Cobb Energy implements Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing services

Oracle has announced that Cobb Energy, a provider of diversified energy-related and non-energy-related products, has implemented Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing to replace several inflexible and expensive-to-maintain legacy systems. The company is running this application on Oracle database.

With Oracle, Cobb Energy has greatly improved operational efficiency, reducing the time needed to complete nightly batch processes, including uploading meter reads and payments and bill creation, by nearly 80% - from 36 hours to seven hours. Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing allows Cobb Energy to monitor bill accuracy with much less manual effort and train staff efficiently on the application to increase user adoption.

Cobb Energy has experienced a significant reduction in turn-around time for configuration changes - allowing the company to reduce its IT costs and bring its bill design in-house.

Cobb Energy offers the Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing application to other organizations, including Cobb Electric, Gas South and Interlink Controls on a hosted, application-service-provider basis, allowing access to a billing system with less investment in infrastructure and personnel.

Source: www.cbronline.com

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Comstar Implements ERP System Oracle E-Business Suite

COMSTAR – United TeleSystems” JSC (“Comstar” or “the Company”), the leading integrated telecommunications operator in Russia and the CIS, today announced that it has implemented Oracle E-business Suite, the full-scale Enterprise Resource Planning (“ERP”) system from Oracle. The total investment in the project amounted to US$ 12 million.

Comstar commenced the introduction of the ERP system in 2005. The project was implemented in several stages, with Kvazar-Micro (now renamed as SITRONICS Information Technologies) acting as a prime contractor. Over 500 Comstar employees have been trained to work in the new system as users.

Comstar implemented the process automation stage which included contract management, procurement payments and other treasury functions, between 2005 and 2006. The second stage of the project commenced in the Autumn of 2006 and involved the automation of financial, tax and accounting management, legacy IT-systems replacement and the introduction of unified accounting and management data to the centralized Oracle E-business Suite system. The management team was thereby equipped with a powerful tool to control and execute the Company’s operations, based on the best enterprise business process management practices. The system users operate in an integrated information infrastructure which eliminates duplication and provides an end-to-end control at all levels of accounting and reporting. The current implementation includes the following modules of ERP system: Oracle Purchasing, Oracle Account Payables, Oracle Warehouse Management, Oracle Treasury, Oracle Projects, Oracle Fixed Assets, Oracle General Ledger and Oracle Financial Consolidation Hub.

Alexey Goncharuk, First Vice President of Comstar UTS, commented: “The introduction of the ERP system has enabled us to create an integrated information infrastructure and optimize the business processes within the Company. This is of great benefit to Comstar as one of the leading players in the Russian telecommunications market and a public Company listed on the London Stock Exchange.”

Irina Matveeva, Chief Financial Officer of Comstar UTS, added: “The ERP system increases management efficiency and provides greater transparency, both of which should have a positive impact on Comstar’s market capitalization.”

Source: www.businesswire.com

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Oracle may seek more than $1 billion damages from SAP in IPR lawsuit

Another war between software giants is set to begin, and it will be fought not on consumers' minds and computers, but in the US law courts. Database pioneer Oracle Corp. is reportedly seeking damages exceeding $1 billion (500 million pounds) in an intellectual property rights (IPR) lawsuit it has brought against arch-rival SAP AG, according to a court filing.

Oracle is suing TomorrowNow, an American subsidiary of Germany-based SAP, for corporate theft and alleges it illegally downloaded masses of Oracle customer service materials and passed those documents to SAP.

"Because defendants have not provided Oracle with critical information relevant to liability and resulting damages, Oracle does not yet know its damages with precision," Oracle said in a filing this week to the US District Court in San Francisco, California.

"But, even so, it appears Oracle's damages are, at a minimum, well into the several hundreds of millions of dollars and likely are at least a billion dollars."

SAP countered the charges in the joint discovery statement, saying, "Oracle speculates wildly about the amount of its damages 'claim' in this discovery report, even though more than a year after this case was filed, Oracle still refuses to identify with any precision the nature or amount of its alleged harm or even to provide the theory on which its damage claim is based."

SAP has said that employees of TomorrowNow, which specialises in customer support for PeopleSoft and JD Edwards software, authorized to download materials from Oracle's Web site on behalf of TomorrowNow's customers, but also acknowledged that "some inappropriate downloads of fixes and support documents occurred.''

But this information remained in TomorrowNow's systems, and SAP did not gain access to Oracle's intellectual property, according to SAP. In addition, SAP has already produced about 2.3 million pages of documents from 42 custodians, and under its proposed limit of 115 custodians, will turn over another 4 million records, according to the German major.

That total does not include an "additional 6 terabytes of data already produced in native form and non-custodian based documents and information to be produced from central repositories and the like," it said. "If Defendants' alleged wrongdoing is as pervasive as Oracle claims, that surely is enough discovery to allow Oracle to present its case."

SAP bought TomorrowNow in 2005 after Oracle bought PeopleSoft, which in turn had acquired JD Edwards - hoping to exploit uncertainty among PeopleSoft and JD Edwards customers as to how Oracle would support them.

An Oracle spokeswoman said the company would have no additional comment.

Andy Kendzie, a spokesman for SAP, also called Oracle's damages claims speculative.

"What I would stress is that these are strictly allegations, they haven't been proved," he said. "Our intent is not to litigate this in the press. We have said all along this is going to be the court's decision, and we're going to abide by the courts."

A joint discovery conference for the case is scheduled for 1 July, according to the filing.

Oracle specialies in developing and marketing enterprise software products, particularly database management systems. The corporation has arguably become best-known due to association with its flagship Oracle database.

The company also builds tools for database development, middle-tier software, enterprise resource planning software (ERP), customer relationship management software (CRM) and supply chain management (SCM) software.

For the last few years, Oracle has spent billions on acquisitions over the last few years to challenge SAP's leadership in ERP and CRM. It is the second largest software company in the world after Microsoft with annual revenues of $18 billion last year.

SAP is the world's largest business software company and the third-largest independent software provider in terms of revenues. It focuses on six industry sectors: process industries, discrete industries, consumer industries, service industries, financial services, and public services. It reported 2007 revenues of €10.25 billion ($16 billion).

Source: www.domain-b.com

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