The Oracle OpenWorld conference at Excel in London
kicked off today with news of the latest versions of the company’s
enterprise software, which will focus on integration and industry
support.
During his keynote, Oracle president Charles Phillips said the
company had been focusing for the past five years on rewriting the
11i eBusiness enterprise software suite to create a single "data
model".This allows various components of the suite to share
information, he said.
Historically, suppliers built applications all the same way to
support a business process or automate a problem using a database
to store the data required by the application, he said, adding that
this leads to "project by project stove pipes, which will work over
time, but at great cost [to the business]".
"The only way to get data out is to aggregate this data in a
data warehouse," he said. In the new release, called Oracle
eBusiness Suite 11i.10 , the company claims to have improved IT
integrations with third-party suppliers, in a bid to tackle the
cost of integration.
Oracle also said the new release will offer wider support for
industries like aerospace and defence, chemicals, consumer
products, energy, healthcare, industrial manufacturing, life
sciences, retail, transportation, travel and the public sector.
Sector-specific features include Oracle iRecruitment, which
Oracle said supports staffing compliance in healthcare; RFID
support for manufacturing and technology to meet the US Federal
Drug Agency 21 CFR Part 11 regulatory requirements. The FDA
requires electronic tracking of consumer packaged goods, medical
equipment and pharmaceuticals.
The company is also support for its grid technology within the
11i product - Grid, which allows an IT department to spread
computation workload across a farm of commodity servers in the data
centre, has previously been available on the Oracle 10g
database.
With 11i.10, Oracle said it would be providing a plug-in called
Oracle Grid Control, designed to simplify integration between the
10g database and the 11i enterprise suite.