

Also worth bearing in mind is that while the database may have been pre-installed it will still require administration, and Oracle doesn’t have a reputation as the database requiring the most DBA attention for nothing. If you think that low/minimal administration is a feature of an appliance then this isn’t it.

Leaving that aside, this is certainly a significant step forward but it isn’t ground-breaking. It will encourage existing Oracle shops but I would recommend a proof of concept. In addition, I expect it to hurt IBM and Microsoft (because Oracle should now have clear performance advantages over these vendors in appropriate situations) more than it does the specialist data warehousing vendors. The latter may suffer where it is a close call between staying with Oracle or going elsewhere, but otherwise the appliance and column-based suppliers should still be able to beat Oracle hands down, at least where performance is a major issue.

Which only leaves one question: if the data warehouse is Sage who does that make Larry? Dr Xavier or Magneto?

Author: Philip Howard @ www.it-analysis.com

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Oracle Teams With HP On Database Hardware

Oracle in tandem with HP is bringing out its first hardware product, a database machine, which Oracle CEO Larry Ellison says is suitable for high end, high performance data warehouses.

Oracle (NSDQ: ORCL) in tandem with HP (NYSE: HPQ) is bringing out its first hardware product, a database machine, which Oracle CEO Larry Ellison says is suitable for high end, high performance data warehouses.

At the Oracle OpenWorld conference on Wednesday, Ellison said in a keynote address that the HP Oracle Database Machine will combine a grid of Oracle database servers with a grid of HP Exabyte storage servers. The two grids are combined in a standard 42-u rack.

In a departure from other high end designs, the storage server rather than the database server will contain the intelligence to break queries down into separate parts that are executed in parallel on multi-core processors.

In effect, query-handling intelligence has been shifted from the database server to the storage server, which is closer to the data itself. The move allows only results to be passed from storage over to the database system, instead of blocs of data from a voluminous table of a large, 100 Terabyte or 200 Terabyte database. Databases of that size are becoming increasingly common, and the database machine approach will commonly improve performance over software-only, Oracle data warehouses by a factor of up to 30, Ellison said.

"We pass the query from the database server to the query server, where it is parallelized," with a part of the query running on each core of two-way storage server. Up to 14 storage servers or 28, multi-core CPUs are included in the database machine. The now common quad-core CPU would yield a maximum of 112 cores available for parallel query processing, allowing a complex query to be broken down into 112 parts, if necessary, each with its own core.

Each database server and storage server are connected by two InfiniBand channels, each capable of moving a GB of data per second. The 12 disks in an Exabyte Storage Server are capable of delivering only one GB of data per second, conceded Ellison, but the surplus indicated headroom for data warehouse performance to improve in step with disk drive performance. With a storage server grid of 14 units, the amount of data that could be moved per second under current limitations is 14 GB per second, with pipes capable of carrying 28 GB per second.

Ellison said HP and Oracle have been engaged in joint work on the database machine for three years.

The data warehouse machine is expected to compete with Teradata (NYSE: TDC), the market leader in high end data warehousing based on parallel processing, and specialist Netezza (NYSE Arca: NZ), a supplier of data warehouse machines.

Ellison, never shy about making claims against the competition, said the HP Oracle Database Machine would also perform up to 30 times better than an IBM DB2 data warehouse. In press releases and other documentation, Oracle emphasizes performance improvements that are 10 times faster than predecessor Oracle and competitor data warehouses.

No pricing was announced, the database machine has been in use at several key Oracle customer sites for a year, Ellison said, and is available immediately. Oracle is responsible for sales and software system support. HP will assume hardware service.

Netezza President Jim Baum responded with a prepared statement to Oracle's move: "You just can't slap together existing solutions in clever packages The power of the data warehouse appliance lies in integration and design from the ground up. Engineers in the same company, the same building, working to integrate a shared vision--not patch it together with glue and spit."

Author: Charles Babcock @ InformationWeek.com

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Oracle promises more cloud love

OpenWorld 08 Oracle is planning partnerships with more cloud computing providers while suggesting it could also deliver cloud services as part of its existing ondemand business.

Executive vice president of product development Chuck Rozwat said Tuesday Oracle's database and software infrastructure sack would "definitely" be updated to work with more providers of cloud computing beyond Amazon's EC2 and S3.

He did not name names or provide dates, but - speaking to press at OpenWorld - indicated he had faith in the future of cloud computing services like EC2.

The currently experimental market will mature into a service for businesses as "people will migrate more and more serious/mission critical applications to the cloud".

"My feeling is people will try it out first, get their IT and business practices down," Rozwat said.

Rozwat called cloud computing an "outgrowth" of what Oracle's being doing for 10 years with its ondemand business.

Asked whether Oracle planned to provide its own server farms for cloud computing, he said Oracle's skills lie in building and optimizing software rather than simply running data centers. Reading between the lines, and given his views on how he expects serious business uptake of cloud in future, that sounded like a "yes" - once there's a business case.

"We have no plans to be in the business of providing just a hardware platform because we think the added value is what we can do around the software, and you call that the cloud," Rozwat said.

Oracle's ondemand business has provided versions of its software to customers on hosted server and storage both on and off customers' premises. Services can be run by customers, Oracle partners or Oracle itself.

Commenting on the work with Amazon, Rozwat said the goal has been to enable customers, partners, and Oracle to use EC2 and S3 easily in conjunction with Oracle's database and middleware products. The crux of the work has been to enable back up to the cloud from Oracle by working with Amazon's virtualization layer.
11g take two

Rozwat, meanwhile, told press that Oracle is still not ready to provide a public delivery date for the next update to its 11g database, released last year. Session after OpenWorld session has focused on 11g, while president Charles Philips announced an interim 11.1.07 release on Monday - although further information on this has so far proved hard to find.

However, there's been no mention of 11g R2 even though it's expected to be relatively big.

Among planned features, the ability to make grids - clustered servers - easier to set up and manage using Oracle's Real Application Clusters (RAC). "We want to make sure customers have access to a set of new tools we have for better monitoring and to be able to react to some issues in the future," Rozwat said.

Author: Gavin Clarke @ www.theregister.co.uk

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Oracle replaces senior Australian exec

ORACLE Asia-Pacific has replaced Australian senior manager Nick Evered with former Hyperion executive Sebastien Marotte.

Mr Evered, Oracle's Asia-Pacific senior vice-president for technology sales, is understood to have left the company earlier this month, as reported in The Australian last week.

Mr Evered's departure follows a rejig of Liberal Party proportions at the database maker.

A few months ago Oracle Asia-Pacific head Brian Mitchell also left the company.

Oracle today confirmed that Mr Marotte had replaced Mr Evered.

Mr Marotte comes to the role with a slight change in job titles. As senior vice-president for the technology business unit, he will provide overall leadership for the company's technology solutions portfolio, business strategy, and market development in the region.

He was previously the company's vice-president of enterprise performance management and business intelligence.

According to Mr Marotte's profile on Oracle's website, he has more than 20 years experience in the business software arena.

Mr Marotte has been with Hyperion for over 15 years in senior management roles across various locations, and was the company's Asia-Pacific vice-president since 2005.

Mr Evered spent more than a decade at Oracle where he began his career in Australia managing its alliances and channels division.

Oracle's new Asia-Pacific head and former BEA executive, Steve Au-Yeung, is said to be fine-tuning the company's operations across the region.

Oracle last week exceeded analysts' expectations by posting a stronger-than-expected quarterly profit. Net income rose from $US840 million to $US1.1 billion in the first quarter ending August 21.
However, Oracle's business management software sales dipped 12 per cent to $US331 million, a performance some analysts expressed concern over.

Author: Fran Foo @ www.australianit.news.com.au

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Oracle 11g 'on track' but questions remain over deployments

49% of the global database market is great but will users upgrade? Oracle Oracle said deployments of its latest 11g database were on track, ahead of the OpenWorld conference, which begins today in San Francisco.

The database has been downloaded 450,000 times since its release last July, Oracle president Chuck Phillips said during a first quarter 2009 earnings conference. Oracle is "seeing significant adoption of 11g, on pace with the 10g adoption curve," he said.

A survey this spring of members of the Independent Oracle Users Group found that 35% plan to upgrade some databases to 11g within a year, higher than previous surveys.

Another survey by database management provider The Pythian Group found that only 1.4% of the 756 databases it manages on behalf of corporate clients are running 11g today.

"Whoever tells you that is awesome is selling you a bill of goods," said Paul Vallee, Pythian's founder and president. The firm still sees plenty of Oracle 7 and 8 databases in use, which were first introduced in 1992 and 1997, he said.
Vallee said 11g upgrades are slow in part because there were fewer compelling new features offered at its launch last year than there were in prior upgrades.

It has "minimal feature pull," he said. Also, companies tend to be conservative about upgrading major pieces of infrastructure, such as databases.

"Our philosophy with Oracle is that it is too bleeding-edge to go with any first release," one DBA told Computerworld last July.

The good news from Pythian's study is that interest is rising. Twenty-five percent of Pythian's clients have tested or deployed some Oracle 11g databases, Vallee said.

Moreover, 11g R2 is expected to introduce major new features in the areas of storage and database performance that could finally compel organizations with aging databases to make the move, he said.

The company had a 49% share of the global database market last year, with US$8.3 billion in revenue, according to Gartner.

Author: Eric Lay @ www.computerworlduk.com

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Oracle profit rises 28%; FedEx slips

Oracle Corp. said Thursday that its fiscal first-quarter profit jumped 28 percent, beating Wall Street's expectations, as software sales stayed steady despite turmoil in the U.S. economy.

The business software company's net income for the three months ended Aug. 31 rose to $1.08 billion, or 21 cents per share, from $840 million, or 16 cents per share, a year ago.

Excluding expenses for employee stock options and acquisitions, Oracle posted earnings of 29 cents per share, 2 cents better than analysts had expected, according to a Thomson Reuters poll.

Revenue increased 18 percent, to $5.33 billion.

Oracle forecast adjusted earnings per share of 35 to 36 cents per share in the current quarter. Analysts were expecting 35 cents per share.

Oracle shares gained 65 cents, or 3.6 percent, to $18.75.

FedEx Corp.: The package-delivery company said its fiscal first-quarter earnings fell 22 percent but still matched Wall Street expectations, as cost cuts partially offset slowing global growth.

The company also predicted it will beat analysts' expectations for its fiscal second quarter, and said it will hike shipping rates at its Express unit starting next year.

FedEx earned $384 million, or $1.23 per share, in the three months ended Aug. 31, compared with $494 million, or $1.58 per share, a year earlier.

Revenue rose 8 percent, to $9.97 billion.

The results reflect a shift away from more-expensive overnight shipping. The drop in such deliveries at FedEx, considered a proxy for the economy, may be an "ominous" sign for U.S. growth prospects, said Dan Ortwerth, an Edward Jones & Co. analyst in St. Louis.

"It's quashed any hopes that people have that we're going to emerge from the current period of weakness sooner rather than later," Ortwerth said.

Overall, the company is mitigating the weak U.S. economy and slowing international growth "pretty well" while maintaining strong customer service, said Stifel Nicolaus analyst David Ross. That includes a planned update of its Boeing fleet to further cut fuel consumption.

For the fiscal second quarter, FedEx expects to earn $1.40 to $1.60 per share, well above Wall Street's average forecast of $1.35 per share for the period. It made $1.54 a share in the year-ago quarter.

FedEx shares rose $3.06, or 3.5 percent, to $91.13.

ConAgra Foods Inc.: The packaged-foods company said fiscal first-quarter profit more than doubled on the sale of its commodity trading unit, but rising costs hurt results and drove the company to lower its outlook for its fiscal year.

The maker of Hunts, Healthy Choice and other brands earned $442.4 million, or 94 cents per share, in the quarter ended Aug. 24, up from $175.4 million, or 36 cents per share, a year ago. That includes a gain of 71 cents per share for selling its trading and merchandising operations.

Earnings from continuing operations totaled 23 cents per share, a penny below Wall Street expectations.

Revenue rose 17 percent, to $3.07 billion.

Chief Executive Gary Rodkin said the company expects stronger profit in the second half of the year because of the recent price increases, cost cutting, new products and an expected moderation of rising commodity costs. He said ConAgra plans to launch a new line of shelf-stable Healthy Choice meals in the coming months.

Citigroup analyst David Driscoll said in a research note that many food companies have benefited because consumers are eating less at restaurants and getting more of their food at grocery stores.

"This has resulted in improved results across the sector," Driscoll wrote. "ConAgra has clearly lagged these improvements but ultimately should benefit as the others have."

Shares advanced 52 cents, or 2.7 percent, to $19.69.

Source: www.chicagotribune.com

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Oracle New Product Sales May Be Hurt by Dollar, Slump in Europe

Oracle Corp., the software maker whose international orders buoyed revenue this year, may report smaller growth in sales of new programs after the U.S. dollar advanced and European clients curbed spending.

Sales of software licenses probably came in at the low end of Oracle's goal of $1.2 billion to $1.3 billion in the first quarter ended Aug. 31, six analysts interviewed by Bloomberg said. The increase could be as little as 10 percent, two-thirds less than the year-earlier gain.

Companies abroad are joining U.S. customers in cutting budgets to cope with an economic slowdown, removing a shield that Chief Executive Officer Larry Ellison used to protect Oracle's results in the past. More than half of Oracle's total revenue comes from overseas, and those sales rose almost twice as fast as sales at home during the fiscal fourth quarter.

``Europe is in the tank,'' said Jeff Markunas, who helps manage $1.2 billion as portfolio manager for RidgeWorth Large Cap Core Equity Fund, which owns 900,000 shares of Oracle, in Richmond, Virginia. ``Companies there are beginning to trim discretionary spending.''

The dollar has gained as economies from Europe to Japan cooled and crude oil dropped more than 30 percent from its peak of $147.27 a barrel. The U.S. currency has risen 11 percent from its record low of $1.6038 per euro July 15.

Oracle, the second-biggest software maker after Microsoft Corp., had forecast that converting the euro and other currencies to the dollar would boost revenue by 5 basis points, or 0.05 percentage point.

Dollar Gains

Instead, the dollar's increase means the lift probably will be 2.5 basis points, said UBS AG's Heather Bellini in New York, ranked as the top software analyst by Institutional Investor magazine. She projects as much as $1.23 billion in new license sales, a barometer for future revenue from upgrades and maintenance fees.

Redwood City, California-based Oracle plans to report earnings today after the markets close. Total revenue probably gained 19 percent to $5.45 billion, based on the average estimate of 19 analysts surveyed by Bloomberg. Profit excluding buyout and stock-option costs probably rose to 27 cents a share.

Oracle spokeswoman Deborah Hellinger didn't return a phone call and an e-mail seeking comment.

Oracle fell 86 cents to $18.10, an 18-month low, in Nasdaq Stock Market trading yesterday. The shares have lost 20 percent this year, compared with a 25 percent drop for the Standard & Poor's 500 Information Technology Index.
`Weaker End'

Almost half of large companies worldwide cut their technology budgets for the next 12 months, Forrester Research Inc. said in a report published this month.

``It was a weaker end to the quarter than people had anticipated,'' said Brendan Barnicle, an analyst with Pacific Crest Securities Inc. in Portland, Oregon.

License sales advanced 35 percent in the year-earlier quarter, boosted mostly by Ellison's $34.5 billion in acquisitions, Barnicle said. Typical growth rates for big technology companies are less than 20 percent, and Oracle will return to that pace, he said.

Ellison's 44-company buyout spree almost doubled revenue and pushed Oracle beyond database software. The company now sells programs to run tasks from human resources to analyzing internal operations, manufacturing and merchandising. The purchases helped Oracle overtake International Business Machines Corp. last quarter as the second-biggest software maker.

The company's variety of products still may guard Oracle from a sinking economy in the long run, Goldman, Sachs & Co. analyst Sarah Friar said in an interview from San Francisco.

``Customers are working with fewer vendors, and that's helping Oracle because they have so much they can sell,'' Friar said. ``Software spending is stronger than technology overall, and Oracle spending is stronger than software.''

To contact the reporter on this story: Rochelle Garner in San Francisco at rgarner4@bloomberg.net

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Microsoft takes on Oracle

MICROSOFT WILL REPORTEDLY begin adapting SQL servers to support hundreds of terabytes of data.

The server extensions are based on technology acquired from Datallegro, a developer of large-volume data warehouse appliances. According to the Vole, Datallegro's products will allow it to surpass Oracle's capabilities and compete with other high-end enterprise data warehousing solutions.

The Redmond giant plans to initially offer community technology previews and expects to begin distribution of a commercial version by the first half of 2010. Microsoft will also retain the majority of Datallegro's staff at its headquarters in Aliso Viejo, California.

The Datallegro v3 warehouse appliance is currently priced at under $500,000 for 12 terabytes and includes hardware, rack, networking and a 15TB capacity backup server. The unit, which is capable scanning data at up to 10.5TB/minute, utilises EMC storage, Dell servers, Cisco Infiniband switches, Intel multi-core CPUs and the Ingres Open Source database.

Author: Aharon Etengoff @ www.theinquirer.net

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Oracle eyes bigger share at Gitex

Oracle, the world’s largest enterprise software company said it will showcase the continued evolution of Oracle Database 11g, industry-leading Oracle Fusion Middleware, and its comprehensive industry solutions at Gitex 2008.

Oracle has more than a decade of leadership as the largest exhibitor at Gitex.

It said one of the fastest areas of growth for the company in the Middle East region is the expanding market for industry-specific solutions. Oracle is expecting a record number of visitors to meet with its executives in areas of financial services, retail, telecommunications, government, energy and transportation organisations at Oracle World in Hall 5 at Gitex.

"One of the fundamental benefits of being the vendor with the largest exhibition space at Gitex 2008 is that Oracle World enables us to demonstrate that we have a software solution for every business need, from our database and middleware platform, through our business applications which reduce costs and increase customer satisfaction, to our industry-specific solutions and expertise. The fast-moving, dynamic nature of today's marketplace means that companies need IT solutions to allow them to adapt quickly to keep pace with changing business needs," said Dana Murugan, senior marketing director for Oracle in the Middle East and Africa.

Visitors to Oracle World will have the opportunity to gain a better understanding of Oracle’s customer relationship management (CRM) solutions, as well as get a closer look at the Oracle E-Business Suite and the most recent enhancements to Oracle’s business intelligence and software development solutions.

"Gitex is the marquee IT exhibition for Oracle in the Middle East and is an excellent opportunity for us to demonstrate our expertise in Middleware solutions. The Middle East is a significant market for Oracle and we will continue to invest in this thriving region while introducing new, cutting-edge solutions to meet the demands of customers in any and every industry," he added.

Source: TradeArabia News Service

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Oracle to post results as analysts advise caution

Oracle Corp. is expected to post gains in its first-quarter profit and sales when it reports results for the traditionally weak period after the market's close Thursday, even as Wall Street analysts have warned that a poor economy may be hindering the business software giant.

Analysts on average expect Oracle to post earnings excluding special items for the period ended in August of 26 cents a share, on $5.45 billion in revenue, according to FactSet Research.
That compares to earnings excluding special items of 22 cents a share, and $4.53 billion in revenue in the same period a year earlier.
Wall Street analysts have generally sounded cautious about Oracle's stock recently. Oracle shares have dipped nearly 20% in the past month. The shares rose slightly Thursday, to close at $19.35.
Credit Suisse analyst Philip Winslow wrote in a note to clients earlier this week that he expects a "difficult first quarter" for Oracle, "due to a sluggish application business, disruption in sales due to sales re-organization, as well as foreign currency headwinds."
Oracle, historically a powerhouse in database software, has more recently used a string of acquisitions to construct a formidable line of software applications for businesses.
That's drawn it into more direct competition with German rival SAP AG, while providing new potential sources of revenue.

In its first fiscal quarter last year, Oracle posted surprisingly strong growth in the sale of new software application licenses, helping boost its stock price.

Citigroup analyst Brent Thill wrote in a recent research note that Oracle's flagging share price recently is due to low expectations for the company's first-quarter license revenue growth.
"Despite a strong [fourth quarter] backlog, we believe [the first quarter] lived up to its difficult reputation," Thill wrote.
Still, Thill wrote that while Oracle may issue conservative guidance for its current, second quarter, if that guidance is in the "low to mid-teen" range, "the stock could rally."

Author: John Letzing @ MarketWatch.com

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Oracle's new yacht to continue testing in San Diego

Oracle Racing's new 90-foot multihull yacht, which will lead the US team's bid for next year's America's Cup in Spain, will be relocated to San Diego for training, the team announced Wednesday.

"With light breeze and flat water, Anacortes (in Washington State) has been the ideal place to sea trial our new boat," said team helmsman James Spithill when confirming the ongoing testing plans.

"We will move the team to San Diego for two months to extend the sailing season in the warmer climate of Southern California."

San Diego was the home of the America's Cup during the San Diego Yacht Club's reign as Defender from 1987-1995.

The boat is expected to arrive by barge in San Diego by the end of September.

The 33rd edition of the America's Cup, yachting's showpiece event, could take place in the Mediterranean port of Valencia in eastern Spain if a long-running court battle over the rules of the event between the two teams ends with a decision in favour of Oracle.

Swiss team Alinghi, which won the last edition of the America's Cup held in 2007 in Valencia, have begun building their own multihull boat for the duel which should be ready at the start of 2009 in case the duel goes ahead.

Source: www.turkishpress.com

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Breaking News - Oracle Announces Oracle Application Testing Suite; Oracle IT Service Management Suite Certified ITIL Compatible

Oracle today announced availability of the Oracle Application Testing Suite, the latest addition to Oracle Enterprise Manager's suite of Application Quality Management products.

The Oracle Application Testing Suite provides an integrated solution for load testing, functional testing and test management, enabling customers to thoroughly test packaged, Web and SOA-based applications and their underlying infrastructure to help ensure optimum quality, scalability, and availability. With this announcement, Oracle is adding to its existing portfolio of testing solutions, Moe Fardoost, Oracle director of product marketing, told 5 Minute Briefing. Oracle Application Testing Suite incorporates technology acquired earlier this year with the e-TEST suite Web application testing products from Empirix. As a result, Oracle now offers “a complete testing solution” for both Web applications - as well as database applications and secure data sharing, which were part of pre-existing capabilities within Oracle, he said.

Key components of Oracle Application Testing Suite include Oracle Load Testing for Web Applications. “This is the component that allows you to generate tens of thousands of simultaneous requests so that you can stress-test your application,” said Fardoost. Another component, Oracle Functional Testing for Web Applications, enables comprehensive functional testing of applications and Web services and is a “huge” productivity boost, noted Fardoost. Its transaction engine simplifies automated test script generation and enables the automation of complex Web applications and associated technologies out-of-the-box to validate the end-user’s experience. Finally, Oracle Test Manager for Web Applications “is the component that really helps you manage the whole testing task from planning to scheduling to defect management,” said Fardoost.
“Testing has always been a major part of the application lifecycle and we have been aware of the challenges customers have in trying to get better quality with less resources and with fewer skills,” Fardoost explained. With the new capabilities for Web application testing, Oracle offers maximum automation of load and functional testing, enabling organizations to reduce their testing effort by as much as 50 percent as well as better utilize less skilled IT resources, said Fardoost.

Oracle also today announced Oracle IT Service Management Suite has been certified as ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) compatible through the PinkVERIFY IT Service Management (ITSM) certification program. Key components of the Oracle IT Service Management Suite include Siebel CRM HelpDesk, Oracle Enterprise Manager and Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition.

Source: www.dbta.com

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Pacific Crest Says Oracle Earnings Could Come in Short

Concerns are growing about Oracle (ORCL). In the latest in a series of cautious Street comments on its upcoming earnings report, Pacific Crest’s Brendan Barnicle Monday morning warned that revenues for the fiscal first quarter ended August could come in short of Street expectations. He says that the quarter closed weaker than he expected. Barnicle says that the company likely to have a 2% headwind from currency in the quarter, after a 6% benefit last quarter.

Barnicle says the weakness reflects “nothing more than seasonality and currency,” and there has been no change in the company’s business fundamentally. But he does say the company faces a difficult comparison with the year-earlier quarter. “Our contacts report that the pipeline remains solid for Q2, and management has not demonstrated an excessive reaction to Q1,” he writes. “Nevertheless, Q1 is likely to be lackluster, at best, and Q2 guidance is also likely to be at best in line with current expectations.”

Barnicle trimmed his revenue estimate for Q1 to $5.44 billion from $5.52 billion; the Street is at $5.45 billion. For Q2, he goes to $6.4 billion, from $6.47 billion. For the full fiscal year ending May 2009, his EPS estimate slips to $1.56 from $1.57; for fiscal 2010 he goes to $1.85, from $1.88.

Oracle will report earnings on September 18.

Oracle closed Monday down 81 cents, or 4%, to $19.26.

Source: seekingalpha.com

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SOA buy for Oracle

Oracle is to buy ClearApp, a maker of software for managing the performance of composite applications in SOA (service-oriented architecture) environments.

ClearApp's software automatically discovers application components and their dependencies at runtime and monitors performance.

ZapThink analyst Jason Bloomberg says ClearApp's technology provides "deep visibility into the components underlying SOA-based composite applications", but the acquisition also raises questions, as it follows related purchases by Oracle of companies like Auptyma and Moniforce, he says.

"Oracle does have quite a bit of experience in assimilating acquired technologies, and they're also known for taking care of the customers that come along as a result, but every such acquisition sets the bar of success higher for them," Bloomberg says.

The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Author: Chris Kanaracus @ computerworld.co.nz

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Oracle Audit Vault 10.2.3 Released!

With this latest release, Oracle Audit Vault customers can now also monitor Microsoft SQL Server databases. Oracle has announced the general availability of Oracle Audit Vault Release 10.2.3. This latest release of Oracle Audit Vault now collects audit data from Microsoft SQL Server 2000 and 2005, in addition to Oracle Databases, addressing the lack of a Microsoft solution for enterprise database auditing and activity monitoring.

"Oracle Audit Vault 10.2.3 allows organisations to turn database audit data into mission-critical business intelligence for enabling enterprise security and regulatory compliance," said Vipin Samar, vice president, database security, Oracle.

With Oracle Audit Vault, audit data is automatically consolidated into a secure and centralised repository based on Oracle's data warehousing technology, and analysed in real-time against enterprise-defined policies. Any unauthorised activities can be immediately detected using Oracle Audit Vault's dashboard alerts capabilities.

Oracle Audit Vault also features built-in and customisable reports to address the need for reliable compliance reporting for regulations such as the Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) Act, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standard (DSS). This latest release introduces additional pre-built reports, and now captures before-and-after changes to sensitive data to help organisation save time and costs related to compliance reporting, says the company.

Oracle Audit Vault 10.2.3 delivers improved reporting capabilities such as filtering audit data, highlighting rows with condition values, as well as generating charts and graphs. Custom reports can be saved and shared within the enterprise or with external auditors. It also increases privileged user monitoring by auditing Oracle Database Vault.

Oracle Audit Vault 10.2.3 is priced at $57,500 per processor and the Oracle Audit Vault Collection Agent for Microsoft SQL Server or Oracle Databases is available for $3,500 per processor.

Source: www.efytimes.com

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Oracle's Ellison spanked for withholding evidence in shareholder suit

A federal judge has upbraided Oracle CEO Larry Ellison for withholding evidence in a class-action suit brought by company stockholders.

Yesterday, Bloomberg reports, US District Court Judge Susan Illston ruled that Ellison failed to preserve or intentionally destroyed emails and audio recordings that should have been turned over to the suit's plaintiffs. She stopped short of sanctioning the world's fourteenth richest man, but she did say that jurors should assume the missing evidence would have the boosted the stockholders' case.

According to Illston's ruling - provided here (PDF) by the Wall Street Journal - Ellison was obligated to preserve his emails after the suit was filed in March 2001. But in the end, he gave the court only 15 messages.

Ellison and his Oracle co-defendants did produce 1,650 Ellison emails from the files of other company employees. But the judge says this merely muddied the waters.

"It could have been helpful to plaintiffs to demonstrate that certain emails were discovered in Ellison's files," Illston wrote. "Otherwise, for instance, Ellison could argue that he never actually read or received an email that was sent to him, and thus had no knowledge of its contents.

"Moreover, having established with certainty that numerous emails were not produced from Ellison's email files - because the emails were produced from other files or accounts - it is impossible to know whether additional unproduced emails were also deleted or not turned over."

The defendants also requested 135 hours of Ellison interviews recorded by Matthew Symonds, author of the book Softwar: An Intimate Portrait of Larry Ellison and Oracle. But, says the judge's ruling, Symonds asked a computer repair shop to destroy the laptop storing the interviews.

Ellison did hand over some transcripts of the interviews, but none from 2001. With their suit - originally brought by the Nursing Home Pension Fund - shareholders accuse Oracle, Ellison, and other execs of falsifying financial results for the company's 2001 second and third fiscal quarters.

"The court believes it is appropriate to infer that the e-mails and the Softwar-related materials would demonstrate Ellison's knowledge of, among other things, problems with the [Oracle software] Suite 11i, the effects of the economy on Oracle's business and problems with defendant's forecasting models,'" Illston said.

Trial in the case is scheduled for March. Ellison settled a similar shareholder suit in 2005, donating $100m to charities and forking over $22m in attorney fees.

Author: Cade Metz @ www.theregister.co.uk

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Oracle chief needs to help Portola Valley schools

As school resumes across the Bay Area, Anne Campbell has more than the usual number of challenges to juggle this year.

The superintendent of the Portola Valley School District went into this academic year facing a $1 million budget shortfall in the planned $11 million budget for the 2008-09 academic year.

"That's a pretty substantial hit," Campbell said.

A big chunk of that shortfall can be blamed on the housing meltdown. The fall in property taxes zapped about $700,000 from the district, which consists of just two schools. There's nothing anyone could have done about that.

But what of the other $300,000? For that, the district can thank Larry Ellison, Oracle's chief executive. And unlike the property tax problem, this is something that can be fixed. As the nation's highest-paid CEO, Ellison should dip into his bottomless bank account and donate at least twice that amount to his local school district.

It's not just that Ellison is fantastically rich. For someone such as Ellison who has benefited more than most people from all that society has to offer, we should expect more in return.

Let's review how things came to this point.

Ellison spent years building a Japanese-style estate on 23 acres in Woodside. And for several years, Ellison has been appealing the county's assessment of his property.

In a nutshell, Ellison argued that because of the estate's distinct architectural style, it's worth far less because it would be far less appealing to any potential buyer. The San Mateo County Assessment Appeals Board agreed.

The board lowered the property's assessed value from $173 million in 2007 to $69.7 million in 2008. That is expected to cut Ellison's estimated tax bill from $1.86 million in 2007 to $751,041. And as icing on the cake, the board also ruled that the county owed Ellison a $3 million refund for taxes paid since 2004.

That brings us back to Portola Valley. The district consists of just two schools, K-3 and 4-8. Over the past few months, Campbell said, the district has been struggling to figure out how to deal with the double whammy of the housing crunch and Ellison reassessment.

The solution it is using is a temporary one. The district cut about $500,000 in expenses, primarily by whacking the equivalent of four jobs and nipping and tucking several other parts of the budget. The district then chipped in $333,333 from a reserve fund. And the Portola Valley Schools Foundation, which is funded by parents and the community, raised $165,515.

That problem is that the last two items are one-time funding solutions. The district will already start the 2009-10 year about $500,000 in the hole.

Now, Ellison isn't responsible for all of these funding problems. And yes, the assessment board agreed with his case. He's made his point. Now he should do the right thing and write a check for $600,000 to cover his portion of the shortfall for this year and next while the district finds a long-term solution.

I don't think I'm being unusually harsh in arguing that the last person in Silicon Valley who needs or deserves such a windfall is Ellison. But as if to emphasize my point, just last week in a securities filing Oracle disclosed that the company paid its founder $84.6 million in the fiscal year ending in May. That doesn't count the $544 million Ellison pocketed from selling Oracle stock over the past year.

Ellison's 38 percent raise has triggered outrage among some Oracle shareholders, as well it should. One group has submitted a proposal that would give shareholders more say over executive pay packages at Oracle. It will be voted on at the company's annual meeting Oct. 10. I don't expect it will pass. And even if it does, I assume Ellison and the company would ignore it.

But as long as Ellison continues to treat Oracle as his personal piggybank, the least he can do is send $600,000 of his pocket change to help the Portola Valley schools.

Author: Chris O'Brien @ www.mercurynews.com

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Oracle releases enterprise pack for Eclipse

Oracle has expanded its Fusion Middleware with new components aimed at Java developers. The Enterprise Pack for Eclipse combines technology from Oracle Fusion Middleware and BEA Systems, which was acquired by the company in January for $8.5 billion.

It includes a set of Eclipse plug-ins to accelerate database, Java, Java EE, and Oracle WebLogic Server development. It will enable users to develop, debug, and deploy applications to Oracle WebLogic Server 10g R3, and supports new development features of Oracle WebLogic Server including FastSwap and the ability to redefine Java classes without redeployment.

It also supports developers working with web services, XML, the Spring Framework, JavaServer Faces, Cascading Style Sheets, and JavaScript.

Earlier this month, the company introduced Oracle WebLogic Server 10g R3, which also combines technology from Fusion Middleware and BEA Systems.

Ted Farrell, chief architect and senior vice president of tools and middleware at Oracle, said: "Continuing to enhance Oracle's Eclipse developer tools for Oracle Fusion Middleware demonstrates our commitment to providing developers productivity with choice. The Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse helps to expand our offerings for the Eclipse and open source developer community."

Source: www.cbronline.com

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Breakout gains 'foreseen' for Oracle (ORCL)

"Technically, Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) is now set up nicely in a base for a breakout," says Leo Fasciocco, a technical analyst who specializes in stocks breaking out above previous resistance levels.

In his Ticker Tape Digest, the newsletter advisor explains, "ORCL is in a good spot to be accumulated for a breakout, supported by favorable earnings prospects. And as a big cap play, it is most suitable for conservative investors."

"Oracle, based in Redwood City, California, sells a wide range of enterprise software solutions, including databases, middleware, and applications. With annual revenues of $22.4 billion, ORCL is one of the largest software companies. Its updates and product support are the most profitable segment of its operations. It accounts for 46% of revenues.

"The company has an active acquisition program that is a fundamental component of its strategy. ORCL has spent more than $28 billion in acquisitions the last four fiscal years.

"The stock's long-term chart shows a powerful run up to 40 during the 2000 bull market. It then went south with the stock market. It has since been working its way back. Short-term, the stock rallied from 18 to 23 and has formed a cup-and-handle base. That type of pattern is sometimes found with big caps. The stock is now set up nicely in a base for a potential breakout.

"The handle portion of the base has shown a nice contraction in volume, showing that selling pressure is drying up. That reflects itself in the accumulation-distribution line which is still trending higher.

"The company will be reporting a big jump in quarterly earnings soon. This fiscal year ending May 2009, analysts forecast a 17% increase in earnings to $1.48 a share from $1.26 a share a year ago. The stock sells with a price-earnings ratio of 14, which is low given the growth rate.

"What makes ORCL look good at this point is that earnings for the upcoming fiscal first quarter ending August 30 should jump 30% to 26 cents a share from 20 cents a year ago. The growth rate for the quarter is well above the norm and could attract attention and buyers for the stock.

"The highest estimate for the quarter is at 27 cents a share. We see chances for a modest upside surprise. The past three quarters, ORCL topped the consensus estimate by one to four cents a share.

"The stock's institutional sponsorship is excellent. The 5-star rated American Funds Fundamental Investors was a recent buyer of 1.7 million shares. Also 5-star rated Janus Twenty Fund added 19 million shares."

Author: Steven Halpern @ http://www.bloggingstocks.com

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