Solution Beacon and Oracle Team to Deliver a Highly Differentiated Solution for the Advertising Industry

Solution Beacon Will Create State-of-the-Art Technology Solution that will Optimize Business Processes, Reduce Costs and Enhance Profit Margins for the Advertising Industry.

REDWOOD SHORES, Calif., Sept. 10 - Solution Beacon, a Certified Advantage Partner in the Oracle PartnerNetwork, and Oracle today announced that Solution Beacon will provide an enhanced advertising industry-specific solution that will integrate to Oracle(R) Media and Entertainment solutions. Solution Beacon will develop this solution through its subsidiary, Sage View Enterprises, Inc. It will include customized front-end modules focused specifically on advertising industry requirements that will integrate to Oracle(R) E-Business Suite.

The software solution will provide state-of-the-art technology to estimate, manage and control all processes and costs of advertising and marketing campaigns, so that clients will maximize the use of time, efforts and people in order to enable results with the greatest possible profit.
The solution's main focus is on the integration of budgeting, scheduling and actuals to provide Account Managing Directors and Agency Executives with real-time information they need to effectively manage advertising campaigns and take corrective action to increase profitability.
The solution will use business intelligence and a powerful research engine to improve the analysis of the client's products, competition, target demographic audience, media spend, ratings, buying trends and market conditions.

"The advertising industry continues to be challenged in its management of advertising and marketing campaigns that include many dynamic activities, creative teams across disparate geographies and collaboration across campaign agencies," said David Murphy, previously EVP for Young and Rubicam. "Automation of this process and real-time performance monitoring
will have a positive impact on profit margins and the quality of operations."

"Isolated, stand-alone legacy systems are pervasive throughout the advertising industry. Managing a highly collaborative creative process with operational data in silos decreases an executive's ability to monitor and improve performance," said Steve Bamberger, Vice President, Media and Entertainment, Oracle Industries Business Unit. "This targeted solution will establish best practices across the industry, provide dashboard reporting in a format conducive to the industry's business processes and help executives proactively improve profit margins."

"Solution Beacon is pleased to continue its commitment to customers within and beyond the Oracle user community to enhance enterprise system effectiveness to support strategic business goals," said Craig Hobson, President of Solution Beacon.

Advertising industry customers can leverage this innovative solution combined with Oracle's enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications, market-leading database technology, market-leading CRM, business intelligence tools and open standards-based architecture to manage and improve performance for their entire business. In addition, Oracle's integrated end-to-end solution set enables organizations to extend workflow to customers, suppliers and human resources management to streamline business processes and improve service delivery.

About Solution Beacon

Solution Beacon, LLC is a woman-owned business and leading provider of expert-level resources for the most widely used Enterprise Management Systems and Technologies in the world. Solution Beacon is one of three "5 Star" OAUG partners in the world. Solution Beacon consultant resources contribute their Oracle Applications expertise to advertising, government,
manufacturing, distribution, entertainment, telecommunications, healthcare, higher education and finance segments of the marketplace. http://www.solutionbeacon.com

Source: www.prnewswire.com

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Oracle software implementation helps police deal with enquiries

A software implementation from Oracle has helped Dubai Police significantly speed up its operations, a senior official from the force said today.

Speaking a press conference at the GITEX Technology Week trade show, Colonel Ahmed Hamdan Bin Dalmook, manager e-services department, Dubai Police, told attendees that Dubai Police's deployment of an electronic messaging system from Oracle had enabled it to substantially improve its response times, operational performance and efficiency of transactions.

The software giant built a robust foundation to automate and streamline Dubai Police's messaging processes using its Oracle Database software.

The system, which is now used by more than 5000 people in Dubai Police, replaced the previous manual transmission of documents between departments and external entities.

The Oracle solution enabled correspondence and documents to be organized and available on demand as searchable content, with the integration of e-mail and fax resulting in faster response times and more efficient operations.

"In line with Dubai Government's e-government initiative, Dubai Police had a strategic need to migrate toward an enterprise-level IT infrastructure to enhance productivity and streamline operations," said Hamdan Bin Dalmook.

"We wanted to organize and automate our daily correspondence, and align our business processes between departments," he added.

"Oracle has developed a superior and secure database offering which is ideal for government organizations and addressed our critical requirements around data privacy and protection, regulatory compliance and data consolidation," he went on to say.

Oracle also supplied Dubai Police with a unified architecture and repository for managing internal and external documents and files.

Dubai Police was the first government department in the region to implement the units from Oracle, Bin Dalmook added.

Author: Michele Howe

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Expert finds 'stupid' holes in Oracle 11g

Architectural problems, one researcher says, let attackers 'bypass and avoid' Oracle's newest security tools. The latest version of Oracle's flagship database offers better security than earlier versions, but development errors have left vulnerabilities that attackers can use to steal data, an expert warned Monday.

"Oracle made big progress with 11g, but some of the vulnerabilities I've found so far in 11g are stupid programming errors," said Alexander Kornbrust, managing director of Red Database Security GmbH, during an interview at the Hack In The Box (HITB) Security Conference 2007 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

"Oracle must educate their own development team because they should normally avoid these simple security vulnerabilities," Kornbrust said.

Oracle executives were not immediately available for comment.

Kornbrust, who helps large companies audit the security of their Oracle databases, examined the software and found SQL injection vulnerabilities, which allow attackers to run malicious code. He also uncovered a way to circumvent the auditing capability in 11g and other versions of the database, which could undermine a company's compliance efforts.

While Kornbrust plans to discuss some Oracle vulnerabilities at HITB, he has no plans to detail his method for bypassing the auditing capability until Oracle has fixed the problem.

Some of the problems that Kornbrust uncovered reflect architectural problems with Oracle's database. In a talk scheduled for later this week, he plans to demonstrate how architectural problems allow attackers to "bypass and avoid" Oracle's latest security tools, including Oracle Database Vault and Oracle Audit Vault.

The cost and time required to fix a vulnerability in Oracle's database can be staggering because of the critical role the software plays in the business of large companies, and the wide range of platforms that Oracle supports, Kornbrust said.

Citing the example of one German company that has 8,000 Oracle databases, Kornbrust said rolling out a single patch can require 32,000 hours of labor, or four hours per database. That translates into 60 full-time database administrators and doesn't take into account the time and expense required for testing the patch on each database, he said.

Moreover, for each vulnerability that gets patched, Oracle must develop a patch for every version of its database that's supported, with a version of each for every hardware platform and operating system the database runs on. That amounts to around 100 separate patches for every vulnerability, Kornbrust said.

Author: Sumner Lemon

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