Next Tuesday, the database vendor will release its quarterly Critical Patch Update, which “contains 38 security vulnerability fixes across hundreds of Oracle products,” according to an advance notification posted to Oracle’s Web site.

As usual, Oracle’s most-patched product next week will be its flagship database, which will get 16 bug fixes. Six of these flaws may be exploitable over a network without any type of authentication, Oracle said.

Also in the mix are eight fixes for the company’s E-Business Suite, three for Oracle Application Server and one for the Industry Applications Products Suite.

Patches are also planned for Oracle’s BEA, PeopleSoft and JD Edwards software.

The security updates will come a week later than originally planned, as Oracle decided to give administrators attending its annual user conference in San Francisco this week a break and not force them to update their systems while attending the show.

If you have any questions regarding the above please contact Patech
T:: 01543 444 707

The Fusion suite will tie together the most important product portfolios Oracle has acquired in recent years, and make them available via the cloud or on premise.

The products will be given updates, and new applications are on the way, Ellison explained at the customer and partner event.

“The Fusion applications will contain replacement applications, and then brand new applications that you might want to add to products such as the Oracle E-Business Suite or PeopleSoft, ” he said.

Ellison added that Fusion will co-exist with Oracle’s current applications, so customers would not feel pressured to upgrade.

“We will make it easy for Fusion applications to be easily integrated with applications such as E-Business suite, JD Edwards, PeopleSoft and Siebel, and continue to make large investments in our existing applications,” he said.

“We know that not all customers will replace their current applications with Fusion, and that most are likely to augment.

“We’re a pretty big software company, so we can afford to build the next generation of applications as well as maintain the old ones. So, as a customer, you can move if you want to, when you want to.”

Ellison explained that the first version of Fusion will not contain the same functionality as software such as E-Business suite, but that more will be added over time.

Applications ready for 2010 include: financial management, human capital management, sales and marketing, supply chain management, project portfolio management and procurement. A business intelligence (BI) add-on will also be available, although Ellison said that BI is to be at the heart of all Fusion applications.

“The user interface is BI driven. In fact you can’t use the interface without BI,” he said.

Ellison also said that, when providing Fusion applications via the cloud, the company will monitor the service levels it commits to with customers.

“We have built this monitoring into enterprise support to prove that we will deliver the service levels we have committed to,” he concluded.

Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 enables businesses to think globally, to make better decisions, work globally, to be more competitive, and manage globally to lower costs and increase performance. With a new user experience and hundreds of cross-industry capabilities spanning enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management, and supply chain planning, this new release helps you manage the complexities of global business environments.

There are several reasons to upgrade to the newest versions of Oracle E-Business Suite, however the most important reason is your bottom line, and the positive results Oracle E-Business Suite can produce for your organisation.

Download the Upgrade Value Assessment Document (pdf)

CEO Michael Dell aims to cut $200 billion in IT spending by pursuing the concept of the efficient enterprise. Meeting that goal will require standardization, simplification and automation, Dell said at Oracle OpenWorld.

Standardize, simplify and automate—those three words are at the heart of a strategy laid out Oct. 13 at Oracle OpenWorld by Michael Dell.

Dell, CEO of the company that bears his last name, said he wants to battle inefficiency and reduce IT spending with what he called the “efficient enterprise.” Dell has spoken about the efficient enterprise in the past, but this time he announced that the company would aim to slash IT spending by $200 billion per year by focusing on ensuring that enterprises get the most out of their technology.

“There is $1.2 trillion spent annually on IT infrastructure,” Dell explained during his keynote at the conference. “Four hundred billion [dollars] on hardware and related software that comes with it, and $800 billion on labor and services. So for every dollar that’s spent on the hardware, you need [an] additional $2 … just to kind of make it all work.”

According to Dell, changing that goes back to the three words mentioned above.

“Standardization is really about point solutions that leverage accepted industry standards to drive out the costs and inefficiencies from proprietary technologies,” Dell told the audience. “Simplification is all about making the complex simple. It’s about leveraging pragmatic solutions like virtualization, like storage consolidation, to get the most out of your infrastructure.”

On the standardization front, there is the adoption of x86, which has become the dominant platform in the data center, he said. When it comes to simplification, businesses can find savings through server consolidation, with virtualization playing a significant role in that, he added.

The final area, automation, is about streamlining service delivery and enabling self-service IT models so critical business services can be delivered on demand, he said.

“We believe there is a real opportunity to drive out inefficiency and make technology work,” Dell said. He added, “It’s not just about reducing cost. It’s about improving productivity and efficiency and making technology work harder for the customers. It’s the efficient enterprise.”

Adds ERP Integrator module to its Hyperion Financial Data Quality Management

Oracle has launched Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) System Release 11.1.1.3, which combines performance management and Business Intelligence (BI) to support strategic, financial and operational management processes.

According to Oracle, the new release adds Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Integrator module for Oracle Hyperion Financial Data Quality Management that integrates the E-Business Suite General Ledger and PeopleSoft Enterprise General Ledger metadata directly into Hyperion Financial Management and Hyperion Planning applications, and supports bi-directional data integration for financial budgeting, forecasting, and reporting.

The EPM System Release 11.1.1.3, a component of Oracle Fusion Middleware, delivers enhancements and integrations spanning simulations, data visualisation and enhanced calculation management capabilities, the company said.

Oracle said that the new offering also features enhanced integration between Oracle Essbase and Oracle Crystal Ball, a spreadsheet-based application for predictive modeling, forecasting, Monte Carlo simulation and optimisation. This integration enables inline simulation within the hyperion smart view for excel interface, which allows end users to view, import, manipulate, distribute and share hyperion application and Essbase data in Microsoft Excel.

Bill Guilmart, vice president of EPM product management at Oracle, said: “The introduction of the ERP Integrator module significantly strengthens the integration between the Oracle E-Business Suite and PeopleSoft Enterprise with Hyperion applications. With the module making metadata and data integration simpler, customers can extend their ERP investments while improving their reporting, analysis and planning cycles.”

Source: CBR

SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 12, 2009
——————————————————————————–

 HP today announced at Oracle® OpenWorld 2009 new HP BladeSystem Matrix provisioning templates and reference configurations for Oracle solutions on HP infrastructure.

These solutions from HP enable business to more quickly respond to business changes and maximize technology investments.

The best-practice provisioning Oracle templates streamline deployment of applications with HP BladeSystem Matrix, a breakthrough converged server, storage and networking platform. As a result, customers can deploy all the servers, storage and network resources needed for an entire Oracle application in minutes, instead of days.

“Customers need to increase data center utilization, enhance staff productivity and quickly adjust their infrastructure as business demands change,” said Jim Jackson, vice president, marketing and solutions, Infrastructure Software and Blades, HP. “With more servers running more Oracle applications than any other vendor, HP understands how to optimize these environments and has now built this knowledge into BladeSystem Matrix via Oracle application templates.”

“HP is a very important partner for Oracle. For many years our teams have worked closely to deliver superior engineering and technology integration for our joint customers,” said Stephen Boyle, vice president, Strategic Alliances, Oracle. “The move toward converged server, storage and network infrastructure will provide further opportunity for Oracle and HP to deliver scalable solutions based on HP platforms with Oracle VM and Oracle Grid environments that can help dramatically simplify and reduce costs in the data center.”

Maximize business potential with a converged infrastructure

With the new BladeSystem Matrix Application Infrastructure Template kit, customers can orchestrate and automate provisioning of an Oracle PeopleSoft application with Oracle 11g in a three-tier architecture. Customers can easily customize the templates for their specific requirements and ensure compliance with their data center policies. The pre-designed workflows allow for fast expansion of infrastructure resources to respond to business changes.

The HP BladeSystem Matrix solution in an Oracle environment enables customers to:

• Allocate resources to meet dynamic business needs using application infrastructure templates and a self-service portal to provision data center resources. Applications can now be deployed in minutes versus days using traditional approaches.
• Transform data center economics by moving to a cost-effective, shared infrastructure that doubles administrator productivity by eliminating or automating routine manual tasks.
• Maximize technology investments by integrating HP and Oracle solutions for a flexible shared-services infrastructure with existing data center tools and processes.

New HP reference configurations for Oracle

HP reference configurations for Oracle are guidelines for deploying HP solutions that have been proven through joint HP and Oracle engineering expertise and testing. The new HP reference configurations for Oracle provide customers with best practices focused on:

• Ensuring high availability with the HP reference architectures for a service-oriented architecture with Oracle Database 11g.
• Scaling linearly as user population grows for online transaction processing using the Oracle Database 11g Scalability with Compression on HP ProLiant DL785 reference architecture.
• Achieving the full potential of the Oracle Grid architecture by demonstrating the value of automated online server reprovisioning in a cost-effective environment with HP Scalable NAS and HP BladeSystem. Furthermore, a new reference architecture titled “HP Virtual Server Environment Reference Architecture for Oracle Grid on HP Integrity server blades” is now available.

More information about these offerings is available at www.hp.com/go/oracle.

Enhance storage virtualization with HP and Oracle

HP StorageWorks offers a range of storage virtualization solutions that enable Oracle customers to consolidate and modernize their infrastructures to reduce cost, while increasing performance and utilization. In addition, the flexible storage systems can help meet their growing data requirements.

For example, the HP LeftHand P4000 SAN enables customers to fully benefit from server virtualization, including consolidation and simplified management features. The system is easy to manage, offers unlimited scalability and provides built-in high availability across multiple locations. In addition, Oracle’s recent validation of Oracle VM with HP LeftHand storage and the HP ProLiant DL380 G6 server assures Oracle customers will receive a solid, integrated solution.

Grocery Outlet Inc. chose the HP LeftHand Network P4000 SAN as a key element for managing data associated with its mission-critical custom finance application that uses Oracle Database.

“We trusted HP for their reliability in providing solutions for our mission-critical business applications. HP has also helped us meet our primary strategic IT goals for a solid infrastructure, being well-positioned for growth, and having the lowest cost of entry for virtualization capabilities,” said Gordon Yee, network manager, Grocery Outlet Inc. “With the HP LeftHand Networks SAN, our company was able to save energy and reduce our overall footprint by provisioning 10 terabytes of storage on two HP LeftHand servers.”

More information about HP StorageWorks solutions for Oracle is available at www.hp.com/storage/oracle.

Oracle and Sun SPARC SOLARIS World Record TPC-C Performance Beats IBM’s Best Results on DB2 with Power 595 Server

Oracle and Sun Publish First World Record TPC-C Benchmark using Flash Technology

News Facts

• Today, Oracle announced a new world record TPC-C benchmark result for Oracle® Database 11g running on Sun SPARC® servers with CMT technology and the Sun Solaris Operating System (1). This result proves that the Oracle-Sun combination runs faster than IBM DB2 running on IBM’s flagship Power 595(2).
• The Oracle-Sun benchmark used an innovative combination of Sun’s fast CMT servers to power the database, along with Sun’s new flash technology to speed I/O.
• Oracle Real Application Clusters allowed Sun and Oracle to scale performance on a 12-Node Sun SPARC® Enterprise T5440 cluster. Oracle Real Application Clusters is in production use at thousands of customers, enabling transparent scaling of real-world business applications.
• With this benchmark, Oracle and Sun become the first vendors to achieve world record TPC-C performance results using Flash Storage technology. Using the Sun™ Storage F5100 Flash Array, Oracle and Sun were able to set the world record using eight times less hardware than IBM used for its largest benchmark (3).
• The Oracle-Sun configuration consumed four times less energy than the IBM configuration even though it ran 26 percent faster.
• The Oracle-Sun benchmark demonstrated 16 times better transaction response times than the IBM benchmark(4).
• Oracle Database 11g running on the Solaris™ 10 Operating System achieved a record-breaking 7.7 million tpmC at $2.34/tpmC.
• Oracle is now the TPC-C world record holder in both major categories – performance(1) and price/performance(5).

 “With this benchmark result, there’s no denying that Oracle Database 11g running on Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 servers outperforms IBM and DB2,” said Juan Loaiza, senior vice president, Systems Technology, Oracle.

Unlike its predecessor, which introduced a large number of new features, Windows 7 is intended to be a more focused, incremental upgrade to the Windows product line, with the goal of being fully compatible with applications and hardware with which Windows Vista is already compatible.

A few of us here at Patech have been running Windows 7 since the first beta’s were made available, right from the outset it was a solid, stable and reliable OS. Microsoft have gone to great lengths to try and forget Vista, an operating which by Microsoft standards was one of it’s weakest ever.

The mood at Microsoft seems (understandably) high about this release. It’s clear that lots of folks see this as the big, shiny band-aid for many of the Vista woes that people have been experiencing — and in many ways, that’s exactly what it is. If you’re at all curious about what Microsoft has been up to, you should absolutely grab this install and take it for a spin (when you can); there is a metric ton going on here, and it’s certainly worth taking a second look at.

“As for performance, I think Microsoft is going to surprise people. And if you’re working for an enterprise that hasn’t upgraded to Vista because it won’t run acceptably on your existing PCs, you’ll want to look again at Windows 7.”

Paul Thurrott, Supersite for Windows

For your convenience and available for immediate download, the new Patech Toolbar allows you to stay in touch with everything Patech.

Here are some of the benefits of using the Patech Toolbar and remember, we are adding to these features all the time. We want this toolbar to be used daily so if you have any ideas or features you would like to see added please let us know.

Search Faster: Get straight to the answers with helpful suggestions and more precise searches, powered by Google.
Slick Interface: One click access to the Patech Support portal/Managed Services, no need to trawl through your bookmarks, one click, you’re in.
Instant Alerts: Read the latest news and service announcements first, the Patech News feed keeps you informed with what’s happening as it happens.
Live Chat: Chat with fellow colleagues or Patech Staff live.
RSS Reader: Tap into our favourite RSS feeds and stay on top of the hottest headlines.
Plus much more…

For your piece of mind.

1. No Spyware Policy – the toolbar does not collect or transmit Identifiable information and does not monitor personal toolbar usage.
2. No Adware Policy : exposure to unwanted advertisements is not required in order to use the toolbar. The toolbar does not launch pop-up or pop-under advertisement windows or any other type of obtrusive ads.
3. Unobtrusive: The toolbar does not enable other applications to access data stored on your computer’s hard drive or in your online accounts. The toolbar does not modify pages you visit or modify your search experience. You may voluntarily opt to receive Publisher notifications (such as Community Alerts) or use other advanced functionalities offered by Patech.
4. Easy uninstall : you can easily uninstall the toolbar at any time using the toolbar’s standard uninstall package (Add/Remove Programs in Windows, Add-on Removal in Firefox, etc.).
5. Easy deactivation: you can easily deactivate your toolbar at any time by clicking the “View” menu in your browser and deselecting the name of your community toolbar.
6. Full control : you have full control over your toolbar and you can add/remove toolbar components at any time using your toolbar’s Options dialog box.
7. Report – Patech is committed to ensuring your Privacy and safety while using your community toolbar. If you have a reason to believe that your rights have been infringed upon, please email privacy@conduit.com to contact the owners of Platform that was used by Patech to create your community toolbar, and your application will be handled at the earliest convenience.

The website has been re-launched with a vibrant new look, new content, significant layout updates and many new features. There are now community forums for all Patech customers to participate in, tools for you to use to make your lives simpler and being news based a whole load of content with regular updates to keep you informed.

Be sure to let us know what you think and if you have any suggestions feel free to send them.