Global CIO: Oracle's Fowler Says Systems Performance About To Explode

InformationWeek -- Oracle executive vice president of systems John Fowler clearly revels in the significant new investments Larry Ellison is pumping into every facet of Fowler's organization: the hiring each day of more engineers, the expansion in scale and funding for chip development, the creation of advanced systems running thousands of threads and handling hundreds of terabytes of memory, and imagining what the "refactored" storage and server systems of the future will look like.

But what really animates the already-mercurial Fowler are his ideas for how all that geeky, inside-the-labs stuff can be expressed in business environments to unleash for clients opportunities wring unprecedented customer and marketplace insights out of the mountains of data and information that they're accumulating today faster than they know how to manage it.

"On our server systems, now that we're with Oracle, we plan on at least doubling performance every two years," Fowler said in a recent interview on the former Sun campus about 20 minutes from Oracle headquarters. "That's pretty aggressive, but actually, that's not really the exciting part because what's really happening in most enterprises is that what people would like to do is to operate on, say, 10 times the information they have today. So whether it's consumer analytics, or collecting smart-meter data in the utilities thing, or becoming very much better at seismic and oil exploration, or to properly handle national health-record systems.

"There's just an endless number of examples where if you can take a richer data in-feed, and you have a set of data models behind it that let you look at all that in five or six or 10 different ways instead of in just one way, you can accelerate your business. I don't care if you're in transportation, if you're in banking, manufacturing, the military, telephony—all of those areas really benefit if they can enrich the data and speed up the access to that data and thereby gain great advantage. To me, that's the most exciting aspect of infrastructure development today."

Oh yes—and it all has to be done in real time. Read more >>

Global CIO: Larry Ellison And The New Oracle Rock The Tech World

InformationWeek -- If you think Larry Ellison and Oracle are developing complex and byzantine schemes to turn the computer industry upside down, consider the reaction of Oracle executive VP John Fowler upon meeting Ellison and coming aboard as the highest-ranking former Sun executive.

"I didn't know Larry before the acquisition except by reputation," Fowler says, "so, like most executives in this situation, I spent a little time familiarizing myself with my key financial numbers so I could try to seem particularly intelligent when we met.

"But in the very first discussion Larry had with me, he wanted to know the cache sizes of all my processors. He wanted to talk about clock rates and cache sizes!" Fowler says with a laugh. "And every single meeting with Larry since then has been identical on these broad topics: How do you make the products better, where do we need to be investing more, how do we make all the products work better together, and how do we deliver them better for customers?

"And so it's actually kind of a simple place in that regard -- and it all flows from Larry." Read more >>

10 of the Top Data Breaches of the Decade

ABC News (from June 14th) -- The Internet cried foul last week when news broke that an AT&T security breach exposed the e-mail addresses of at least 100,000 owners of Apple's iPad 3G.

But industry observers are quick to point out that this is hardly the first -- and hardly the worst -- data breach that the tech world has ever seen.

"The fact is 114,000 is an impressive number and they're e-mail addresses. ... [But] that's almost public information," said Dan Tynan, a technology reporter and co-author of the technology humor site eSarcasm.

Some companies publish relevant e-mail addresses on their sites, and even when companies don't outright reveal addresses, it's often easy to guess them, he said.

"What these guys did was something that spammers do every single day," he said.

While it's discomforting when any personal information is compromised, Tynan said that this breach didn't expose seriously valuable information, such as social security numbers, bank account numbers or medical records.

But other security breaches over the past decade have disclosed the kind of information that could potentially threaten the people behind the data. Read more >>

Global CIO: Oracle Reveals Strategy And Customers For White-Hot Exadata

InformationWeek -- Oracle's 22-month-old Exadata Database Machine has leapfrogged the data-warehousing market and become a major player in high-end OLTP environments, and is now being positioned as a core database-consolidation platform due to its unprecedented capacity and throughput.

After rejuvenating its data-warehousing business and giving the company a foothold in the high-end OLTP systems market, Oracle's white-hot Exadata Database Machine is now also being positioned as a core database-consolidation platform that can handle all of the above for CIOs while delivering faster, cheaper, and better results.

In Oracle's first detailed public discussion of its Exadata strategy and market dynamics, senior vice president of database and server technologies Andrew Mendelsohn identified 15 global customers using the product and said Exadata Version 2 is rapidly becoming the foundation technology for banks and other large enterprises looking to build what he called "virtual private clouds."

Mendelsohn said that Exadata's unique combinations of optimized software and networking along with mostly commodity hardware allow it to handle a range of high-end tasks that competitors' systems can't match, making Exadata a more-attractive alternative for CIOs looking to harness greater performance at lower cost while also simplifying their maddeningly complex environments.

The system's blend of flash memory chips with hard-drive memory, he said, allows it to address not only the sequential I/O scanning requirements for data warehousing but also the random I/O needs for OLTP, which creates a vast difference between the value offered by Exadata V2 and that offered by single-function data-warehousing appliances from Teradata, Netezza, and more recently the EMC-Greenplum pairing. Read more >>

Real Application Testing: A Business Case

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Introducing Oracle Business Intelligence 11g

Oracle.com -- Discover Why Oracle’s Business Intelligence Technology Is The Best-in-Class BI Solution



Event Details:

Tuesday, July 20, 2010
12:00 noon – 6:00 p.m.
Frederick P. Rose Hall, Home of Jazz at Lincoln Center
33 West 60th Street at Broadway
New York, NY 10023
____________________________________________________________________

Join Charles Phillips, President, and Paul Rodwick, Vice President, Product Management, for the introduction of the latest release of Oracle’s business intelligence software.

Be among the first to hear about Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition 11g, the new, industry-leading technology platform for business intelligence, which offers:

- A powerful end-user experience with rich visualization, search, and actionable collaboration

- Advancements in analytics, OLAP, and enterprise reporting, with unmatched performance and scalability

- Simplified system configuration, lifecycle management, and performance optimization

For a full agenda or to register, please visit here today!

Oracle for SAP

Oracle.com/SAP -- SAP supports Oracle Database 11g Release 2 for SAP products based on SAP Kernel 6.40, 7.x and higher.

Oracle Database 11g (single instance) and Oracle Real Application Clusters 11g for SAP are available for the major Linux and Unix platforms, such as Solaris, HP-UX and AIX, as listed with details regarding the OS versions in SAP Note 1398634.

The SAP release of Oracle Real Application Clusters 11g occurs at the same time as the general release of Oracle Database 11g in the SAP environment. For information about Oracle RAC support, see SAP Note 527843. It contains important details about the released RAC configurations.

Oracle Database 11g Release 2 Enterprise Edition delivers industry leading performance, scalability, security and reliability on a choice of clustered or single-servers running Windows, Linux and UNIX. It provides comprehensive features to easily manage the most demanding transaction processing, business intelligence, and content management applications. Read more >>

(Click on image to enlarge)

Data Explosion: Plan for the future -- or fail

InfoWorld -- Technology changes at such a mind-bending rate, most IT organizations can't stay off of their back foot. Planning for the future takes a permanent backseat to dealing with the present.

Constantly reacting to unforeseen challenges almost always results in waste on a massive scale. Whether it's an undersized SAN platform or a proprietary archiving architecture that fails to work with new applications, too many solutions are hastily implemented only to be replaced before their time.

Breaking the cycle of IT solution whack-a-mole is hard, but not impossible. There's no time like the present to adopt a proactive technology stance. Here are six steps to freedom that I've found to work well in the wild.

1. Clear the slate
The very first thing to do is forget everything you've done up to this point. If you have a nice Visio diagram of your current infrastructure, hide it somewhere. You'll need it later, but not now.
I frequently see infrastructure solutions chosen solely based on what is currently in use and how easy the new and old will be to integrate. While focusing on the here and now will often result in a quick deployment, solutions that are chosen this way will have a much better chance of failing to grow well into the future. As the saying goes, don't throw good money after bad.

2. Imagine the future
Imagine your infrastructure five years from now as if you were in a position to build it from scratch starting today. How will your organization grow? How will your data grow? What regulatory requirements might you fall under in the future? What new types of applications are your users clamoring for? How will you support them? Read more >>

Oracle + Sun: Transforming the Industry

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SAP Buys Sybase, but...

InformationWeek -- With acquisitions being a growth engine for most large technology vendors these days, the pressure is on SAP to buy.

But is the planned acquisition of Sybase, a $5.8 billion deal announced yesterday, a good fit?

The answer depends on SAP's ability to execute. IBM's rule on acquisitions, recently articulated by software executive Steve Mills in announcing the purchase of Cast Iron Systems, is that the company be in an adjacent market and that it offer synergistic promise.

Sybase doesn't meet the first test well in that the database and mobile platform provider is not really in an adjacent market.

"Indeed, that's a key reason SAP vowed yesterday that Sybase will be run as a separate subsidiary and that it will not pressure SAP customers to switch to Sybase databases."

So the value of this deal is all down to synergies.

There are plenty of opportunities, starting with mobile access to applications and extending to potential blends of SAP and Sybase data management technologies, including in-memory analysis, column-store analytic databases and complex event processing. Read more >>

Oracle.com/IronMan2

Oracle.com - Just as man and machine join flawlessly to power Marvel’s invincible hero Iron Man, Oracle’s industry-leading software and hardware seamlessly integrate to deliver a complete IT stack unmatched by any competitor.

http://www.oracle.com/us/ironman2/index.html

At the core is the world's #1 database, supported by Oracle Fusion Middleware and best-of-breed industry and business applications. Oracle Solaris and Oracle Unbreakable Linux provide open and innovative operating systems. Leading-edge virtualization and cloud solutions provide efficient access to fast, flexible, and cost-effective service. With the final addition of Sun storage and server technology, the Oracle stack is now complete. Read more >>

LAUNCH EVENT: Introducing Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g

Join Oracle President Charles Phillips and Oracle Senior Vice President Richard Sarwal for the launch of Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g.

Be the first to learn how to drive greater business agility and efficiency through a unique, integrated IT management approach available only in Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g.

You’ll discover new Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g capabilities including:

>> Integrated application-to-disk and cloud management that maximizes return on your IT investment
>> Business-driven application management that allows your IT department to spot and fix issues before the business is impacted
>> Integrated systems management and support that provides proactive notifications and fixes combined with peer-to-peer knowledge sharing to increase customer satisfaction

Come learn how only Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g can help IT proactively drive greater business value across technologies, including Sun systems; Oracle Solaris operating system; Oracle Database; Oracle Fusion Middleware; Oracle E‑Business Suite; Oracle’s Siebel, Oracle’s PeopleSoft, and Oracle’s JD Edwards solutions; virtualization technologies; and private cloud environments.

Please register today to reserve your spot for this exclusive event.

If you are unable to attend the event in person, you may also register for the live webcast.

Oracle 11g Release 2 Now Certified for SAP

SAP Community Network -- Oracle 11g Release 2 (Oracle 11.2) is now certified for use in an SAP environment on Unix and Linux platforms.

Only SAP products using kernels 640_EX2 and higher are certified with Oracle 11.2.

This is a runtime certification only, which means customers are allowed to upgrade their existing database to Oracle 11.2. New installations of systems running with Oracle 11.2 will be certified during 2010.

Real Application Testing

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Go from IT Hero to Super Hero

Oracle.com -- Are you transforming your enterprise through innovation by using Oracle solutions? Does your company consider you a business hero? Then Marvel and Oracle challenge you to enter the Stark Industries Honorary CIO Contest. Tell us your Oracle success story and you could become the Honorary CIO of Stark Industries. Our winner will:

>> Become an Honorary CIO of Stark Industries
>> Attend a premier of Iron Man 2
>> Have their success story appear on Oracle.com

Enter to win! Contestants must enter by March 15, 2010 - some restrictions apply. Get contest details below:

>> An Honorary CIO and two runners up will be selected. Oracle customers must submit a nomination form on behalf of their company. If you already have a success story on Oracle.com, you can still enter to win; just supply the link to your current story and supplement with any new and additional items of relevance.

>> Use the online nomination form to tell us how you vanquish challenges and transform your company through innovation!

>> Winners will be selected based on business efficiencies achieved through use of Oracle products. The goal is to impress our panel with your cost savings, process improvements, increased capacity, etc. Keep in mind that Stark Industries is awed by numbers that show improvements, so quantify your achievements whenever possible.

>> Click here for the Official Rules

>> Click here to Register

Welcome Event: Oracle + Sun Transforming the Industry

Oracle invites you to a special event to learn more about the combination of Oracle and Sun. You'll get the chance to hear directly from Oracle and Sun executives what the combination means to you, while getting acquainted—or reacquainted—with your local team.

This informative session will explore Oracle's plans to engineer and deliver open and integrated systems—from applications to disk—that improve performance, reliability and manageability so that IT will be more predictable, more supportable and more secure. Technology experts and customer service executives will provide insight into Oracle's strategy on topics such as:

• Oracle + Sun Strategy Update: Software. Hardware. Complete
• Oracle's Sun Hardware Strategy: Servers, Storage and Networking
• Solaris and the Oracle Virtualization Portfolio
• Managing Physical and Virtual Sun Systems
• Engaging with Oracle—Sales, Services and Partnerships

Register here for our first event on March 2nd in New York City

Check here to see our full schedule, and for additional locations around the world

More Deep-Dives: "Upgrading to 11g", and complimenting features

Editor's Note: This Virtual Classroom Schedule was updated on February 24th with the most current dates and times.

If it seems like our Virtual Classroom campaigns have been on a continuous loop, then you've definitely been paying attention. Starting with the Oracle Business Intelligence and Oracle GoldenGate webcasts back in December, and now on to the "Upgrading to 11g" series, indeed, our presenters have been busy.

But let me be clear, this frequency boils down to a simple matter of supply and demand. Customers demand (okay, they actually "request nicely"), and we supply. Done and done.

View the slide-deck "Upgrading to 11g: What that means to you?"

At any rate, here is the latest schedule of free online training courses, provided only to our valued, existing Oracle customers. If you would like to attend please do let me know and I'll send you the appropriate web and dial-in coordinates.

March 9th 1pm EST – Upgrading to Database 11g – new Features & Functionality: This will be a 60 minute high level presentation to cover the following topics:

>> Real Application Testing
>> Manageability
>> Total Recal

>> SQL Plan Management
>> Security
>> Integrated Components
>> 11g for Storage Administrators
>> New Caching and Connection Pooling
>> Advanced Compression

March 11th 11am EST - Application Performance Management Overview: This will be a 60 minute high level presentation to introduce all the new products we have in our Systems & Application Management product line:

>> Application Testing Suite. Application Testing tools including load testing & functional testing as well as the test quality manager for upgrades, patches, etc. There are also EBS, Siebel, Web Services accelerators for this product allowing for usage of hundreds of pre-built forms in order to cut down on the testing time for each individual application test
>> Real User Experience Insight. End to End holistic tool that allows IT or the business to have a direct view into what exactly end users are doing within the application to pinpoint issues. Accelerators for EBS, Siebel, PeopleSoft, and JDE Enterprise One are available to provide hundreds of prebuilt forms and cut down on implementation and deployment time
>> Application Management Packs for EBS, PeopleSoft, Siebel, and JDE Enterprise One

March 22th 11am EST – Application Performance Management for E-Business Suite: This will be a 90 minute deep dive session – 45-60 minutes spent in presentation and 30-45 minutes spent in demo mode.

>> Application Testing for EBS. Including Load Testing, Functional Testing, and Test Manager specific to EBS.
>> Real User Experience Insight for EBS. End to end passive monitoring tool allowing to view the end user experience and help to diagnose issues from the application tier, through the network, application and web servers, and down through to the database.
>> Application Management Packs for EBS. Through the management pack, you can proactively monitor the health of all Oracle E-Business Suite application components, the hosts that they run on, and the key business processes that they support. If a potential problem is spotted, you may use Oracle Enterprise Manager’s diagnostic tools to identify the root cause and fix it quickly. In addition, Oracle Enterprise Manager helps you visualize the impact of application performance in the context of business impacts, so that you can apply resources in a way that is aligned with your business priorities.
>> Application Change Management Pack for EBS. Consisting of three components:
Customization Manager. Provides a toolset of infrastructure to package and redeploy custom applications, reports, and extensions. Customization Manager bundles the respective files into an AD-Compliant Patch and then uses standard EBS tools to deploy those products into downstream instances.
Patch Manager. Eliminates many of the manual, redundant tasks associated with existing patch application practices. Key features of the product include a guided interview process, the ability to deploy custom patches as well as Oracle patches, the ability to apply the patch simultaneously on multiple targets, and a central console to manage patches for all instances.
Setup Manager. Provides substantial enhancements to an existing EBS tool, Oracle iSetup. Key enhancements include the ability to group individual extracts into a project, and then deploy that project to multiple instances simultaneously. In addition, the project concepts enforces any dependencies that might exist between individual extracts. This all results in a massive reduction in time and effort investments associated with the management of configuration information, as well as considerable improvement in consistency and accuracy.

March 23rd 11am EST – Application Testing Suite: This will be a 90 minute deep dive session including 45-60 minutes of presentation followed by 30-45 minutes of demo and Q&A.

>> Application Testing tools. Including Load Testing, Functional Testing, as well as the test quality manager for upgrades, patches, etc. There are also EBS, Siebel, Web Services accelerators for this product allowing for usage of hundreds of pre-built forms in order to cut down on the testing time for each individual application test.

March 23rd 1pm EST – Database Security

March 24th 11am EST – Application Management Pack for Siebel: This will be a 90 minute deep dive session – 45-60 minutes spent in presentation and 30-45 minutes spent in demo mode.

>> Application Testing for Siebel. Including Load Testing, Functional Testing, and Test Manager specific to EBS
>> Real User Experience Insight for Siebel.
>> Application Management Pack for Siebel. Through the management pack, you can proactively monitor the health of all Oracle Siebel application components, the hosts that they run on, and the key business processes that they support. If a potential problem is spotted, you may use Oracle Enterprise Manager’s diagnostic tools to identify the root cause and fix it quickly. In addition, Oracle Enterprise Manager helps you visualize the impact of application performance in the context of business impacts, so that you can apply resources in a way that is aligned with your business priorities.

March 24th 1pm EST – Database Testing Deep Dive: Real Application Testing (RAT) – This will be a 90 minute session to include a 45-60 minute presentation followed by 30-45 minute demo and Q&A session. Recently, Oracle has taken a greater focus on Application Performance Management. Based on our research:

>> Application performance problems predominately link back to the SQL Queries in the database.
>> The traditional ways of testing databases has limited companies to simulate testing of only 15% of their database.
>> Oracle has a solution that is designed to test 100% of the SQL statements automatically in a production environment.
>> Whether you are on Version 9, 10, or 11 of Oracle Databases, Real Application Test can help improve the testing cycle of database upgrades.

March 25th 11am EST – Real User Experience Insight: This will be a 90 minute deep dive session with 45-60 minutes of presentation and 30-45 minutes spent in demo and Q&A.

>> This is an end-to-end holistic tool that allows IT or the business to have a direct view into what exactly end users are doing within the application to pinpoint issues, from the application layer down through the network to the database/server layers to help pinpoint the issue.
>> A good example of this is online retailers who lose revenue each year to their competitors due to issues in the online transactions that are not relayed to the vendor or supplier. The vendors or suppliers of the website are never aware of the technical issues causing lost revenue as 99% of the US population does not call in to explain the issues to the IT organizations.
>> Accelerators for EBS, Siebel, PeopleSoft, and JDE Enterprise One are available to provide hundreds of prebuilt forms and cut down on implementation and deployment time.

March 25th 1pm EST – Information Lifecycle Management: This will be a 90 minute deep dive session with 45-60 minutes of presentation and 30-45 minutes spent in demo and Q&A.

>> Partitioning. Describes benefits of Oracle Partitioning, which stretch beyond scalability into availability, manageability and performance.
>> Advanced Compression. An option introduced in Oracle Database 11g Enterprise Edition, offers a comprehensive set of compression capabilities to help organizations reduce costs, while maintaining or improving performance. It significantly reduces the storage footprint of databases through compression of structured data (numbers, characters) as well as unstructured data (documents, spreadsheets, XML and other files). It provides enhanced compression for database backups and also includes network compression capabilities for faster synchronization of standby databases.
>> Active Data Guard. Provides the management, monitoring, and automation software to create and maintain one or more synchronized replicas (standby databases) of a production database (primary database). An Active Data Guard standby database is an exact copy of the primary that is open read-only while it continuously applies changes transmitted by the primary database. An active standby can offload ad-hoc queries, reporting, and fast incremental backups from the primary database, improving performance and scalability while preventing data loss or downtime due to data corruptions, database and site failures, human error, or natural disaster.

March 26th 11am EST – Application Management for PeopleSoft (manages PeopleSoft Targets in a Centralized, browser-based Interface): This will be a 90 minute deep dive session with 45-60 minutes of presentation and 30-45 minutes spent in demo and Q&A.

>> The application management pack integrates seamlessly with OEM and provides the most advanced PeopleSoft management solution available.
>> From a central, browser-based console, PeopleSoft administrators can now monitor and manage PeopleSoft components in manner far superior to previously offered solutions.
>> Support is offered for the following solutions. Application Server Domains; Process Scheduler Domains; PIAs and Web Sites; Application Databases support provided for all supported database platforms including Oracle, SQL Server, IBM DB2, Sybase, and Informix.

Upgrading to 11g: What that means to you?

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Abercrombie & Fitch: Less Noise = Greater Efficiency

"You try to think through all of the 'what if’s' as you’re going through the design of a system. As we worked through the process, we relied heavily on our partners, most specifically Oracle.

We partnered with them because they have a true end-to-end retail vision. They continue to prove to us that they are staying in front of what is required in future releases of products."

- Kristen Blum, CIO, Abercrombie & Fitch

Store.org - Kristen Blum was presented with a specific set of goals – and challenges – when she joined Abercrombie & Fitch as CIO in the spring of 2006.

With the brand growing by leaps and bounds, and merchants in need of more precise data to support emerging strategies and long-term growth initiatives, Blum was charged with overhauling the IT systems of the New Albany, Ohio-based specialty retailer. That’s never a simple task, but the fact that A&F was operating on COBOL applications running on mainframes puts the enormity of the challenge in perspective.

Blum chose Oracle as A&F’s primary IT partner, then set her sights on addressing several key objectives: greater speed to market; maintaining and growing industry-leading margins; retiring legacy applications; reducing the labor and maintenance costs linked to existing systems; providing one version of the truth; and preparing the IT foundation for an accelerated international rollout scheduled for 2010 and 2011.

The first outward sign of A&F’s IT transformation became evident with the launch of a new data center in 2007. Since then, the retailer has deployed a virtualized, centralized POS application and – refusing to be deterred by the sputtering economy – spent the better part of 2009 immersed in a two-phase rollout of Oracle’s Retail Merchandising System. Click here to read the full article >>

My Oracle Support

Introducing My Oracle Support, your next generation support platform and a key part of Oracle Customer Services' ongoing commitment to improving your support experience.

My Oracle Support provides groundbreaking personalized, proactive & collaborative support capabilities to enable faster problem resolution and reduce unplanned downtime.

To get the most out of My Oracle Support, install the Oracle Configuration Manager collector. My Oracle Support embeds automated configuration management capabilities into key support workflows to deliver faster resolution times and proactive advice to help avoid known problems. Click here to visit My Oracle Support >>

Real User Experience Insight (RUEI): Navigating to Customer Satisfaction

“Every hour that the Web site is not performing to its max, it costs us money and more importantly doesn’t meet the high quality standards we have.”

-Oscar Diele, Global Vice President, E-Commerce, TomTom

Profit Magazine - Sometimes, all the expertise in the world can’t help you if you don’t know where you are or what’s going wrong in your organization. Take the case of TomTom, a €1.7 billion (approximately US$2.5 billion) Dutch-based leading manufacturer of navigation software and personal navigation devices (PNDs), or GPS units.

Problems with inconsistent performance and a lack of insight into its end-to-end e-commerce processes made it difficult for TomTom to satisfy its customers and capture maximum potential revenue growth. “There was a point in time when we were more or less driving in the dark,” admits Oscar Diele, global vice president of e-commerce at TomTom.

Click here to read the full article >>

Real User Experience Insight External

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Oracle Wins EU Approval to Purchase Sun Microsystems

Bloomberg: Oracle Corp. received approval from European Union regulators to buy Sun Microsystems Inc., overcoming one of the last regulatory hurdles to the planned $7.4 billion transaction.

The European Commission cleared the acquisition after Oracle addressed competition concerns about its acquisition of the open-source database MySQL, which Sun bought in 2008. Oracle said on Dec. 14 that it will boost investment in MySQL and is committed to keeping MySQL’s open-source licensing platform.

I am now satisfied that competition and innovation will be preserved on all the markets concerned,” European Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes said in a statement today in Brussels. “Oracle’s acquisition of Sun has the potential to revitalize important assets and create new and innovative products.”

Oracle, the second-biggest software maker, aims to squeeze $1.5 billion in operating profit from Sun in the first year after the deal closes in the next few weeks. Oracle Chief Executive Officer Larry Ellison said in September that the delay was breeding customer uncertainty, causing Sun to lose $100 million a month as companies held off purchases.

Gaye Hudson, a spokeswoman for Oracle in Reading, U.K., did not respond to a message left on her mobile phone.

‘Competitive Constraint’

The commission had threatened to block the deal because of concerns that Oracle might be able to eliminate MySQL as a competitor. The regulator, which said that MySQL is the “leading” open-source database, investigated whether Oracle’s purchase of MySQL would remove a “competitive constraint.”

MySQL had an estimated market share of 0.2 percent and $40 million in revenue in 2008, according to IDC, a research firm in Framingham, Massachusetts. Click here to read the full article >>

McKinsey Quarterly: The promise of multichannel retailing

McKinsey: If one certainty about economic downturns is that they end, another is that traditional retailers recover slowly. In the United States, for example, only 25 percent of drugstores, 40 percent of mass retailers, and 60 percent of specialty-apparel retailers returned to pre-recession growth rates within five years of the 2001 downturn.1 That’s time retailers can’t afford. The period when an economy emerges from a recession is pivotal to determining retail’s winners and losers, and our research suggests one of the keys to securing this success is to maintain investments throughout the business cycle. We believe that for companies coming out of the current recession, investing to build robust multichannel capabilities provides an attractive opportunity for retailers to set themselves apart from their peers.

For all the difficulty retailers have experienced in the past year, online sales have continued to be a bright spot: while overall sales have generally fallen in the United States, online sales have actually been increasing since the start of 2009.2 In fact, the percentage of total sales made online continues to increase, and our research also shows that more and more consumers are using the Internet to investigate products they later buy in stores. By 2011, we believe the Internet will play a role in more than 45 percent of US retail sales, as either a research tool or a sales channel. What’s more, consumers who shop across a number of channels—physical stores, the Internet, and catalogs—spend about four times more annually than those who shop in just one (exhibit). Companies that get multichannel retailing right can enjoy larger profit margins and yearly revenue growth more than 100 basis points higher than companies that don’t. Click here to read the full article >>

11 Things to Know about 11gR2

Candidly, the following slide show could just as well be written in Swahili and it would not make any less sense to me. But for "those in the know", I imagine this information is quite helpful, and maybe even a little cool...

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Oracle 11gR2 Keynote: Consolidate On Low Cost Server And Storage Grids

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Oracle Enterprise Manager

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Oracle GoldenGate

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CIO Survey: 2010 IT Priorities | Upcoming Events

Gotta be honest here, I'm not sorry to see 2009 in the rear view mirror. Not so much for what kind of year 2009 was, but rather for the kind of year 2010 hopes to be, namely from an Oracle standpoint. I mean, how exciting is it to see the gigantic leaps and bounds in technology right now? Especially where it comes to helping businesses cut costs, "Do more with less", while at the same time actually improving performance and productivity. How cool is that?

Maybe you're already enjoying some of these very benefits, already unleashed in 2009. Maybe you haven't drank the proverbial Kool Aid yet. Maybe you're so bogged down with workload right now - trying to keep your systems running; trying to keep people off your back; hoping your kids still remember what you look like - that you haven't even had two seconds to kick the tires on new technology.

Whatever the case, you're not alone. Not by a long shot.

According to a 2009 survey conducted by Deloitte, cutting IT costs remains the number one priority for the CIO's that were polled. This diagram further compliments the results of that survey (click on the image to enlarge). Business cost reduction and IT cost reduction rank 1 and 2, respectively, followed closely by Information Management (um, Advanced Compression, hello?).

The list goes on to then rank Security and revising current IT strategies as next priorities, with Compliance and replacing legacy systems among the remaining initiatives.

So why is this important to you? Because this is EXACTLY what our Oracle solutions revolve around: Helping businesses run more effectively, efficiently, while at the same time improving the bottom line.

Folks, if you haven't had an Oracle strategy session recently, then you're really missing out on the opportunity to learn about all of new technologies than can help you accomplish your IT goals for 2010. From all the advancements via 11gR2, to industry leading BI, SAM, and storage (Information Lifecycle Management) solutions, to the mind-blowing GoldenGate technology - Oracle is the #1 business software company on the planet, and it might be time for a reminder why.

Upcoming Oracle Events

Save the Date: Oracle Financial Services Industry Forum Thursday, February 11, 2010 | New York Marriott Downtown New York, NY

Click here to register or call 1.800.820.5592 ext. 7119.

Please join Oracle and our partners for the Financial Services Industry Summit.

Financial Services Organizations are transforming to meet the increased regulatory pressures, greater market uncertainty and rising demand for innovative customer service. Organizations need to continue to transform to be more competitive and efficient in today’s marketplace.

Oracle and our partners invite you to attend the Oracle Financial Services Forum where we will discuss critical challenges being faced by the industry. As the world’s largest provider of enterprise software solutions, Oracle is in a unique position to help Financial Services organizations address today’s mission critical challenges.

This event will provide networking and industry thought leadership. The agenda includes keynotes, breakout's, and hands-on workshops including:

>> Keynote by Charles Phillips, President of Oracle Corporation
>> Perspectives from industry strategists and thought leaders on critical challenges being faced within the industry
>> Real-world best practices and lessons from leading financial service organizations
>> Networking opportunities with other financial service organization attendees, the Oracle partner community and Oracle experts

Join Oracle at NRF 2010!
January 10-13 | Jacob Javits Center

This event is fast approaching and we'd love to see you there. Click here to see the full invite.

Oracle Business Intelligence Deep Dives
January 12-14 | Video Conference

As previously advised, we had outstanding attendance for the Oracle Business Intelligence Virtual Classroom on December 8th, so again, thanks for attending if you had the opportunity to do so.

That said, whether you attended the initial high level presentation or not, as a continuation of the BI Virtual Classroom, we are offering three follow-up product deep dive sessions:

Deep Dive #1: Oracle BI Analytic Applications
Deep Dive #2: Oracle BI Publisher
Deep Dive #3: Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition Plus

These are 90 minute sessions consisting of 30 minutes of product presentation and 45 minutes for demonstration, following a live Q&A.

Learn how companies like Facebook, EMC, Shopzilla, MassMutual and Virgin Media are using Oracle Business Intelligence to improve their query, reporting, analytics, and modeling capabilities, which are so critical to business performance and profitability.

If you are interested in learning more about Oracle's BI solutions and would like to see demonstrations of the products, please let me know which classroom(s) would be of interest to you and we’ll book accordingly.

Session Schedule:

>> BI Analytic Applications Jan. 12 at 2:00 pm EST
>> BI Publisher Jan. 13th at 2:00 pm EST
>> OBI EE Plus Jan 14th at 2:00 pm EST

Thanks again for your continued partnership with Oracle, and please do not hesitate to contact me with any questions or concerns.