SAN FRANCISCO: What do you do if you are an enterprise software company that has gone on an acquisition binge over the last few years and is currently sitting on a portfolio of 3,000 disparate software products that span almost every imaginable industry and function?

“This year we shipped 3,000 software products, 190 of them new. There were 50 major releases and more than 17,540 new features,” Oracle Corp executive vice-president of product development Thomas Kurian said during his keynote at the company’s annual OpenWorld conference here.

It was therefore little wonder that Oracle chose to make software integration — tying together different apps from within its own vast array of product lines as well as those from other companies — the central theme at the event.

In fact before Kurian took to the stage on the second day of the event, Oracle’s co-presidents Charles Philips and Safra Catz got the ball rolling on the importance of integrating Oracle’s own broad portfolio of applications on the first day.

“I think the strategy (of software integration) really gelled when we did our own IT transformation, when we realised that most of the hard work is really with you,” Catz said to the gathered host of users and developers during her keynote.

“It turns out that we have been sending you little pieces of technologies all these years, and it was at your site that you had to make it all work together.”

She added that if consumers bought cars like most enterprise users have bought technology, they would have to order thousands of little pieces, have them shipped individually to their garages, and then hire a mechanic and welder to assemble it.

“The pieces matter, but fitting it together is where all the value is.”

Integration at work

Catz said Oracle is committed to providing standards-based applications and the company can do all the process integration work for those customers who wish to have an application stack that works seamlessly together out of the box.

During the keynote, various Oracle execs demonstrated some of the work the company has already done to link applications across processes in an organisation.

One example was how Oracle’s Hyperion budget planning app has been connected with its PeopleSoft financial applications.

Another demonstration showed Oracle’s Primavera project and portfolio management application linked to the company’s e-Business Suite and JD Edwards ERP (enterprise resource planning) software to allow a project’s financial and accounting data to be shared between Primavera and the ERP systems.

Oracle also said its new Application Integration Architecture (AIA) 2.5 is the most extensive Oracle AIA release to date with 10 new cross-industry process integration packs (PIPs) and six new industry-specific PIP. It also has a growing library of more than 1,000 enterprise services and 100 enterprise objects.

Oracle said AIA 2.5 is aimed at helping organisations reduce integration complexity and hasten the delivery of enterprise application solutions with a proven and reliable SOA (service-oriented architecture) framework.

It was developed with an increased focus on end-to-end industry solutions and pre-built integrations across virtually all major Oracle and non-Oracle applications, such as SAP products.

For example, AIA 2.5 creates a link between Oracle’s Siebel CRM (customer relationship management) and SAP’s ERP applications, which allows users to transfer price quotes from the CRM software into orders processed by the SAP system.

AIA 2.5 also now supports applications in the utilities, retail, health sciences and manufacturing industries in addition to the previously supported communications and insurance industries.

“We spend US$3bil (RM10.2bil) on innovation every year, trying make sure we have all the parts you need to pull together complete solutions. It is all about innovation and integration,” Catz said.

Another key message to take home from the presentation was that Oracle should now be seen as a one-stop shop that can deliver a fully integrated stack even if users are not using apps from Oracle.

Sun integration

While Oracle products now include database, middleware, applications, and infrastructure and management software, soon it will add hardware to its arsenal when the impending merger of Sun Microsystems gets the go-ahead from the European Commission.

Oracle announced its plans to acquire Sun in April for US$7.4bil (RM25.3bil) and the deal was approved in the United States in August. However the European Commission is conducting an investigation of its own into any possible antitrust issues.

Chief amongst the concerns is Oracle’s plan for Sun’s open-source database MySQL. For the record, Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison said during his keynote that MySQL does not compete with Oracle’s database offering.

Phllips also promised full integration of Sun’s hardware and software once Oracle’s acquisition is completed. “We will do the same thing with Sun hardware and software that we’ve done with all the other acquisitions — make them better,” Phillips said.

This reassurance followed those by Ellison and Sun Microsystems chairman Scott McNealy at a special keynote held before the official start of OpenWorld 09, which was held at the Moscone Centre from Oct 11-15.

The heads of both companies took pains to reassure customers that Sun’s technologies will continue to flourish after the two companies come together (see In.Tech, Oct 20).

At the conference, Oracle also announced its first server platform tie-up Sun — the Exadata Version 2 database machine, which it claimed is the world’s fastest machine for both data warehousing and online transaction processing (OLTP).

Ellison said Exadata V2 test results showed a big leap in performance over Oracle’s first generation Exadata machine, which was built in partnership with Hewlett-Packard Co.

He added that while Exadata V1 was already the world’s fastest database machine, V2 has pushed the envelope further by yielding data warehousing performance numbers that are twice as fast as the HP version.

Ellison claimed the new version boosts performance over the first version due to tighter hardware-software integration from both companies as well as the use of Sun’s Flashfire NAND technology for more efficient memory management.

The most interesting part, however, is that the Exadata V2 is able to run OLTP (online transaction processing) comfortably alongside data warehouse and analytic processing on the same database platform, Ellison said.