As Published In May/June 2004

Oracle Lowers Price for Standard Edition

Oracle recently announced lower pricing on the standard edition of its database product, extending affordability of the database to small businesses. The price for Oracle Database 10g Standard Edition One is now US$4,995 per processor, and the maximum processor capacity has been doubled to two. Standard Edition One is also available with Named User Plus licensing at US$149 per user, with a minimum of five users—or a total of US$745.

"Oracle is committed to providing smaller organizations and our partner community with a world-class database at affordable prices," says Jacqueline Woods, Oracle vice president of Global Practices, Global Pricing and Licensing Strategy. "Making our entry-level pricing the same as Microsoft's shows that we're serious about competing head-on with SQL Server."

For customers looking to build highly available and scalable information technology systems, Oracle Real Application Clusters is now free with Oracle Database 10g Standard Edition. For all technology products, Oracle offers licensing models both per processor and per Named User Plus.

Oracle Clinical Adds SiteWorks Solutions

Before a pharmaceutical company can release a new drug to the market, it has to conduct extensive clinical trials—complex project management efforts requiring coordination of staff and patients at multiple sites. With the recent acquisition of SiteWorks Solutions, Oracle eases this complexity, helping research institutions operate more efficiently and pharmaceutical companies bring new drugs to market more quickly.

"Pharmaceutical companies need to reduce the US$800 million cost of producing a new drug, and research institutions need to operate more efficiently in order to be attractive to those pharmaceutical companies," says Keith Howells, vice president of Oracle's Pharmaceutical Applications group. "Our integrated suite helps both sides by managing the administrative data and the actual clinical data in a single environment."

Oracle's SiteWorks acquisition includes SiteMinder, an application that hospitals and research institutions use to plan, budget, and manage clinical trial participation, and TrialMinder, an application that addresses the same requirements from the perspective of the sponsoring pharmaceutical company or contract research organization. Oracle plans to integrate these products with the Oracle Clinical suite to provide a seamless, unified environment.

Discoverer to Support Both OLAP and Relational Access

The next release of Oracle Application Server Discoverer—Oracle's ad hoc query, reporting, analysis, and Web-publishing tool—will enable users to access both relational and OLAP data from a single interface. In the next version, targeted for release in mid-2004, Discoverer Viewer and Portlet Provider allow users to access and analyze relational and OLAP data without needing to know how the data is stored.

Discoverer Plus, which allows business users to query, graph, and create reports, has a redesigned user interface that gives users the capability to create and edit relational and OLAP workbooks, utilizing the analytic power of both the relational and OLAP query models. In addition to the flexibility Discoverer has always offered for relational access, the new version adds the dimensional, stepwise query power of the OLAP model. The OLAP support is transparent to the end user, so whether the data is relational or OLAP, the user experience is the same.

"IT departments can leverage their existing investment in Discoverer to deliver more-sophisticated types of analysis, with no additional tools to deploy or maintain," says Nichelle Rhone-Alford, product director at Oracle. "End users can access and analyze data from both relational and OLAP sources, using an intuitive interface—there are no new or proprietary OLAP tools to purchase or learn."

Tools Simplify Migration to Oracle Collaboration Suite

Did You Know? Software Standards Rule Seventy percent of surveyed IT professionals say the future of software depends on standards. They also report that the amount of time it takes to define standards and the perception that there may be too many competing standards get in the way of progress. Companies actively pursuing technology stabilization believe that the most important reason to adopt standards is future compatibility of software. Source: IDC

Oracle's migration tools and additional plug-ins constitute a set of in-house utilities and partner solutions that allow enterprises to move both their e-mail and calendar data from existing systems to a consolidated Oracle environment.

Oracle provides tools to automate the movement of user accounts from multiple Microsoft Exchange servers and archive older data, ensuring that only relevant information is used to populate the new Oracle system. The Oracle Email Migration Tool transfers user accounts and mail messages and configures mail routing, and the ExMigrate tool migrates calendar, contacts, tasks, and notes from an Exchange/Outlook environment to an Oracle Collaboration Suite/Outlook environment.

Partners such as Wingra Technologies provide a complete solution for migrating users, mail, and calendar data from a Lotus Notes or Novell GroupWise environment. For migration from other platforms, the Oracle Email Migration Tool provides IMAP-based migration, where data is extracted from the source e-mail message store and placed directly in the target Oracle Collaboration Suite environment. Most other calendar platforms support an "Export to iCal" function, which an implementer can use to effectively export the legacy calendar data to a file with iCal representations of the objects in the calendar. Those iCal representations can be used to populate the Oracle Calendar via the uniical command-line tool or the Calendar API.

iHub Takes on Security Role

Governments have unique needs when it comes to distribution of sensitive security-related information. They must be able to securely share law enforcement and intelligence information among all levels of agencies and organizations—a daunting task if each agency or organization is running a combination of custom applications, applications from multiple software vendors, legacy systems, and computing environments not designed to work together.

The Oracle Integration Hub (iHub) solution for criminal justice combines Oracle technology and consulting services with partner applications designed specifically for law enforcement agencies. Scheduled for a nine-week implementation, iHub allows departments from every stage of the criminal justice process—from police departments and courts to prisons and probation—to connect to a common data model at the center of the system. As an offender moves from arrest to release, iHub triggers workflow events that send case data from one system to the next, storing the case in a secure central database.

Now information about offenders can be searched and tracked as they are processed, allowing crime analysts to search for clues based on crime patterns. Additionally, iHubs from different municipalities can connect to each other and share information about criminals who move from region to region.

Oracle Increases Use of Own

Web Locator Oracle Database 10g Standard Edition One Oracle SiteWorks acquisition Oracle Discoverer Oracle Migration Tools Oracle Partner Portal Oracle Database 10g

Portal Product

One of the ways that Oracle tests and improves its products is by using them in its own production environments. Several company Web sites, for example, have been deployed on Oracle Application Server Portal. Recently Oracle relaunched its partner site, the Oracle PartnerNetwork, on Oracle Portal, making that site one of the largest Oracle Application Server Portal deployments to date. In the last year, monthly unique visitors to the partner portal have increased 26 percent and total visits have increased 63 percent.

All of Oracle's 12,741 partner companies drive their interaction with Oracle through the portal, which provides partners with personalized content tailored to their specific needs based on region, country, language, industry, and membership level. With the portal, partners can manage their membership, take advantage of enablement and training resources, and access transactional business systems and sales and marketing tools.

NEMMCO Joins Ranks of Oracle Database 10g Early Adopters

As the independent system operator for Australia, the National Electricity Market Management Company (NEMMCO) faces the challenge of ensuring electricity for its 8 million consumers. And NEMMCO hopes to meet this challenge with Oracle Database 10g.

NEMMCO joins a growing number of U.S. and European organizations—including Qualcomm, CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research), and the New Mexico Department of Transportation—that have been announcing plans to adopt the technology.

"One of the key benefits we've experienced with Oracle Database 10g is better use of resources with the database's self-managing features," says Suzanne Webb, NEMMCO project manager. "This functionality will simplify and automate many of the daily and routine tasks associated with managing the database, allowing our IT professionals to put their talents to better and more strategic use."

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