Oracle kicked off its Oracle World 2005 event in San Francisco yesterday by outlining its new strategy in the light of a spate of acquisitions.
Addressing the opening session, Oracle president Charles Phillips focused on the company`s strategy, announced two new support programmes and pointed to future trends.
Claiming North American leadership in applications, human resources and supply chain, Phillips said Oracle would soon be number one in customer relationship management, in reference to the company`s planned acquisition of Siebel Systems.
Regulatory approval for the deal is expected early in 2006.
"Our strategy is simple. Everything we do is around providing better information at a lower cost," said Phillips.
"We engineer the entire technology set, the database, the middleware, the management tools and the applications. We want to be in all those businesses because that way we can add more value," he said.
Phillips committed Oracle to remaining open and standards-based as well as to approaching innovation in a way that offered protection to existing investments, extended current applications, evolved at a pace customers could accommodate, and met with needs and expectations.
In response to customer feedback, Phillips announced a new lifetime support policy for all integrated suites, including PeopleSoft and JD Edwards applications. In terms of the new policy, Oracle customers will receive indefinite sustaining support after the first five years of premier support. Sustaining support includes major technology releases, but not regulatory or tax updates.
Phillips also announced a new "one-stop" integrated support programme for global independent software vendors. The programme is designed to address partner and customer support needs and deliver improved, multi-vendor support through a single point of contact.
Turning his attention to future trends, Phillips said Oracle believed the industry was finally ready for component-based or service-oriented architectures. It planned to take advantage of that by introducing Oracle`s new fusion architecture that was service-based, event-enabled, standards-based and information-centric.
"Oracle fusion architecture is the blueprint for how we are going to move all our applications forward," Phillips said. "It also speaks to our middleware and our grid because they are required components going forward."
Phillips also announced an agreement to enable IBM`s WebSphere products to be an additional run time environment for Oracle`s next-generation applications.
Phillips explained that open standards were key enablers for Oracle`s planned process of evolving all products using the Oracle fusion middleware platform.
Oracle Open World 2005 combines Oracle Open World with the PeopleSoft Connect and Retek World conferences for the first time, and has attracted a record attendance of 35 000.
Related story:
Oracle to buy Siebel
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