Oracle addresses archiving

You know when an American West coast-headquartered IT vendor is serious about a product when it gets its press staff to send out releases at 5 am in the morning West Coast time. And that is what happened at the Redwood Shores offices of Oracle USA on Monday when it announced the release of Universal Online Archive 10g (UOA) and the associated Oracle Email Archive Service.

Despite (or potentially in part because of) the downturn in western economies, archiving, including email archiving, appears to be this year's 'must have' product for the enterprise. However, this is not a vendor-driven initiative, unlike a large number of significant IT purchasing decisions that have been made over recent years. This is a direct response to customer demand.

Compliance, risk management, and eDiscovery, all require robust archiving of digital content. According to Oracle one in four US companies being prosecuted have had corporate email subpoenaed as part of the case. Furthermore the fallout from the sub-prime debacle has prompted many financial institutions to invest in solutions to trawl their 'back catalogue' of communications and agreements to identify their potential exposure.

Oracle wants a bit of this archiving pie, and fortunately for the company it has four elements that enable it to address the demand by putting a good sized knife and fork into the pastry meat and gravy.

The first is building the Universal Online Archive platform on top of the Oracle Database, which can cope with both the scale and the variety of content that organisations will need to archive. The second is its HVIE (High-volume Import engine) which can ingest millions of objects per day. Third is the acquisition of high volume content management technology and specialist staff in the guise of Stellent. Lastly is a broad content archiving strategy, not just focusing on email.

The product is focused on holding all historical content, in whichever format, initially from email, but later to include SharePoint, file server, and even ERP content, within a single platform.

As part of the business case development for the product Oracle looked at its own content storage, identifying that 'active' content (with a short 30 day lifecycle) is a much smaller percentage of content stored than that which is 'historical' i.e. rarely accessed, but must be kept for five years or more.

Oracle identified also that archiving does not need the full Enterprise Content Management (ECM) stack, just a highly scalable infrastructure, which could both store, and more importantly retrieve, high-volume, often low-value content from any source.

Importantly Oracle has not made the mistake of thinking that archiving is the same as Records Management, and there is an adapter for Oracle Universal Records Management (EuroView Daily, 10 October 2007). This gives full classification of the content, and a policy-based process of disposition at the end of a record's defined retention period. Here the record is either deleted (with no chance of recovery), retained for a further set period, or in the case of many government records retained in perpetuity.

In Ovum's opinion this announcement is another demonstration of the bringing to fruition the combined capabilities of both the Oracle and former Stellent teams, melding understanding of content types with that of high-volume storage. Good move, very timely.

Author: Mike Davis @ www.ovum.com

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Oracle Advances Price Management Strategy With Deal

Deal Management furthers Oracle’s strategy of delivering a complete price optimization and management suite. Be aware that Oracle offers separate modules for Siebel and EBusiness Suite. On 14 April 2008, Oracle announced the availability of Deal Management, a software module that is designed to enforce pricing practices and provide tools to aid deal negotiation processes.

Deal Management represents an initial step by Oracle in executing its strategy to offer a complete pricing software suite. Announced in November 2007, Oracle’s strategy is to deliver by 2009 modules under the Price Management brand that address price analytics, price optimization and price execution functions for E-Business Suite and Siebel. This strategy marks a shift from Oracle’s traditional focus on price execution as an option bundled with order management and quoting applications. Deal Management complements existing price execution capabilities for managing price lists and communicating prices, with additional functionality for:

* Reviewing deal elements via price waterfall analyses
* Pricing reviews by line items
* Deal profitability analysis
* Price recommendations for structuring deals
* Approval workflow and policy enforcement

Oracle has stated that Deal Management was built on Fusion Middleware and supports Siebel CRM 8.0, E-Business Suite 11.i.10 and Release 12. It has not disclosed that separate products were released for Siebel and E-Business Suite as an interim measure to expedite market entry. Oracle is currently developing Price Management for two application suites that eventually will be consolidated into one offering:

* One for Siebel, with modules called Price Performance Analytics, Price Planning, Price Administration, Dynamic Pricer and Deal Management
* Another for E-Business Suite, with modules entitled Price Performance Analytics, Price Planning, Advanced Pricing and Deal Management


The Price Performance Analytics and Price Planning modules will be shared between suites, but the Deal Management modules differ:

* Siebel Deal Management is written in Siebel code and embeds software that Oracle acquired from Revenue Technologies for price waterfall analysis, determining profitability and pocket margin and providing discount guidelines.
* Deal Management for E-Business Suite was developed separately in Java and PL/SQL, but includes intellectual property from Revenue Technologies for enforcement and authorization workflows and analytics for scoring deals.

The presence of Revenue Technologies and Siebel code may mean more of a migration than an upgrade, should customers eventually migrate to Fusion.

Author: Michael Dunne @ www.gartner.com

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Oracle files new charges against SAP

Oracle has filed new charges against SAP alleging that its TomorrowNow subsidiary stole Oracle software with the knowledge of SAP executives, according to court papers filed yesterday.

Oracle claims its revised complaint will reveal "a pattern of unlawful conduct that is different from, and even more serious than the mass downloading," which was the focus of the original case.

Oracle filed its first complaint against SAP in 2007, alleging that TomorrowNow employees posed as Oracle customers to download patches and support documentation from Oracle's website.

TomorrowNow then used the materials to provide cheap services to Oracle customers, and made attempts to switch them onto SAP's platform, Oracle alleges.

Oracle now claims that TomorrowNow workers downloaded Oracle business applications, as well as just its support materials and that SAP executives may have been complicit - something SAP has vehemently denied.

"It appears that SAP AG and SAP America knew - at executive levels - of the likely illegality of TN's business model from the time of their acquisition of TN and, for business reasons, failed to change it," said Oracle.

SAP claimed that it did not have access to Oracle materials downloaded by TomorrowNow. SAP explained that it intentionally created a business structure that maintained a firewall between TomorrowNow and SAP and that it was satisfied that SAP AG or SAP America did not access Oracle intellectual property via TomorrowNow.

The parties' next case management conference will be held on April 24.

Author: John-Paul Kamath @ www.computerweekly.com

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