Oracle Financial introduces new enterprise application

The new application helps centralize exposure management across the entire spectrum of offerings. Oracle Financial Services Software has introduced Oracle Flexcube Enterprise Limits and Collateral Management, an enterprise application that enables banks to achieve a holistic view of their exposure by helping them to centralize collateral management, limits definition, and tracking and measurement of exposure across the institution.

Customers using Oracle Flexcube Enterprise Limits and Collateral Management can centralize exposure management across the entire spectrum of offerings including loans, trade finance, treasury and overdrafts, said Oracle Financial.

The application is process-driven and designed to deliver capability that helps banks to deploy it centrally. It leverages the Oracle Industry Reference Model for Banking to help standardize business processes and replicate best practices across the enterprise.

Oracle Flexcube Enterprise Limits and Collateral Management enables efficient limits monitoring across the institution with centralized online tracking and monitoring of multi-currency limits for all transactions across all branches or entities - in countries as well as regions.

The system helps banks make informed credit decisions with accurate credit information, by customer and segment, while also helping to improve exposure management with collateral pooling and contribution controls, added Oracle Financial.

NRK Raman, managing director and CEO of Oracle Financial Services Software, said: "Oracle Flexcube Enterprise Limits and Collateral Management is a comprehensive, standards-based solution that enables banks to centralize their processes as well as monitor, control and report their exposure to key stakeholders and regulators. To meet the needs of customers, the application is designed to co-exist with a bank's current application environment to minimize the resources and costs associated with getting these processes streamlined."

Source: http://enterpriseapplications.cbronline.com

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Oracle sticks to guns over maintenance fees

It has become a regular ritual during Oracle's quarterly earnings conference calls. Company executives point to the vendor's lucrative revenue stream from maintenance - paid annually by customers as a percentage of their license fees - and bask in the approving glow of the financial analysts on the line.

Maintenance revenue is particularly crucial to software vendors during a recession, when many customers are holding back on buying new licenses.

Oracle reported $2.9 billion (£1.8 billion) in revenue for "software license update and product support" in its third quarter and incurred just $256 million in expenses against that total, for a roughly 90 percent profit margin. In contrast, the vendor logged about $1.5 billion in new license sales in the quarter, which it reported last month.

It's no surprise, then, that Oracle isn't budging an inch on maintenance fees as it works to finalise new contracts by the end of its fiscal year on May 31, say analysts and consultants.

"People have gotten different concessions initiated by maintenance or around maintenance, but I wouldn't say they're getting discounts on maintenance," said Forrester Research analyst Ray Wang.

For example, a customer's contract may include a clause that allows for the customer's maintenance bill to be adjusted each year according to the Consumer Price Index, a key measure of inflation.

Some users are managing to get Oracle to relent on this, said Eliot Arlo Colon, president of Miro Consulting, a Fords, New Jersey, company that advises Oracle customers on contact negotiations.

Wang echoed Colon. "I've seen this happen recently with a lot of deals, including Oracle," he said.

This particular concession may be more possible now because the CPI has been anemic so far this year.

Miro clients are also letting maintenance lapse on less mission-critical applications, according to Colon.

Meanwhile, Oracle's willingness to discount new licenses has been "roughly the same" as last year, Wang said.

Instead, the company is trying to give customers more bonus items, he said: "They're assisting you with installation, adding training, adding other products and tools that can help the application succeed."

These non-discount areas can actually be more valuable to a client than a price discount, according to Wang.

But for some users, such as those who "need a lot of hand-holding" or are rapidly expanding their use of the software, maintenance fees may well be justified, Wang said.

Oracle also spends billions each year on research and development, reinvesting with help from maintenance revenue, Wang added.

Indeed, some Oracle customers say they aren't troubled by the vendor's fees.

Zebra Technologies has adopted Oracle widely, moving away from a previous strategy that employed a lot of custom development and a legacy ERP system.

The Lincolnshire, Illinois, printing and labelling company now has an enterprisewide license agreement with Oracle, and has hired "key people" to work in-house instead of paying outside consultants, said Jeffrey Hand, director of IT.

As a result, from an integration standpoint, Zebra is saving about 60 percent over the old model, he said: "We're getting out of the software business."

Wind River Systems, which sells products and services for optimising device software, is planning to buy Oracle BI (business intelligence) software to run against its financials application, said vice president and CIO Scott Fenton.

While he has "been very successful" at garnering significant license discounts from the vendor, Fenton takes the cost of maintenance in stride.

"Paying maintenance is like getting a tuneup on your car," he said. "Oracle is top-notch. It's best-in-class support. It's a valuable service and part of doing business."

Author: Chris Kanaracus, IDG News Service @ www.techworld.com

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Oracle Offering Gadget Wizard for Google Apps

Oracle announces the release of Oracle Gadget Wizard for Google Apps and says Oracle Siebel CRM applications can now interact securely with the Google cloud platform through Google Secure Data Connector, allowing multitenancy support for accessing corporate data behind firewalls. Together, the new developments will allow even mobile enterprise users to interact securely with the cloud, Oracle says.

Oracle made several announcements on April 7 centered on products designed to interact with Google Apps, including Oracle Gadget Wizard for Google Apps with support for Google SDC.

Google marked the first birthday of the Google App Engine cloud computing solution at its Mountain View, Calif., headquarters, offering newly added Java support for the Google App Engine platform along with additional features including a database import tool and the Google Secure Data Connector, a development tool for building applications that give users access to secure corporate data even when they are working with Google Apps outside the firewall.

In addition to Oracle Gadget Wizard for Google Apps supporting Google SDC, Oracle is rolling out Siebel CRM support for Google Apps and Oracle Gadget Wizard for Google Apps.

Oracle Gadget Wizard for Google Apps allows users to construct gadgets without prior programming knowledge. These gadgets can make use of Oracle CRM.

The Siebel CRM applications utilize the Google SDC to interact with the cloud in a secure and flexible way, allowing for SAAS (software as a service) applications that can access corporate data behind the enterprise firewall, Oracle said in a news release.

Siebel CRM support of the Google Secure Data Connector "provides customers choice by helping seamlessly integrate existing [on-premises] investments with on-demand services," according to the company.

"There's an opportunity now to provide miniapplications or even applications that can be based, in part or in whole, on using Siebel CRM," Mark Woollen, vice president of Social CRM for Oracle, said in an interview. "You can take the code you built on middleware and port it directly to the Google App Engine. From there you can run it up into the cloud and use Google Apps accounts to get at the data behind the firewall."

With the new solutions in place, a brand owner could provide a gadget for deal registration, for example, sparing channel sales people from having to visit a company portal; instead, a salesperson could log on to a secure Google site to review and accept leads, interacting with the cloud without exposing the company's data in an insecure way.

Oracle has been updating or rolling out a number of new solutions as of late. On April 7, the company announced Oracle Transportation Management 6.0, a solution that provides improved oversight for transportation networks, the first update since Version 5.5 in May 2006.

And in March 2009, Oracle released Oracle Sourcing on Demand, a SAAS solution designed to make enterprise procurement of supplies a more efficient and cost-effective process by letting a company's experts collaborate online.

Author: Nicholas Kolakowski @ www.eweek.com

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