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Oracle Corp., the largest provider of software for e-business today announced Oracle� FastForwardSM Enterprise PortalRPM solution, designed to allow companies to create an enterprise portal in five business days or less. The FastForward program is built on Oracle's industry-leading Internet database, Oracle8i, and Oracle WebDB, Oracle's portal building tool. This five-day offering is the first fixed-time, fixed-price solution available in the market for portal development. Furthermore, it is designed to reduce the number of disparate applications, web sites and information stores, including e-mails with large attachments, that employees, partners and users must navigate through to gather information and conduct transactions on a daily basis. As with recently announced complementary Oracle FastForward programs, customers can be up and running in days, not months or years with this latest offering.
Oracle FastForward Enterprise Portal solution is immediately available in the United States at a base price of $30,000 for 20 named users. A spectrum of pricing packages is available for named users as well as power units.
Enterprise portals are quickly becoming the centerpieces of e-business for effective and timely communication between customers, employees and partners. The hallmark of enterprise portals is centralized, up-to-date information � the one place on the Internet, intranet or extranet that people go to on a daily basis for information, gleaned from a variety of applications and personalized to their needs.
Luxurycity.com, based in Rolling Hills Estates, California, needed a full understanding of what Internet software could do to help the company create one of the first online destinations for affluent consumers worldwide. The company knew it wanted to feature a selection of goods and services that represented the finer things in life, but it also wanted a deeper understanding of how using technology and software services could enrich
the user experience without being obtrusive. Luxurycity.com turned to Oracle for its FastForward Enterprise Portal solution to implement their initial application, which
is evolving from an organizational intranet into an Internet and extranet solution. This critical phase of their corporate web site is the foundation of a complete offering of commercial web services to be launched this Fall.
"Time-to-market is essential to launching our service," said Bernd Hess, Founder and COO of LuxuryCity.com. "Oracle FastForward Enterprise Portal provided us with an overview of the possibilities for our portal, removed all the uncertainty over how long it would take to get up and running, and allowed us to implement a solution that we can build on to serve even our most demanding clientele. Furthermore, the Oracle-based enterprise portal is easy to use and easy to manage, allowing us to focus on building our business rather than hiring an extensive IT team to manage our various Internet applications.
The Luxurycity.com web site will feature four categories that leverage the features of Oracle Enterprise Portal solution: lifestyle, travel, shopping and member-only section. Their online concierge service, for example, will actively take advantage of the online calendaring and scheduling features available with Oracle Enterprise Portal solution. The FastForward Enterprise Portal solution includes additional features such as personalized corporate training facilities, organizational charts, employee information and personal folders most likely used in intranet and extranet implementations of enterprise portals.
During the engagement, customers receive Oracle software, support, education and consulting services for implementation at Internet speed. Forming the technology foundation of Oracle FastForward Enterprise Portal solution are Oracle8i and WebDB, coupled with one year of OracleSILVERSM 24x7 support. A two-day Oracle Enterprise Portal class entitled: "Build Web Sites and Components for IT" is also provided. Implementation services span the rapid offering provided by Oracle Consulting or a certified Oracle partner. Hosting is also available on Oracle Business OnLine.
With the Oracle FastForward Enterprise Portal solution, Oracle helps a wide-range of companies solve three key problems � consolidating disparate information located on different web sites, easing the complexity for IT management � quickly while reducing large e-mail attachments" said Sandy Sanderson, executive vice president, Oracle Corporation. "With an infrastructure based on Oracle8i, customers can start small and grow large quickly, just as their centralized IT framework grows to support hundreds of thousands of users per day in record time."
About Oracle FastForward Programs The FastForward Enterprise Portal solution is the fourteenth in a series of programs introduced over the past two years, the latest being Oracle FastForward Online FinancialsRPM. Both the FastForward Enterprise Portal and the recently introduced FastForward Online Financials are designed to be five-day
programs with the goal of reducing implementation time by 90% over previous programs. Oracle is the leader in providing successful fixed-priced, fixed-time implementations, with over 100 satisfied customers to date.
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December 20, 1999, Oracle implemented a new global price list that simplifies pricing and licensing worldwide and continues Oracle's transformation into an e-business.�
Key components of the new pricing include:�
Standardization - There is one price list worldwide�Affordability - Term pricing and Perpetual pricing is available on all products, meaning companies with smaller budgets can still have an enterprise class database, tools, and applications�Consistency - Discounts are now standardized across online and offline purchases�
Key components of the new licensing terms include:�
Simplicity - Three easy to understand licensing types: Named - Single Server, Named - Multi Server, Power Unit (Intel and RISC)�
Flexibility - Power Unit licensing is now available for both internal and external use.�
What does this mean to Oracle customers? For one, the cost of Oracle Designer for a single user license has dropped significantly from $5995 to $3995, making it much more price competitive with the competition.
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Oracle Corp. plans to announce on Tuesday that it will port its namesake database to the Linux freeware operating system, a move that may be increasingly considered by other major database vendors as the Linux user community continues to grow.
Oracle8 and Oracle8.1, which are scheduled to ship by year's end, are expected to be available for Linux on Intel Corp. platforms in the first quarter of 1999, sources said. An Oracle official said that the Redwood Shores, Calif., company's decision was made in response to a groundswell of customer interest in seeing Oracle software available on Linux.
At the same time, Computer Associates international Inc., of Islandia, N.Y., is readying, for release in September, a Linux port of its Ingres II relational database.
Informix Software Inc., meanwhile, is planning to announce a port to the open source operating system, although Informix officials in Menlo Park, Calif., have not decided which products and tools will be recoded. One company executive said the Linux support will be phased in gradually, starting with a "main database product and a few tools" in an announcement this week.
"We're going to roll out our Linux support gradually and gauge our customers' interest as we go along," said Mike Saranga, Informix's vice president of research and development.
As recently as two months ago, Informix officials stated publicly that they were leaning against a Linux port.
According to Saranga, the company will most likely offer up the Linux development platform for free and charge developers a small fee for "run time," the process of getting the new applications up and running.
A Linux evangelist said a port of an enterprise-size database such as Oracle would help lend credibility to Linux in the eyes of business managers.
"It'll be really interesting to see what happens when a big-price, big-name database comes out on Linux,'' said Rob Walker, system administrator for both Linux systems developer VA Research Inc., in Mountain View, Calif., and the Silicon Valley Linux User Group. "I think there's a great deal of demand for it already.''
Estimates of the number of Linux users have ranged from 5 million to 7.5 million, with supporters claiming the operating system is gaining momentum as an alternative to Windows and various Unix flavors
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