Oracle wins CRM deal with Jafza

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Source: ITP.net

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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SAP Shows Solid Earnings, Firm Stance Against Oracle

SAP on Thursday narrowly topped analyst profit estimates in its third quarter, raking in $579 million on sales of $3.44 billion.

Analysts were looking for sales of $3.46 billion in the quarter, a target the German software giant would surely have met or exceeded if not for currency fluctuations related to the strength of the euro. Most analysts pegged SAP for a third-quarter profit of $575 million.

"Given the current currency situation and the concerns of the market, we would assess the report as a success," DZ Bank analyst Oliver Finger wrote in a research note following SAP's earnings report.

While the story this quarter was the company's 11-percent surge in licensing sales, which rose to $1.02 billion, Chief Financial Officer Werner Brandt cautioned that SAP probably wouldn't hit the upper end of its previous estimates of 15 percent to 17 percent growth for the full fiscal year.

"It appears less likely that product or software revenue growth will reach the upper end of the aforementioned ranges," Brandt said during a conference call with analysts. However, he said, the company expects to still top earnings-per-share estimates for the full year, ranging from $7.32 to $7.54 a share.

During the conference call, CEO Henning Kagermann and Leo Apotheker, SAP's president of customer solutions and operations, spent a considerable amount of time defending the company's performance in head-to-head battles with arch-rival Oracle over large customer accounts.

While Oracle has claimed that it consistently dominated SAP in landing new customer accounts, Apotheker said SAP actually had won in 85 percent of the 247 deals for which the two companies competed during the quarter.

The company also announced Thursday that it beat out Oracle for a large contract with retailing giant Wal-Mart during third quarter. According to SAP executives, Wal-Mart will implement SAP ERP Financials to replace some of its legacy software systems, including its JD Edwards enterprise resource planning (define) applications, and integrate it with other internal systems. The first phase of the installation is planned for completion in 2010.

Reaffirming the company's plan to grow its customer base to more than 100,000 clients by 2010 through aggressively targeting the small- and mid-sized business sector, SAP announced that it would invest more than $560 million in the coming year to market and develop Business By Design, its first software-as-a-service (SaaS) (define) offering, announced last month.

SAP also announced it would be launching a new mid-market product that features a flexible architecture and new deployment models -- and implying it too will be delivered to customers in an on-demand model or both on-demand and on-premise. The company said further details and a specific timeline for the new product's delivery will wait until SAP's annual analyst conference in December.

On Thursday, Kagermann reiterated that SAP would continue to follow its long-time plan of making only small, strategic acquisitions -- rather than follow Oracle's strategy of constant acquisition.

That comment come in spite of SAP's contrary move last week, when it broke from tradition to purchase business intelligence and analytics software vendor Business Objects for $6.8 billion.

Less than a week later, Oracle announced its intention to acquire middleware provider BEA Systems for $6.7 billion. According to some industry insiders, SAP's Business Objects deal inadvertently assisted Oracle's acquisition strategy by ensuring the German company would be unlikely to engage in an expensive bidding war so soon after making a massive purchase of its own.

SAP shares pulled back $1.69 a share, or three percent, to $54.61 in Thursday afternoon trading.

Author: Larry Barrett

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