Oracle Announces New Mobile Interoperability with Nokia Devices and Enterprise Software

Oracle Announces New Mobile Interoperability with Nokia Devices and Enterprise Software

Source: WEBWIRE

Oracle and Nokia Deliver Unrivalled Support and Capabilities for Oracle Mobile End-users and Developers.

Oracle announced new mobile interoperability with Nokia devices and technology, as a result of the ongoing cooperation and co-development between the two companies. Oracle has validated the Nokia Intellisync Device Management solution working with Oracle’s Siebel CRM platform, Oracle(r) Database Lite is now available on Symbian Version 9/S60 Version 3 enabling enterprises to mobilize their applications using Nokia devices and Siebel Wireless is now available on the Nokia E90 Communicator, an Eseries device designed for enterprise users.

Since 2003 Oracle and Nokia have leveraged their leadership positions to accelerate the adoption of mobile technology into the enterprise. IT organizations gain maximum benefits from the ability to develop, implement, and manage their mobile applications in a secure and efficient manner, enabling cost savings, increased operational efficiency, and higher customer satisfaction.

Validation of Nokia Intellisync Device Management with the Siebel CRM
Nokia Intellisync Device Management complements deployments of Siebel Wireless and Siebel Handheld mobile applications with advanced device management functionalities such as device configuration, application management including over the air provisioning, asset collection, help desk, theft-loss protection and recovery. In addition to these features, validation of Nokia Intellisync Device Management solution with Siebel Handheld applications enables mobile users to reduce expenses and save time through features allowing them to easily create new users, send and accept new device management profiles, set up GPRS/EDGE network settings and push out URLs to Siebel Wireless that aide in updates or locking out, or wiping devices as needed.

Oracle Database Lite now supports Symbian 9 (S60 v3)
The new Oracle Database Lite now supports Symbian 9 (S60 v3). With Oracle Database Lite, mobile devices can operate in occasionally-connected environments, periodically synchronizing with back-end database servers. Oracle Database Lite also provides centralized application, user and device provisioning, as well as management and mobile application tools, enabling developers to build the latest mobile enterprise applications for the leading mobile platform.

Oracle Siebel Wireless on Nokia E90 Communicator
The Nokia E90 Communicator, developed for the world’s leading smartphone platform S60, includes the benefits of a laptop in a pocket-size device. By supporting the S60 Open Source Software (OSS) browser, Siebel Wireless is available on the Nokia E90. Nokia E90 Communicator provides mobile workers with ubiquitous enterprise users access to Siebel Sales Wireless, Siebel Field Service Wireless, Siebel Partner Relationship Management Wireless and Siebel eService Wireless, providing them maximum flexibility for viewing and editing CRM data.

"Over the past five years, Oracle and Nokia have worked together for one common goal - to achieve seamless interoperability between our products and enable developers and end-users to gain the greatest potential from the use of Oracle and Nokia technologies together" said Anthony Lye, Senior Vice President of CRM Development at Oracle. "Our latest support and capabilities for Siebel CRM Mobile with Nokia technologies and devices helps customers realize further usability, efficiencies, and freedom"

"Our collaboration with Oracle has been to meet the demands of enterprises - making these developments beneficial not only for enterprise customers and end-users, but for the entire mobile industry" said Clyde Foster, Vice President, Software & Services, Nokia. "Nokia Intellisync Device Management is a strategic platform for enterprises and service providers to manage mobility, and I am pleased to say that integrating Siebel Handheld applications brings clear benefits to enterprises"

Oracle Database 11g Launch

Oracle Database 11g Launch
Equitable Auditorium, New York City

The history of information technology is a journey, defined by innovations such as the Internet and grid computing. On July 11 2007, Oracle introduces the latest release of the world's most popular database with the launch of Oracle Database 11g which is designed to help customers innovate and grow their business more quickly by managing their information more effectively. The software also sets new standards for quality of service by delivering secure information at high speed, 24 by 7, on scalable, low cost grids.

Klick here for the 58 minutes video.

Oracle Integrates Oracle's JD Edwards EnterpriseOne and Oracle’s Demantra

Latest Integration Enables Consumer Goods Companies to Increase Profitability and Efficiently Monitor and Control Trade Spending

* Oracle today announced the general availability of Oracle's JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Trade Promotions Management powered by Oracle's Demantra.
* By integrating Oracle's JD Edwards EnterpriseOne 8.12 and Oracle's Demantra 7.2, consumer goods companies are equipped to efficiently monitor and control trade spending, validate compliance, and improve the return on investment of promotional dollars.






* The integrated trade promotion management solution extends the existing JD Edwards EnterpriseOne integrations to Oracle's Demantra Demand Management, providing increased visibility into the impact of promotions on supply chain costs, constraints and performance.
* Oracle's Demantra is being successfully used by more than 50 JD Edwards EnterpriseOne customers across a variety of industries and platforms including Bush Brothers, Dal-Tile, DeRoyal, Mohawk, Pharmavite, Red Gold, Schiff Nutrition, and Tetra Technologies.
* With this announcement, Oracle demonstrates its commitment to preserving customers' investments in existing Oracle Applications while integrating best-in-class capabilities between Oracle's different offerings.

Oracle's JD Edwards EnterpriseOne and Oracle's Demantra Integration Details

* By integrating the industry-leading predictive trade planning, promotion optimization, and deduction and settlement management functionality of Oracle's Demantra 7.2 with Oracle's JD Edwards EnterpriseOne 8.12, companies can implement best-in-class trade promotions management processes across their enterprise.
* Supply chain managers can now benefit from increased visibility of promotion data with the integration between JD Edwards EnterpriseOne and Oracle's Demantra's Predictive Trade Planning, Oracle's Demantra Trade Promotion Optimization, and Oracle's Demantra Deduction and Settlement Management.
* This integration features many enhancements that give customers an understanding of the impact of promotions on supply chain costs and constraints in order to optimize supply chain performance. With the ability to execute more accurate volume forecasts, customers are equipped to improve service levels, reduce inventory and lower distribution costs.

Supporting Quotes
* "With Oracle rating the highest on TPM [trade promotion management] strategic vendor importance, the company is a strong contender to close the application gaps in TPM."
* "Typically sales and marketing managers do not get adequate information about the impact of their promotional initiatives on the performance of the supply chain," said Oracle Vice President of SCM Product Strategy, Jon Chorley.

"With the integrated analysis and insight now available between Demantra and JD Edwards EnterpriseOne, customers can reduce ineffective promotions to spend more time on profitable campaigns that impact both top and bottom line performance."

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Pro- Actief Beheer
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Application Protection, a Distributed Approach

Source: WSTA written by Peter Glock, Head of Solution Development & Marketing, Orange Business
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The ability to talk to someone at a distance has been taken for granted by large businesses since the widespread adoption of the telephone. Market forces are reshaping the ways we communicate with each other, bringing a new set of security challenges.

Conferences on collaboration driven by technology vendors often assume that all organizations have or are in the process of converging all applications onto one IP network that connects users to a unified communications system that enables visibility of co-workers (or maybe even customers and partners) availability and communications via IM, email, and/or voice at the click of a mouse.

The reality is that many are just starting to plan for these changes, especially outside of head office locations. Indeed, many still manage voice and data communications budgets and operations in different parts of their business.

One of the potential barriers to realizing the benefits of a converged network is how to provide security and appropriate service levels for all the applications, now that they are no longer separated.

Application firewalling has been around for a while but has largely been used to protect specific applications that are exposed to the public Internet but are confined to a few protected locations.

Now that many applications will be carried on a corporate intranet, the network itself has to become application-aware and provide appropriate performance and security for each application at all points. A problem with one application must not be allowed to take down the others as has happened with malware outbreaks in the past.

The threats facing a network application like Voice over IP are:

1. Infrastructure- and application-based attacks

2. Denial of service (DoS) attacks

3. Eavesdropping

4. Toll fraud

5. Protocol-specific threats (SIP, H.323, and MGCP)

This implies that the application needs protecting across the network and at all end points. There are similar threats for most network applications. Defensive approaches that should be examined include:

The Fortress
Consolidating applications into a small number of data centers, providing high performance gateways at the center through which all communications flow and policy are enforced. Effectively, the infrastructure outside the data center is treated as semi-trusted or untrusted. This can have significant cost impact on the network but leads to consistent policy enforcement and lower security infrastructure operating costs.

The United Nations
This approach uses federated policy with codes of connection that are enforced by each entity, and audited by a central team. Operational risks are difficult to manage across disparate teams. It is usually adopted by decentralized organizations as they find it inappropriate to push central control on their subsidiaries, many of whom may be not under direct control, i.e., joint ventures and partners.

Distributed Security
This strategy involves building security enforcement points at various points around the network, pushing a central security policy to all points. The availability of unified defense technology facilitates implementation at a much lower cost than the typical fortress gateway.

For organizations that have adopted the fortress or United Nations approach, now is the time to examine distributed security.

Peter Glock is Head of Solution Development & Marketing at Orange Business Services. He was one of the founders of the managed security business back in the last millennium. Please contact Alan Simpkins, Solutions Manager, IT Services, Orange Business Services;
email: alan.simpkins@orange-ftgroup.com;
web: www.orange-business.com.

Juniper Takes 'Control' of High-Speed Networking

New control-plane architecture set to help carriers with time to market on new services.

High-performance carrier networks are about more than just moving high volumes of data; they're also about control of the services and protocols the data relies upon.
Yet, for the most part, data and control have been combined in routing platforms often resulting in a performance trade-off. Juniper Networks is taking a different tact with its new JCS 1200 Control Plane Scaling platform.

The idea with the JCS 1200 is to separate data from the control plane, which in allows the control plane to scale independently. Juniper claims that for control-intensive services the separation of the control plane from the data plane provides greater service scalability for service providers.

"We are the ones taking the bold move of a separate control platform," Alan Sardella, Juniper's senior product marketing manager for high-end systems, told InternetNews.com.
"The main competitive advantage that it gives us and our customers is that you don't diminish control plane capacity as you add forwarding capacity."

Sardella explained that a typical router is made up of two primary components, a data plane and a control plane. The data plane is the packet-forwarding engine, and it is responsible for moving packets in and out of the router and into the destinations of the network.

The control plane is responsible for running protocols as well as creating and managing the forwarding tables. "It provides the intelligence to the router," Sardella said. According to Sardella, the control plane also provides direction to the data plane and to where packets need to be forwarded.

On the data-plane side, last June Juniper announced its T1600 Terabit router.

Sardella commented that the T1600 provides lots of capacity on the data side but in some cases the control plane can be a bottleneck. The JCS 1200 is designed to relieve that bottleneck, allowing the control plane to scale without having an impact on data-plane capacity.

Sardella argued that without a separate control plane architecture, as services are added, an impact on the data plane could occur. He noted that services such as MPLS (define) can sometimes require a lot of control resources and as such are well served by a separate control plane.

That said, Sardella added that many existing T1600 customers already have plenty of control-plane capacity.

"All networks are designed a little differently, and we're seeing some cases where this (JDS 1200) will give us more flexibility if we can do some separation," Sardella said.

"We're not saying the T1600 doesn't have enough capacity for most cases, but this is for select cases where the service provider needs something extra."

Global IT Job Market Starts off Strong in 2008

Any worries that a slowing economy might mean a loss of IT jobs seem unfounded — at least for now.

In the United States, IT employment capped off a year of 7.9 percent growth with a record 3.8 billion jobs in December 2007, reports vnunet.com. Concerns over a possible recession haven’t yet dampened demand for IT pros, says the CEO of the National Association of Computer Consultant Businesses (NACCB), which tracks IT employment.

It’s a similar story elsewhere around the world.

According to ENN, 68 percent of high-tech companies in Ireland expect to add jobs in 2008, up from 63 percent last year, with software engineers especially in demand. The country’s tech industry thus far remains relatively impervious to a shaky economy and a loss of IT manufacturing jobs to low-cost locales such as Eastern Europe, India and China, says a network director with Eurocom Worldwide.

Due to a tight job market, IT salaries in Australia are “inflated,” says the managing director of a recruitment company in an Australian IT article. He says business analysts earn up to $900 (U.S. $829) a day, after struggling to find work just a few years ago.

In addition to business analysts, Australian companies are seeking project managers, application developers, architects, storage and security pros, and help desk staffers.

In India’s West Bengal state, IT employment is expected to grow from 55,000 to 75,000 in 2008, according to the Business Standard, with IBM, Cognizant, Capgemini, Wipro and Genpact among the companies expected to add staff.

Entry-level IT salaries in India could rise nearly 40 percent this year, due to increased hiring by multinational giants such as IBM, says the story. Such companies will expand their staffs by 65 percent.

Network Appliance: Cash IS King

Network Appliance (NTAP) is a data storage company that takes standard hardware (disk drives), adds proprietary software and creates a high value technology. They devised and commercialized a type of storage called Network Attached Storage that dramatically lowered the cost of data storage systems for businesses. Their main competitor is EMC (EMC) who dominates the market for a higher end storage product called SAN. Over time (15 years), NetApp has rounded out their product line and has transitioned from a role as the scrappy underdog to an industry incumbent.

They are the growth leader in an industry with natural growth. Their customers include companies like Yahoo! (YHOO) and the Federal government.

The leadership team has been more or less intact since their IPO over ten years ago. They have executed, executed and then executed again.

Some people owned the stock on and off again for almost as long for a variety of reasons, not all of which include rigorous investment analysis. Bought in 1998, sold some on meteoric rise to dot-com bubble top, sold the rest on the way down, bought some after the crash, sold some last year. They were always uncomfortable as NetApp was a true growth stock - little revenue but the promise of riches "some day". Most of the investors think of themselves as a passive investor first, value investor second and growth investor almost never. Fortunately, the company is now at a place where they can evaluate it using their “value” hat.

Wall Street has been and is obsessed with this company's margins and precise revenue growth rates. The company has repeatedly told Wall Street to go to h*** and has done whatever they thought was in the best interest of the company over the longer term. If that meant hiring a lot of sales people who wouldn't produce sales for a quarter or two, so be it. Time and time again, the wisdom of the company's decisions has been proven.

When a valuation hangs on a 20% growth rate, a couple % up or down can make a huge difference in the current price.

The reality is that company sales and profits will almost surely continue to grow. The natural growth in storage helps. A big pickup in demand overseas should more than make up for what will be a tough period selling into the financials, their second largest vertical. They have developed new sales channels that continue to widen the sales effort. They have products at many different levels so in countries that are growing they can capture move up buyers and in hurting industries they can get the move down buyer.

At this point in time, however, talk about whether growth will be 25% or 15% (great or merely really good) is missing the forest for the trees. The stock is so cheap that the company could have no growth over the next 5 years and it wouldn't matter.

Cheap is never a word they thought they would utter in the same breath as NetApp. But it's true.

Wall Street has been so busy being prissy about a point of margin here or there and the generous stock options offered to employees that it has failed to notice that the company has become a cash cow.

Over time, because of the intersection of accounting policies and a change of sales mix behind its revenue, NetApp is recognizing less and less of its income upfront and in combination with its explosive growth, the story of its profitability is not in its net income numbers but in its free cashflow results.

GAAP income numbers include all sorts of accounting adjustments like depreciation and amortization. Sometimes these allow companies to dramatically overstate true profitability (e.g. Enron) and sometimes these underestimate earnings.

For most companies, the number that shareholders should care about is a metric called "free cashflow". This tells you how much money, after making necessary capital expenditure, is available to either payout to shareholders or make new investments. Cash IS king.

And when it comes to cash, NetApp is a member of the royal court.

























Looking at P/E, NetApp is still a growth stock and the growth metrics matter. Using free cashflow as the valuation metric tells another story. Using the numbers the company gave today, $233 million, and currently depressed share prices, Network Appliance is trading at just over 8x free cashflow. This is a valuation for a distressed company, not an industry leader growing like hotcakes.

How can this be?

The story is mostly in the shift of the company towards more revenue from software and service contracts. This is great business, but accounting rules require most of the revenue to be reserved and recognized over a couple of years.

This has meant that the published revenue numbers are not meaningful by themselves, particularly if you are interested in the growth rate of the business, which is all that Wall Street has cared about since the beginning of time for this company.

You have to do some manipulation to figure out what are revenues from newly booked business. You start with published revenues, subtract out revenues released from reserves and add back new deferrals. The situation gets particularly confusing since the new lines of business are more subject to deferral than the older lines. According to the calculations I have done, GAAP revenues broken down by product line dramatically underestimate the role of the more profitable service and software sales within the business.

And if you are concerned about margin numbers, forget about it. With deferred revenue, most of the costs are booked upfront so this wreaks havoc with profitability ratios.



In this graph, shown the traditional profitability ratio of net income as a percentage of revenues versus an adjusted number where they use free cashflow instead of net income and they adjust up revenue for increases in deferred revenue. Using the adjusted metric, net margins are over 20%, instead of 10%. In addition, instead of falling off, margins have improved.

NetApp’s management has clearly tried to refocus attention on cashflow metrics and be clear that projections for growth in GAAP revenue numbers offer little insight into the true state of the business, without that much success.

Okay, NetApp is cheap. Why should that change?

Insider stock sales have noticeably come to a halt and the company has been buying back huge amounts of its own shares (8% of shares over the last 9 months!). More of the deferred revenue will start to show up in revenue numbers and the size of deferred revenue should start to stabilize.

Market sentiment could change fairly soon about the company, or it could not. In the meantime, though, the most likely scenario is that the company keeps making money, keeps growing and keeps buying back stock. From that perspective, having the analyst community take some time to come around might be a positive.

There are risks. There are the typical risks with any individual company – strategic snafus, top management departures, loss of market share. There are the risks of economic downturn. In a stock market meltdown, anything could happen.

There are risks specific to NetApp. Most obviously, they are in the middle of a very public food fight with Sun over patents and technology [NetApp’s side of the story / Sun's version].

US financial companies are a big piece of NetApp’s revenues and this sector will be weak for sometime. The company was very upfront that it expects orders to be quite weak from this portion of the market, as they were last quarter. Still, according to company estimates, financials are only 12-13% of NetApp’s business. Last quarter, which included credit crunch time, revenues from NetApp’s top enterprise customers fell 4%. You could have orders from the banks fall by 50% and overall growth rates of adjusted revenues would still be in the 20%+ range because growth overseas and a broadening of their sales base in North America through sales partnerships should more than compensate for any amount of weakness in Wall Street’s budgets.

And remember, NetApp is a value company, not a growth company, so who cares if revenue growth is “only” 20%?

On balance, the potential rewards of buying a company of NetApp’s quality at the current valuation would seem to outweigh the risks.

Data from company SEC filings and Morningstar.com. Data and calculations are believed but not guaranteed to be accurate. TTM as of November 2007.

Riverbed CEO: 'We Can Be One of the Survivors'

Jerry Kennelly, chief executive and co-founder of networking equipment maker Riverbed Networks (RVBD) stopped by the Barron’s offices today after three days of meetings with investors. He offered two takeaways: the company is not for sale, and making his sales forecast this year shouldn’t be hard.

Given that Riverbed shares spiked 9% yesterday, as Eric noted, I asked if RiverBed was for sale, to which Kennelly said, “None of use wants to work for Cisco [Systems (CSCO)] or one of the giants,” portraying Riverbed’s staff as a a tight-knit band of humble software engineers spending all day on their laptops at Starbucks (SBUX). Not exactly the Cisco culture, in other words. Kennelley argues Riverbed “can be one of the real big survivors in tech over time” and so he’d like to go the distance.

He attributes the bounce in the stock to a couple things he’s talked with investors about this week. First, he sees it as no big deal for the company to make sales of $375 million this year, as the company implied last week. As he sees it, “In the last quarter of 2006, we were at a $140 million annual revenue run rate, but we ended up delivering $236 million [in sales] in 2007. So, if we were at a revenue run rate of $300 million in this most recent quarter, we think it’s reasonable to expect we can deliver $375 million this year.” RiverBed did $76 million in the fourth quarter ended in December. And the uses for Riverbed’s gear are newer than for Cisco’s, which means, he thinks, CIOs will cut back on Cisco’s equipment before they cut back on Riverbed’s.

Second, the company has plans to spread its technology further as the year goes on. Today, Riverbed gear is used mainly for speeding up how fast branch offices can fetch data from computers at headquarters. New versions of the company’s switch could improve how efficiently data is moved between central computers within and between corporate data centers, conceivably broadening Riverbed’s addressable market. Kennelly is holding off on details of the product until its formal introduction.

Top 10 trends at the Mobile World Congress

There was a mobile phone for every taste and need on display at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona

There's something to interest almost everyone at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week:

For the lost
GPS is built in to an increasing number of mobile phones. Nokia is still the most aggressive vendor. This year it plans to sell 35 million phones with GPS. The Finnish phone giant is not alone: its competitors are also embracing navigation, so don't be surprised if in a few years GPS is as common in phones as cameras are today.

Trendsetters: HTC P3470 and Samsung G810

For shutterbugs
Phone makers also continue to develop cameras. Among the features that popped up during this year's show are face-detection, image stabilization and the ability to take better pictures in the dark. Phone cameras with a 5-megapixel resolution are also becoming more common, although you still only get a digital zoom.

Trendsetters: Sony Ericsson C902 and Samsung F480

For Linux
Apple isn't the only company redrawing the mobile phone map. Linux is nothing new in mobile phones, but the launch of Google's Android has given it a lot of extra attention. On the show floor several chip manufacturers showed prototypes. The first real phones should be ready before the end of the year. One benefit with Android is the reduction in the time it takes to develop a new phone, according to Texas Instruments.

Trendsetters: ARM and Texas Instruments

For cineasts
If the mobile phone makers are to be believed, we should also use our next phone to watch movies. Two things that get us there: bigger screens in a widescreen format and larger storage capacity.

Trendsetters: Nokia N96 and Sony Ericsson Xperia X1

For globetrotters
Geotagging is a feature that combines built-in support for navigation and photography. When you take a picture your location is also saved. Then you can overlay that information on services like Google Maps, and see where you've been.

Trendsetters: Sony Ericsson C702 and Nokia 6220 Classic

For CIOs
With Sony Ericsson on board, four out of five of the biggest phone makers have phones based on Microsoft's Windows Mobile operating system. The last holdout is Nokia and it still has no plans. One interesting thing about a few of the Windows Mobile phones launched at the Mobile World Congress is that they fit just as well at home as at work.

Trendsetters: Samsung i200 and LG KS20

For speed freaks
Phones with support for HSDPA (High Speed Downlink Packet Access) are arriving at a steady pace. A few phones now support 7.2Mbps -- but to get the most out of that bandwidth you need a laptop. A few phones also support HSUPA (High Speed Uplink Packet Access), an abbreviation that in the real world means faster upload speeds.

Trendsetters: Toshiba Portege G810 and LG KF700

For speed freaks II
To get more bandwidth to your phone you can also use Wi-Fi. Support for this technology is also becoming more common. One of the advantages with Wi-Fi is that you can sometime sbrowse the Internet for free. Good luck doing that on a mobile network.

Trendsetters: Motorola Moto Z6w and Sony Ericsson G900

For your car
So how do you listen to your MP3 player without using headphones? One solution is to use the FM transmitter integrated in some new phones, and listen on your car radio. A small step for technology, but a big one for usability according to Nokia.

Trendsetters: Nokia N78 and Sony Ericsson W980

For the touchy
Touch-based user interfaces are fast becoming the norm in mobile phones -- although buttons will still not disappear. The goal is, if all goes well, to make phones easier to use. Only the imagination of the phone makers limits what can be done.

Trendsetters: HTC Advantage and Samsung Soul