As Published In July/August 2007

AT ORACLE: Oracle News Briefs

Oracle Audit Vault Now Available

Oracle Audit Vault, which helps organizations address the growing security requirements around compliance and insider threats, is now shipping. Faced with a litany of regulatory mandates and growing concerns about insider threats, organizations are increasingly viewing audit data from information systems, such as databases, as an important security resource and a critical element of their overarching compliance programs. Oracle Audit Vault delivers customers an in-depth view of audit data, ensures the integrity of audit data from Oracle databases, and helps reduce the cost of compliance by making it easier for auditors and security personnel to report on audit data. Additionally, the product's built-in reports, alerting, and audit policy management capabilities enable organizations to detect possible security threats and track and report unauthorized activities.

Oracle Audit Vault, which leverages Oracle's highly scalable data warehousing capabilities and Oracle Advanced Security, enables organizations to centrally manage their database auditing needs, making it easier to deploy consistent, uniform audit policies to meet their security requirements.

"As a powerful audit solution, Oracle Audit Vault can scale to meet an enterprise's growing needs while allowing customers to ensure the integrity of their audit data and simplify their reporting for security audits and compliance requirements," says Vipin Samar, vice president of Database Security, Oracle.

Oracle and Sun Data Warehousing Appliance Foundations

Oracle has released Oracle and Sun Data Warehousing Appliance Foundations, which allow joint Oracle and Sun customers to reduce the risk and deployment time of data warehousing solutions based on Oracle Database 10g and Sun servers, storage, and the Solaris 10 operating system.

The foundations are reference configurations that provide a recommended database, server, and storage mix for a customer's specific requirements. Implementing a foundations-based data warehousing solution can decrease customers' buying cycles by weeks and streamline data warehousing implementations.

As part of Oracle's Information Appliance Initiative, these reference configurations have carefully combined CPU resources, memory, I/O bandwidth, and disks into a well-balanced design that will help prevent performance or capacity bottlenecks.

The Oracle-Sun foundations offer multiple solutions for each set of customer requirements, allowing customers to quickly choose among vertical (single-server systems) and horizontal (clustered-server systems) configurations and SPARC or x64 (x86, 64-bit) architectures running Solaris or other supported operating systems. In addition to the servers, the foundations include configurations for Sun's StorageTek disk arrays.

"These foundations provide our customers a choice of fast, scalable, and reliable solutions to run their data warehousing systems," says Willie Hardie, vice president of database product marketing, Oracle. "They're designed to help take the risk out of building a data warehouse that can meet short-term requirements and provide a path for future growth."

New Content Management Offerings

Oracle has unveiled its new portfolio of content management products, which leverages technology acquired from Stellent. The first major releases of Oracle's content management solutions are now available.

Oracle Universal Content Management 10g Release 3 is a unified enterprise content management system that enables organizations to deploy Web content management, document management, digital asset management, and records and retention management solutions on a single platform.

Oracle Universal Records Management 10g Release 3 provides a Department of Defense 5015.2-compliant system, enabling customers to apply enterprisewide records and retention management policies and practices from one system across file systems, content management systems, e-mail archives, and physical records stored in warehouses. 

• Oracle Information Rights Management 10g Release 3 uses encryption to secure and track documents everywhere they're stored and used, enabling organizations to define fine-grained policies for viewing, editing, printing, and copying sensitive information, ensuring that only authorized users have access to secured content. 

• Oracle Imaging and Process Management 10g Release 3 supports highly scalable process-oriented imaging applications that increase productivity and reduce the opportunity for errors by automating back-office operations such as invoice and claim forms processing. 

• Oracle Content Database Suite 10g Release 3 is based on the industry-leading Oracle Database and provides file server and archive consolidation as well as an enterprise content infrastructure for enabling and building content-centric applications.

"[Oracle's content management solutions] offer an exceptional opportunity for organizations to standardize on a single content management platform that provides Web content, document, digital asset, and records management along with highly scalable imaging capabilities preintegrated with enterprise applications, all backed by one of the true leaders in information management," says Thomas Kurian, Oracle's senior vice president, Oracle Fusion Middleware.

Oracle Unveils Oracle Application Integration Architecture

Oracle has announced Oracle Application Integration Architecture, a standards-based platform for business process management across Oracle, third-party, custom, and legacy applications. Oracle plans to deliver prebuilt integrations across Oracle enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management, and industry applications using a common object model and a Business Process Execution Language (BPEL)-based platform. These horizontal and industry-specific Process Integration Packs will provide preintegrated business flows across Oracle's portfolio of applications and will leverage the Oracle Fusion Middleware SOA Suite.

Available packs include 

• Oracle's Siebel CRM on Demand Integration Pack for Oracle E-Business Suite, which supports the opportunity-to-quote process 

• Oracle's Siebel CRM Integration Pack for Oracle E-Business Suite Order Management, which supports the order-to-cash process lifecycle

Oracle plans to leverage this architecture's processes, objects, services, and methodology in Oracle Fusion Applications, allowing customers to address their integration needs and start adopting a standards-based, SOA architecture to prepare for the next generation of applications.

"The [Oracle] Application Integration Architecture will satisfy customer demands for integration of its acquired applications, while creating a gradual migration path to the future [Oracle] Fusion Applications," says Bill Swanton, vice president of research, AMR Research.

Oracle Buys Tangosol

Oracle has acquired Tangosol, a provider of in-memory data grid software. By providing fast, distributed access to frequently used data, data grid software increases application performance. Tangosol's Coherence Data Grid product is an enabling technology for the rapidly growing extreme transaction processing space, which is typified in the financial services, telecommunications, and travel and logistics industries.

"Together, Oracle and Tangosol create the industry's most comprehensive middleware for building applications that perform real-time data analytics, grid-based in-memory computations, and high-performance transactions," says Thomas Kurian, Oracle's senior vice president, Oracle Fusion Middleware.

Oracle Acquires Intellectual Property of AppForge

Oracle has acquired the intellectual property assets of AppForge, which includes the company's mobile applications development and mobile applications platform.

Oracle's customers are increasingly using devices such as those from Palm and BlackBerry to conduct real-time communications and transactions while mobile. This acquisition will allow the company to better address customers' mobile requirements and develop mini-applications to help mobile workers increase productivity.

Oracle Acquires LODESTAR

Oracle has acquired LODESTAR, a leading provider of meter data management and competitive energy operation solutions. LODESTAR delivers best-in-class meter data management, commercial and industrial billing, load research, load forecasting and pricing, load profiling, and settlement and transaction management solutions to the utilities industry. Oracle plans to combine LODESTAR's solutions with its database, middleware, and enterprise applications, including Oracle Utilities.