19.6.08

Oracle Reportedly Raises Prices 15%-20% On Major Pdts

Oracle (ORCL) has raised prices by 15%-20% “across all major product lines,” according to a brief research note this afternoon by Citigroup’s Brent Thill. Now, you want to keep in mind that Oracle negotiates prices with customers of any significant size, so the numbers on the price list are not necessarily what people actually pay. But that said, it still is an eye-opening development.

Thill says the company has not installed a price increase of this magnitude “for many years.”

According to the note, Thill examined the price list release earlier this week and compared it to previous lists to uncover the price increases.

So how can they get away with this in an soft IT spending environment? Thill says there are three reasons. One, the company is the first or second leading player in each of the categories in which they play. Two, it has been a long time since it raised prices this much. And three, he notes that customers rarely pay list prices after negotiating.

Oracle today is up 5 cents at $22.58.

Author: Eric Savitz @ http://blogs.barrons.com/techtraderdaily


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18.6.08

Overstock.com Improves Customer Shopping Experience with Oracle

Oracle® Coherence Integrates with Overstock.com’s Existing SOA Infrastructure to Reduce Critical Response Times
Redwood Shores, Calif.

* Overstock.com, an online "closeout" retailer offering discount, brand-name merchandise for sale over the Internet, has implemented Oracle® Coherence 3.3, in-memory data grid and component of Oracle Fusion Middleware, to enhance its SOA infrastructure and improve the search performance of its popular Web store, Oracle today announced.

* Overstock.com, ranked among the top 10 most trafficked retail Web sites on Cyber Monday 2007, foresaw potential bottlenecks in its infrastructure, given the massive and unpredictable loads experienced particularly during the busiest shopping day of the year.

* With Oracle Coherence, Overstock.com delivers fast and reliable access to frequently searched data, improving customer search response times by nearly 100 percent and guided navigation response times by over 200 percent. These improvements correlate to increased conversion rates and revenue.

* Start-to-finish, the Oracle Coherence implementation took just two months, leveraging the skilled Java development team at Overstock.com. Oracle Database and Oracle Real Application Clusters provide the data foundation for Overstock.com’s SOA architecture with Oracle Coherence providing added performance, scalability, resilience and reduced downtime.

* A component of Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle Coherence enables users to push data closer to the application for faster access and greater resource utilization. By automatically and dynamically partitioning data in-memory across multiple servers, Oracle Coherence helps provide continuous data availability and transactional integrity, even in the event of a server failure. As a shared infrastructure, the offering combines data locality with local processing power to perform real-time data analysis, in-memory grid computations, and parallel transaction and event processing.

* In addition to utilizing Oracle Database and Oracle Coherence, Overstock.com also runs Oracle enterprise resource planning applications.

Source: www.oracle.com


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17.6.08

EMC Helps Oracle Customers Drive Cost Efficiency and Simplify Deployment

EMC Announces New Multi-Protocol Storage Solutions for Oracle OLTP and Reference Configurations for Oracle Data Warehouse.

EMC Corporation ,the world leader in information infrastructure solutions, today announced new EMC Proven Solutions and reference configurations that help customers
more efficiently and cost effectively deploy an EMC information infrastructure in Oracle transaction processing and data warehousing environments. Customers can more easily map the most appropriate storage platform to the Oracle use case at the lowest cost by taking advantage of EMC's tiered storage. The combination of industry-leading EMC and Oracle technologies, joint testing and new customer-focused technical documentation speeds and simplifies deployments of Oracle on EMC network
storage.

For Oracle OLTP environments, new solutions based on EMC Symmetrix(R) provide additional high performance, scalable infrastructure options for enterprise Oracle(R) Database deployments. New solutions based on EMC Celerra(R) NS Series multi-protocol storage platform unify production and development/test environments with disaster recovery for consolidated Oracle midsize enterprise environments. These new solutions complement the existing Oracle OLTP solutions based on EMC CLARiiON(R) and expand EMC's portfolio of Proven Solutions for Oracle OLTP.

Detailed best practices and reference architectures for Oracle OLTP solutions enable customers to take advantage of the optimized use of EMC's broad portfolio of information infrastructure, including:

-- Combined use of FC, NFS, and iSCSI protocols together with tiered
storage within the platform optimize storage infrastructure for
different classes of Oracle data files, recovery logs and flashback
data.
-- EMC writeable snapshots leveraged with EMC Celerra to speed Oracle
Database development, test and migration as well as backup/recovery.
-- EMC RecoverPoint provides heterogeneous remote data replication for all
business-critical information as well as data compression for advanced,
cost-effective disaster recovery.

For Oracle data warehouse environments, EMC has partnered with Oracle
to expand upon efforts within the Oracle Optimized Warehouse Initiative.
Complementing previously released optimized configurations with Dell, EMC
and Oracle have developed new configurations based on Intel dual core and
servers and EMC CLARiiON CX3 networked storage systems. Through using
optimized configurations, costumers can leverage pre-installed,
pre-configured solutions to help reduce the purchase cycle and streamline
data warehouse deployments.

EMC and Oracle have also documented a series of flexible configurations
based on Symmetrix and CLARiiON for Oracle data warehousing deployments,
helping customers balance cost with performance and growth at any scale of
Oracle data warehouse deployments. This includes support for Oracle
deployments in both "scale-up" SMP computing models or "scale-out" Oracle
low -cost Grid Computing models on Linux. Joint EMC and Oracle efforts
provide customers different sized configurations for a stated workload
requirement based on IBM, HP, Sun or Intel-based server environments.

"EMC and Oracle have a longstanding partnership with deep engineering
alignment. Development of solutions that optimize EMC information
infrastructure and Oracle technology enables our joint customers to easily
and rapidly deploy EMC solutions to accelerate the time to experience ROI
benefits," said EMC's Ritu Jyoti, Senior Director, Technology Alliances.
"The new EMC solutions specifically tailored for Oracle OLTP environments
drive efficiencies around unified tiered storage, backup and recovery,
advanced data protection."

"Many customers rely on Oracle and EMC technologies for scalable, high
performance data warehouse infrastructure," said Stephen Boyle, vice
president, Global Platform Alliances at Oracle. "Through our various
efforts with EMC, together we can offer our joint customers a full
complement of solutions suited for different profiles. Customers can select
the one that best suits their business and price, performance
requirements."

EMC's level of investment to supporting Oracle includes on-site
dedicated engineers and validation and documentation of EMC Proven
Solutions that provide customers predictable, repeatable results. EMC
actively supports Oracle's Global Technology Centers which showcase EMC and
Oracle solutions. Through these investments, EMC and Oracle can provide
customized assessment and design assistance for various workloads and
configurations. Today, more than 55,000 customers rely on EMC and Oracle
for best of breed products, deep knowledge and expertise to optimize their
information infrastructure.

About EMC

EMC Corporation (NYSE: EMC) is the world's leading developer and
provider of information infrastructure technology and solutions that enable
organizations of all sizes to transform the way they compete and create
value from their information. Information about EMC's products and services
can be found at http://www.EMC.com.

EMC, Celerra, CLARiiON and Symmetrix are registered trademarks of EMC
Corporation. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners.


Source: EMC Corporation


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