Openbravo recruits senior Oracle director from Silicon Valley

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- Openbravo, the leading developer of professional, web-based, open source Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solutions designed specifically for small and medium businesses, has expanded its management team with the appointment of Paolo Juvara as Chief Products Officer (CPO).

Paolo Juvara joins Openbravo from Oracle Corporation, where he worked for fourteen years, most recently as senior director, leading the development of the Service product line. He also held a broad range of development and management roles within Oracle's Applications Development business, including positions in Financials, Supply Chain Management, CRM and Business Intelligence.

His experience in developing products for global markets is highly relevant to Openbravo's ERP software.

Moving from Oracle's headquarters in Redwood Shores, California, Paolo Juvara will be based in Pamplona, Spain, and will assume responsibility for Openbravo's ERP product roadmap, engineering and integration projects.

Manel Sarasa, Openbravo's CEO, said: "Paolo understands our market and the opportunities and challenges that open source brings. Furthermore, he has the personality and level of insight to be involved with our development communities, to listen to and engage with them. His appointment is a great endorsement of our product and strategy. I look forward to Paolo playing an important part in our achievements as we work towards 500,000 downloads on SourceForge."

Paolo Juvara, the newly-appointed CPO for Openbravo, said: "I deeply believe in the design and application of open source software and I look forward to applying my experience of development of commercial software into an area that I feel passionately about. Openbravo has a strong team and a strong strategy, and I am proud to be part of one of the most successful projects in SourceForge."

Ismael Ciordia, Chief Technology Officer for Openbravo said: "Paolo has the perfect combination of experiences to take Openbravo to the next level: he is a capable developer; he is used to managing large teams of developers; he has global experience and he has worked on strategy, sales and consulting with companies across Asia Pacific, EMEA, Latin America. While Paolo will take full responsibility on business focused products, such as the ERP, I will focus on evolving and enhancing our powerful development platform in which these products run."

Openbravo is a fully functional integrated web-based open source enterprise management system (ERP), with a proven track record. The ERP has already been installed by a number of innovative SMB enterprises (http://www.openbravo.com/customers/success-stories/).

About Openbravo

Openbravo is the leading professional open source enterprise management (ERP) solution for small and midsize enterprises (SMEs). Driven by open source philosophies and best-in-class services, it delivers a fully integrated, web-based ERP system tailored to the needs of any company, regardless of size or industry sector. The functionality of Openbravo is in continual growth thanks to an expanding international community of users, partners and developers. Openbravo helps companies to manage daily operations, optimize business processes, enhance customer satisfaction and ultimately increase profitability. And because it is open source, Openbravo puts the customer in full control without the overheads of contracts or licenses. In January 2006, Openbravo secured a EUR 5 million ($6.4m) financing agreement with Sodena - record funding for an open source ERP company - to fuel further software development and international growth. Openbravo is a founder member of the Open Solutions Alliance - an independent consortium launched in 2007 to educate and inform businesses deploying Open Source, while promoting best practice and interoperability among vendors. Openbravo is a winner of a 2007 'Red Herring 100 Europe Award' and of the 'LinuxWorld.com Product Excellence Awards 2007' in the Best Integration Solution category.

Source: www.openbravo.com

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Millipore swaps out SAP for Oracle

When life sciences firm Millipore Inc. acquired Serologicals Corp. last summer for its strong focus on drug discovery, nuclear function and stem cell research, one of the first orders of business was to swap out the firm's SAP enterprise resource planning (ERP) software for the Oracle E-Business Suite.

The decision to migrate about 1,000 new Serologicals Corp. users from SAP to Oracle made sense, according to Tom Roy, Millipore's manager of application services, because Millipore has long sought to standardize on Oracle applications throughout its many business units. The company has been an Oracle customer since 1991 and became one of the first firms to achieve a single, global instance of the Oracle E-Business Suite back in 1999.

"We've been pleased with Oracle applications over the years," Roy said, "and so it pretty much seemed a no-brainer that we would bring this acquisition onto Oracle."

The Oracle E-Business Suite implementation at Millipore's new Serologicals division took just under 10 months to complete. Roy said the division is currently running Oracle applications that cover order management, inventory control, manufacturing, shipping and distribution, accounts receivable, general ledger management, project accounting, and purchasing.

"[Serologicals was] pretty much using SAP for their entire ERP," Roy said. "That's all on Oracle now."

Meeting business goals

Millipore decided to standardize on Oracle because it wanted to have consistent and accurate data at its offices and laboratories in 32 countries around the world. The company reports that the consistency it has achieved through standardization has helped to save money and is contributing to the company's ultimate financial goal of doubling in size by 2009.

Millipore's most recent investment in Oracle appears to be paying off. The company says the new Oracle E-Business Suite implementation has helped Serologicals streamline business processes, achieve a consolidated view of customers, and gain critical process manufacturing capabilities.

Some training required

As part of integrating Serologicals into its global operations, Millipore used Oracle's iLearning module to get those 1,000 end users trained on the Oracle E-Business Suite.

According to the company, the iLearning module allowed supervisors to manage, deliver and track training online, and Serologicals employees were able to access the system at their convenience so they could complete training at their own pace.

A supportive message

In addition to running the Oracle E-Business Suite, Millipore currently uses Oracle's Process Manufacturing and Oracle Database 9.2.05.

Roy didn't have any specific complaints about his experience with Oracle thus far, but he said that, in general, all software vendors should strive to improve their support services.

"I think there isn't a software company out there that couldn't do better on support, but I think that compared with the rest, Oracle does very well," Roy said. "Anybody who's done support, whether it's for internal or external customers, knows how difficult it is, and nobody is perfect at it."

Author: Mark Brunelli

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Oracle 11g Ships, But New Features Cost Extra

The recently launched Oracle 11g database server is now shipping but today's release announcement came with a twist: Some of the new features come at an additional cost.

Oracle took the wraps off its next-generation database at an event in New York last month, saying that the first iteration would ship this quarter for Linux. Company officials at the time indicated that the Windows version should follow a quarter later, or by year's end.

The company today declined to comment on the status of the Windows version, which is in beta. Oracle 11g for Windows will boast integration with Microsoft's Visual Studio tool suite.

Also, in a recent white paper, the company said the Windows version will employ a native, thread-based Windows service model and will more tightly integrate with the operating system.

For those running Oracle on Windows, 11g will offer support for large-memory and grid computing. It will support both 32- and 64-bit Windows including Vista, X64-based hardware (client and server) and Intel's Windows-based Itanium server platform.

But the big news today, as mentioned, centers on pricing. Oracle 11g Standard Edition, which allows up to 300 named users, starts at $3,300, while Enterprise Edition is priced at $8,800 for 800 named users. A complete price list is available here.

Some of the key new features of the database are as follows:

* Real Application Testing, which consists of two components. The first is Database Replay, which lets DBAs test, capture and run actual production workloads when executing such tasks as patches and changes to schemas, configuration, storage, network and operating systems. The second component is SQL Performance Analyzer (SPA), which lets developers test the impact of environmental changes. A white paper on RAT is available from Oracle here (PDF). RAT costs $10,000 per processor or $200 per named user.

* Advanced Compression, designed to reduce database storage requirements by two or three times, is priced at $10,000 per processor or $200 per named user.

* Oracle Total Recall, which lets DBAs maintain archives of changed data for those with compliance requirements, is $5,000 per processor or $100 per named user.

* Active Data Guard, a module that provides monitoring, management and automation for data protection and disaster recovery, is priced at $5,000 per processor.

Author: Jeffrey Schwartz

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