SunGard challenges Oracle in public sector

Oracle is facing tough competition from SunGard Data Systems Inc. in its drive to gain a bigger share of the lucrative public sector software market.

Just ask Judy Owen, the systems manager for the City of St. Petersburg, Fla. Owen deals with both companies on a regular basis, and in her opinion, Oracle has too much going on right now to effectively address the public sector's needs.

"Honestly, I think that Oracle should stay out of [the public sector] for right now because I think they're having a terribly hard time as an organization with direction and with support and with consistency across their product lines," she said. "They're brewing at a tremendous rate and I don't think they're managing it well, so I think that they should slow down."

Both Oracle and SunGard expanded their presence in the public sector through acquisition. Last November, Oracle purchased SPL WorldGroup Inc., a maker of revenue and operations management software for the utilities industry. SunGard, a public sector stalwart in its own right, purchased local government software maker HTE Inc. in early 2003. Both companies also offer a wide range of financials and human resources applications.

The differences between the have to do with size and scope, said Ray Wang, an analyst with Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Research Inc. SunGard, which is much smaller than Oracle, is more specialized and offers systems that drill down to fill the highly specific needs of government agencies and utilities, he explained.

Oracle, which boasts a large number of Oracle Database customers in the public sector, takes a broader approach in terms of functionality, Wang said, and one of its primary goals is to up-sell those public sector Database users on PeopleSoft and E-Business Suite applications.

"The public sector is a space that Oracle really wants to get their feet into," Wang said. "The SunGard products are a lot more specialized, though. They have the finance products and they've got the human resources stuff. But SunGard also has things like student billing, registration and accounting. And they've got other things, especially for local governments."

Wang said that another player to watch in the public sector applications market is Hansen Information Technologies, which was recently acquired by Infor.

An Oracle-SunGard user speaks out

The City of St. Petersburg -- a longtime user of HTE's land parcel management systems -- became a SunGard customer by default after the acquisition. But according to Owen, the transition has been fairly seamless.

"I don't think that [HTE was] purchased as an independent subsidiary, but that's how they seem to be operating," she said. "We're dealing with the same people and there hasn't been a lot of pain for us in SunGard having bought them."

All city departments that deal with land use SunGard-HTE systems, including the building and permits, occupational tax and licensing, utilities and codes enforcement departments, she said.

SunGard-HTE's utilities suite makes up the core of the city's utility billing system, and it allows citizens to do things like pay bills and apply for inspections and permits online, Owen said.

The SunGard-HTE systems are integrated with the Oracle E-Business Suite Financials applications that cover general ledger accounting and enterprise resource planning. The city, which also uses Oracle E-Business Suite Human Resources applications, went live with Oracle Financials about two years ago. Some of the other financials modules that the city uses cover payroll, purchasing, iProcurement, accounts receivable and accounts payable.

"When we went through the [Oracle ERP implementation] there were lots of challenges with the interfaces," Owen said. "I think there are always interface challenges. But it's working well now."

Owen said her group considered the possibility of standardizing on either Oracle or SunGard, but decided that it wouldn't work out.

"Oracle couldn't do the parcel-based information -- the land-based systems," Owen said. "Oracle just couldn't do it."

Oracle and SunGard square off on support

With few exceptions, SunGard has been good on the technical support side of things, but Owen can't currently say the same for Oracle.

"[Oracle] support is problematic at best," she said. "A lot of times the poor guys on the other end of the support lines don't know what the sales guys are selling."

Author: Mark Brunelli @ SearchOracle.com

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Oracle Continues to Lead IDC's Analytics Pack

The analyst firm ranks the vendors by revenue and market share, and finds SAS Institute and Microsoft continue to make inroads. Oracle remains the leader of the business analytics market, according to the latest forecast report from research firm IDC, as other vendors, such as SAS and Microsoft, continue to make inroads. On top in terms of both revenue and market share, Oracle is nevertheless closely followed by (in descending order) SAS, SAP, IBM, and Microsoft, according to the report.

IDC's definition of business analytics software comprises performance management applications and data warehouse platform software -- specifically, solutions used to access, transform, store, analyze, model, deliver, and track information to enable fact-based decision-making. According to the report, Oracle's analytics offerings took in nearly $2.8 billion in 2006, controlling 14.2 percent of the market. The software giant was followed by SAS, which earned $1.6 billion and had 8.2 percent of market share. Microsoft recorded the strongest growth of all the leaders, increasing its business analytics revenue by 24.6 percent.

While SAS was second behind Oracle, it was noted as the only vendor of the top 5 that focuses almost exclusively on business analytics, ranking at the top in 3 out of the 11 segments of the business analytics market. That, says Dan Vesset, program vice president of IDC's Business Analytics research, "strongly contributes to its number 2 ranking on the solution diversity scale." Finally, SAS had the third-highest momentum in the market in 2006, growing 14 percent.

According to IDC, the business analytics software market reached $19.3 billion in 2006, an 11.2 percent rise. Vesset expects continued growth over the next five years, though at a compound annual growth rate slightly beneath that level: 10.3 percent. Furthermore, IDC made the following predictions about the future of business analytics:

* Business analytic solutions will increasingly incorporate functionality for unified access and analysis of structured data and unstructured content, business process management, collaboration, and workflow management.
* The use of these tools has matured to a point that organizations are beginning to consider business analytics not just as a set of reporting functions, but as a means to gain competitive advantage through better decision management and process optimization.
* As consolidation among the leading business analytics vendors continues, a new generation of software vendors will target specific market segments with innovative new solutions. "These solutions will include not only functionality innovation but also business model innovation," Vesset says, specifically citing open-source and software-as-a-service (SaaS) business analytics.


The report also suggests that a new wave of business analytics deployments will materialize over the next decade and will be focused on addressing two primary demands:

* More data. As awareness increases reagarding the potential of business analytics to influence performance, the need to combine structured transactional data -- with various other forms of rich media content and unstructured and semistructured data -- will become more acute.
* More users. Traditionally, the business intelligence tools market has addressed the needs of business and quantitative analysts, with less attention paid to managers and supervisors, Vesset says. To achieve pervasive BI, organizations and vendors will have to rethink their approaches to technology deployment: They'll have to take into account expectations that users have by embedding business analytics functionality into operational applications, such as CRM and ERP systems.


At the same time, Vesset says, a shortage of IT developers and analytics experts continues to be a problem. "The number of these professionals doesn't seem to be keeping pace with the increased demand from end users. The widening gap between supply and demand will need to be filled with automation, external services firms, hosted/SaaS solutions, or outsourced business analytics solutions."

Author: Colin Beasty @ destinationCRM.com

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Oracle highlights Enterprise 2.0 efforts

Company cites its WebCenter platform as ideal foundation for bringing Web 2.0-style collaboration to businesses and organizations. Oracle officials during a Web conference Tuesday cited collaborative benefits of Enterprise 2.0 and cast the company's WebCenter platform as its product offering in this space.

Enterprise 2.0 from Oracle's perspective brings the benefits of Web 2.0-style collaboration to the enterprise. Other elements include the ability to build mashup applications. While there has been confusion as to what exactly Web 2.0 really is, it has been equated to blogging, AJAX-style development, and even Google, said Sonny Singh, senior vice president of the Industries Business Unit at Oracle.

"The truth of the matter is there are probably as many definitions of Web 2.0 as there are technologies associated with it," Singh said.

"[Web 2.0 is] really about how users can connect and work with each other through the Internet," said Thomas Kurian, Oracle senior vice president of Server Technologies Development. "It's fundamentally about users sharing information with each other, using Web-based social software technology to fundamentally transform how they get access to information and how they work with each other."

But Oracle is looking at Web 2.0's relevance and benefits in the enterprise world, which formed the basis for discussion on Enterprise 2.0 during the Web conference.

"Enterprise 2.0 is basically integrating these Web 2.0 technologies and capabilities with enterprise information systems and applications to transform how we work within the enterprise, as well as across enterprises and with people outside the enterprise," Kurian said.

"For me, Enterprise 2.0 is the use of freeform social software inside organizations," said Andrew McAfee, an associate professor at Harvard Business School and a featured presenter wired into the Oracle event. Rather than being concerned with how software is developed, Enterprise 2.0 is about how software gets used, he said.

Enterprise 2.0 brings new modes of collaboration, McAfee said.

Oracle's strategy for the new generation of Internet computing is to fuse Enterprise 2.0 capabilities into Oracle products, Kurian said. The Oracle WebCenter platform takes center stage in the company's Enterprise 2.0 strategy.

Part of the Oracle Fusion Middleware platform, WebCenter integrates enterprise services in providing a context-aware Web application. Featured capabilities include mashups, tagging, RSS, wiki, VoIP, and discussions; search and community components are offered as well.

One of the basic beliefs around WebCenter, Kurian said, is that the way to build an enterprise application, portal, and Web site is converging. The line between what is a Web site, an enterprise application, or a transaction system is gone, he said. WebCenter provides a standards-based framework and integrates into an application development framework.

Oracle also is bringing Enterprise 2.0 capabilities to its On Demand applications. Information such as what a customer has purchased can be shared with a network of salespersons and others, he said. Also, the next version of Oracle's collaboration suite will include Enterprise 2.0 and Web 2.0 capabilities, Kurian said.

To drive home its point about Internet-based computing, Oracle showed a video of a company using a mashup to compare worldwide shipping costs of FOLED (flexible OLED) systems.

Oracle competitors also are latching onto concepts such as Web 2.0. BEA Systems, for example, offers a social computing suite for ad hoc collaboration and participation-based experiences.

Putting a damper on Oracle's festivities, however, was a questioner in the audience who said Oracle needs to update its existing "Web 1.0-based" licensing model. Oracle currently bases its licensing on the per-processor or named user methods.

"We have certainly had discussions on that," Kurian responded. The company is trying to gauge interest from the user community about this issue, he said.

Author: Paul Krill @ InfoWorld.com

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