Among those companies benefiting from Oracle Standard Edition One are Copper State Bolt & Nut Co., 3LOG Systems, GAL Manufacturing and Jopari Solutions Inc.

Copper State Bolt & Nut Co. Set for Continued Growth with Oracle Standard Edition One
Copper State Bolt & Nut Co., headquartered in Phoenix, Ariz., is one of the largest manufacturers of fasteners and related products in the southwest. After developing various small-business IT solutions that continued to change over time or became obsolete, Copper State wanted to build an IT infrastructure for the long-term that was scalable and upgradeable. It also needed a solution that delivered enterprise performance at an affordable cost.

Copper State selected Oracle Standard Edition One to efficiently and cost-effectively deploy its in-house transactional business applications, which control the sales of 40,000 different products in four states. Copper State was especially interested in Oracle Standard Edition One's automatic backup and recovery capabilities, which can reduce downtime and enable business continuity, and the product's availability at a price suitable for its business.

"I never thought we'd be able to afford an Oracle Database. I thought they were too expensive -- million-dollar installs, that type of thing -- which wasn't the case at all. They cater to small businesses," said Chuck Berry, IT director, Copper State Bolt & Nut Co. "And from the technology perspective, we now have a system that can grow as fast as we're growing. Oracle is designed for the enterprise, but we get all of the advantages as a small business."

3LOG Systems Keeps Forestry Industry on Track with Oracle Standard Edition One
Located in Vancouver, British Columbia, 3LOG Systems is a software development firm that specializes in timberlands inventory and management systems for the forestry industry. 3LOG's propriety LIMS (log inventory and management software) application interfaces with RFID (radio frequency identification), GIS (geographic information systems), weigh scale and enterprise applications such as financial management systems to capture and track lumber companies' raw materials. This data is synchronized to each customer's central-office database, which 3LOG usually connects and configures.

3LOG chose Oracle Standard Edition One to meet its customers' database needs because of its reliability, scalability and upgradability. Reliability was particularly important, as many of 3LOG's customers are in extremely remote locations with minimal, to no, IT staff. Scalability was also critical, as many forestry companies start out small and grow quickly, and because consolidation in the industry has resulted in the need for companies to be able to quickly scale up or down.

Like Copper State Bolt & Nut Co., 3LOG also wanted a database that would be compatible with future releases. A key consideration was the ability to seamlessly upgrade to a new or more advanced database. 3LOG also required a database solution that worked with different platforms. Oracle Standard Edition One met all their needs.

"We have customers who have implemented our system on UNIX, Linux and Windows, and from a development point of view it is totally seamless because the database takes care of the differences," said Hassan Farzadeh, director of software development at 3LOG Systems. "With our customers, their business is changing every day and they don't really know what kind of business rules they will have one or two months down the road. Strategic flexibility in the architecture is key to being able to adjust to changing business requirements. Oracle Standard Edition One delivers the performance and flexibility we need."

Oracle Standard Edition One Gives Elevator Company, GAL Manufacturing, a Lift
GAL Manufacturing Corp. is a 76-year-old elevator parts manufacturer located in the greater New York City area. A family-run business, GAL was almost entirely paper-based until the late 1980s. Over the past decade, the company has progressively upgraded to a Web-based system built on Java, XML, and Oracle Database for its enterprise ERP and Web-based applications.

GAL chose Oracle Standard Edition One because of the cost advantage over alternative solutions -- which included consideration of maintenance costs and possible upgrades over time. GAL opted against any other database, as it wanted to avoid the potential pain of migrating data to a bigger and more robust database as the company grows.

"Oracle Standard Edition One automated many of our database administrative tasks, enabling our IT team to focus on strategic business objectives. In a family-run business with limited IT staff, that's a significant advantage," said Rexy Philips, director of IT Management, GAL Manufacturing. "In the past few years, we have a come a long way on the computing front. Our focus looking forward is to maintain a strong, sturdy database backbone that is ideal for our Linux OS, which gives us certain advantages in the long run. Oracle has served us well, and we plan to grow with it."

Oracle Standard Edition One Helps Jopari Solutions Automate Insurance Claim Payments
Jopari Solutions Inc. is a business process outsourcing company that automates the payment of insurance claims, a business activity that is still largely paper-based, particularly in the Property and Casualty industry. Jopari needed a system that was robust and scalable, with the ability to grow as Jopari adds major accounts and the industry intensifies the connection of front-office automation with the back-office claim payment stream. Jopari also required a solution that was secure as well as affordable.

The Concord, Calif.-based company chose Oracle Standard Edition One to manage its data needs because of the database's premium performance and ability to be upgraded to either Oracle Database 10g Standard Edition or to Oracle Database 10g Enterprise Edition when the company adds clustering in the future.

"We did benchmarks with Sybase, IBM DB2, Oracle and a few niche vendors, and the performance and manageability of Oracle Database Standard Edition One was simply better than the rest," said Patrick Stack, chief technology officer for Jopari Solutions.

Sherry Wilson, Jopari's chief operating officer, said, "We are poised to transform how the insurance industry fulfills its funding commitments to third-party payees as well as claimants. Oracle's technology is playing a key role in this transformation."

Jopari's Oracle-powered automated payment service is driving large savings for its clients, whose overall processing expenses have been reduced by 50 to 70 percent.

About Oracle Database Standard Edition One
Oracle Database Standard Edition One (Oracle Standard Edition One) allows customers to take advantage of the proven performance, reliability and security for which Oracle is renowned on single server systems up to a maximum of two processors on Linux, UNIX, Windows and Mac OS X. Fully compatible with the complete Oracle Database family, Oracle Standard Edition One is easy to install, supports all data types and comes complete with automated management and Web application development tools.

About Oracle
Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) is the world's largest enterprise software company. For more information about Oracle, visit our Web site at http://www.oracle.com.

Trademarks
Oracle, JD Edwards, PeopleSoft and Retek are registered trademarks of Oracle Corporation and/or its affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners.