Oracle Press Releases

Oracle today announced that Bourbon Ibirapuera has selected a suite of Oracle solutions including OPERA and Simphony Cloud, Fusion ERP, OPERA Loyalty, OPERA OWS, Oracle Sales Cloud, Eloqua and Hyperion as part of an initiative to streamline operations across properties and arm hotel associates with new insights that inform personalized guest experiences. Bourbon Ibirapuera initially invested in OPERA Cloud, Simphony Cloud and ERP Cloud solutions before adding Oracle Sales Cloud and Eloqua products for a full suite of operations, back-office and customer facing technologies. Bourbon Ibirapuera will be the first hotel in Brazil to install these solutions and arm staff with cloud tools that enable deeper guest interaction and loyalty.

“Bourbon Ibirapuera’s choice of Oracle is a testament to the value that Oracle horizontal and vertical products bring to all segments of the hospitality market,” said Bernard Jammet, senior vice president, Oracle Hospitality. “With these new tools Bourbon Ibirapuera will be able to augment their guest experience and compete with larger chains and properties in region.”

“The hospitality industry as a whole spends too much time and effort managing multiple vendors and building integrations across solutions to maximize the value from IT investments,” said John Chen, CEO, Bourbon Ibirapuera. “After an initial investment in OPERA and Simphony Cloud we quickly realized the value of investing in a suite of solutions with existing integrations. With our new suite of solutions we are arming our business with deeper insights to empower informed management decisions, streamlining the reservation process and optimizing hotel operations in an integrated way.”

As a longtime customer of Oracle Hospitality, Bourbon Ibirapuera’s experience with OPERA delivering value for hospitality operations established Oracle as a clear front runner for the upgrade project. A phased integration approach, first focusing on the back end operational infrastructure before adding new marketing tools, allowed Bourbon Ibirapuera to effectively manage digital transformation and prepare staff for a cloud transition. Bourbon Ibirapuera’s implementation will also bring several new customer-facing features to the region including web and mobile check-in and more targeted incentives for new or repeat guests including personalized rates and promotions.

Bourbon Ibirapuera will bring these point of sale, online reservation, financial and budget planning and CRM and marketing tools online in June 2018 after a four month implementation process.

St. HOPE, a nonprofit community development corporation, has leveraged Oracle NetSuite to support its mission to create one of the finest urban pre-kindergarten through 12th grade public school systems in the United States. With NetSuite SuiteSuccess for Nonprofits, St. HOPE has been able to streamline critical business functions in order to focus its time and resources on providing high quality public education and creating living-wage sustainable jobs.

Founded by former NBA All-Star and Sacramento mayor Kevin Johnson in 1989, St. HOPE began as a single, portable classroom that served as an afterschool program for Sacramento High School students. Today, it serves 1,800 students through five charter schools and manages residential properties as well as an Art and Cultural Center that includes a cafe, bookstore, barbershop, art gallery and 200-seat theater. The charter school network focuses on students from urban communities and aims to graduate self-motivated, industrious and critical-thinking leaders who are committed to serving others, passionate about lifelong learning and prepared to earn a degree from a four-year college.

“As we found success with the schools, the organization realized that we had an opportunity to do more in the community,” said Julian Love, chief financial officer, St. HOPE Community Development. “That meant we needed a system that could better track and manage finances. SuiteSuccess fit exactly what we needed.”

With the preconfigured roles, dashboards and nonprofit industry best practices within SuiteSuccess, St. HOPE has been able to shorten payroll processes by 87 percent, digitize and gain greater control over purchasing processes, and achieve real-time visibility into its financial performance. As a result, St. HOPE has been able to manage the increasing business complexity presented by its growth and expanding scope. St. HOPE selected NetSuite SuiteSuccess for Nonprofits in March 2017 and went live with a full-fledged Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system in less than three months.

“NetSuite has a proud history of helping organizations in the nonprofit sector,” said David Geilhufe, Senior Director, Social Impact & Nonprofit, Oracle NetSuite. “With SuiteSuccess, we’re able to help thriving organizations like St. HOPE to quickly and easily manage critical business functions so they can focus on their mission and on helping the community.”

Oracle, the largest provider of cloud technology for the utility industry once again earned the top spot in a Navigant Research Leaderboard report that ranks companies in the home energy management (HEM) space. Oracle Utilities, which acquired Opower in 2016, received the highest ranking in this 2018 report due to significant market penetration of its home energy management solution across 100 utilities and its ability to offer utility companies a comprehensive, end-to-end utility software solution at scale around the world.

“This is significant validation of our continued leadership and support of our utility customers,” said Rodger Smith, SVP and general manager of Oracle Utilities. “Since acquiring Opower we have continued to innovate in the rapidly evolving home energy management market to deliver the strongest results in the category. Our investment in scalable solutions that connect every customer enables tighter customer-to-grid integration for the utility of the future.”

Prior to joining Oracle, Opower has been consistently ranked as the top provider since Navigant introduced the HEM Leaderboard, due to its leading capabilities in this category including home energy reports, behavioral demand response, smart meter and rates engagement, billing insights and alerts and embeddable online tools.

“Home energy management (HEM) is a broad market of technologies and services that consumers use to better manage and control their home energy consumption and production. With the development of the smart home and connected devices, energy management has become a critical part of the digitization of the home. Oracle Utilities’ Opower solutions are at the forefront of monitoring energy usage, demand side management programs and increasing customer engagement to increase energy efficiency,” said Paige Leuschner, Research Analyst at Navigant.

The Navigant Research Leaderboard Report examines the strategy and execution of 14 companies that offer HEM software solutions and rates them on 10 criteria: vision, go-to-market strategy, partners, technology, geographic reach, sales and marketing, product performance, product portfolio and integrations, pricing, and staying power. Using Navigant Research’s proprietary Leaderboard methodology, vendors are profiled, rated, and ranked to provide an objective assessment of each company’s relative strengths and weaknesses in the global HEM market.

Oracle Corporation (NYSE: ORCL) today announced fiscal 2018 Q4 results and fiscal 2018 full year results. In Q4, Total Revenues were up 3% to $11.3 billion compared to Q4 last year. Q4 Cloud Services and License Support revenues were up 8% to $6.8 billion. Q4 Cloud License and On-Premise License revenues were down 5% to $2.5 billion.

Q4 GAAP Operating Income was up 8% to $4.4 billion, and GAAP Operating Margin was 39%. Q4 Non-GAAP Operating Income was up 6% to $5.3 billion, and non-GAAP Operating Margin was 47%. Q4 GAAP Net Income was $3.4 billion, and non-GAAP Net Income was $4.1 billion. Q4 GAAP Earnings Per Share was up 8% to $0.82, while non-GAAP Earnings Per Share was up 11% to $0.99.

At the end of Q4, short-term deferred revenues were up 2% to $8.4 billion, while Operating Cash Flow on a trailing twelve-month basis was up 9%, or $1.3 billion, to a record $15.4 billion.

For the full fiscal year 2018, Total Revenues were up 6% to $39.8 billion compared to fiscal 2017. FY18 Cloud Services and License Support revenues were up 10% to $26.3 billion. FY18 Cloud License and On-Premise License revenues were down 4% to $6.2 billion.

FY18 GAAP Operating Income was up 8% to $13.7 billion, and GAAP Operating Margin was 34%. FY18 Non-GAAP Operating Income was up 9% to $17.6 billion, and non-GAAP Operating Margin was 44%. FY18 GAAP Net Income was $3.8 billion, and non-GAAP Net Income was $13.2 billion. FY18 GAAP Earnings Per Share was $0.90, while Non-GAAP Earnings Per Share was $3.12.

“Last year, I forecast double-digit non-GAAP earnings per share growth for FY18 and we delivered 14% growth this year, largely driven by strong growth in our cloud businesses,” said Oracle CEO, Safra Catz. “Looking ahead to FY19, I expect revenue growth will enable us to deliver double-digit non-GAAP earnings per share growth once again.”

“We had a great fourth quarter with total revenues more than $200 million above our constant currency forecast,” said Oracle CEO, Mark Hurd. “Our strategic Fusion ERP and HCM SaaS cloud applications suite revenues grew over 50% in the fourth quarter, and we expect continued strong growth from our Fusion SaaS suites throughout FY19.”

“Some of our largest customers have now begun the process of moving their on-premise Oracle databases to the Oracle Cloud,” said Oracle Chairman and CTO, Larry Ellison. “For example, AT&T is moving thousands of databases and tens of thousands of terabytes of data into the Oracle Cloud. We think that these large scale migrations of Oracle database to the cloud will drive our PaaS and IaaS businesses throughout FY19.”

The Board of Directors also declared a quarterly cash dividend of $0.19 per share of outstanding common stock. This dividend will be paid to stockholders of record as of the close of business on July 17, 2018, with a payment date of July 31, 2018.

Oracle will hold a conference call and webcast today to discuss these results at 2:00 p.m. Pacific. You may listen to the call by dialing (816) 287-5563, Passcode: 425392. To access the live webcast of this event, please visit the Oracle Investor Relations website at http://www.oracle.com/investor. In addition, Oracle’s Q4 results and fiscal 2018 financial tables are available on the Oracle Investor Relations website.

A replay of the conference call will also be available by dialing (855) 859-2056 or (404) 537-3406, Pass Code: 6866209.

Oracle Hospitality today unveiled OPERA Reporting and Analytics Cloud Service, a new offering providing hotel management with access to business data and performance metrics, intuitive data visualization and customized reporting. OPERA Reporting and Analytics Cloud Service is powered by Oracle Business Intelligence (OBI) an industrial-strength analytics engine known for its capability to develop, design and deploy reports that is used by Fortune 100 organizations to leapfrog their competitors. With Oracle Business Intelligence at the core, OPERA Reporting and Analytics Cloud Service empowers corporate hotel executives and front-desk staff to make more strategic decisions that optimize operational efficiency, enhance guest experience, and drive continued revenue.

“OPERA Reporting and Analytics was developed with the goal of simplifying reporting, creating a common reporting platform for both our restaurant and hotel customers and integrating with OPERA platform to provide actionable insights to the hospitality industry faster than ever,” said Laura Calin, vice president strategy and solutions, Oracle Hospitality. “With these new tools hotel staff at every level can make more accurate and strategic decisions that align to corporate growth objectives while enabling meaningful guest interactions that enhance guest loyalty.”

OPERA Reporting and Analytics enables smarter decisions and better forecasts by allowing management to easily analyze and visualize data on property financial performance, guest profiles, reservations, room rates and revenue metrics, restaurant sales, catering events, and blocks. The solution can be fully customized to reflect performance indicators and metrics unique to individual properties and multiple tiers of hotel staff.

OPERA Reporting and Analytics provides hotel staff at all levels to drive revenue and better guest experiences with a variety of use cases including:

• Allowing corporate and area revenue managers to analyze performance across multiple properties in a region and understand the factors that cause revenue to fluctuate year to year.
• Providing general managers with deep analysis of daily operations and measurement against room revenue, food and beverage revenue and occupancy which can be aligned with monthly, quarterly and annual performance goals.
• Empowering front desk management to offer better guest experience by accelerating guest check-in and prioritizing room availability for loyal or VIP guests with near real-time perspective on departures and room inventory.

Cabel, an IT service provider for the financial services market in Italy since 1985, and Oracle Financial Services Global Business Unit, announced the availability today of Oracle FLEXCUBE for the Italian market. Oracle FLEXCUBE is a core banking solution that has been adopted by more than 600 financial institutions around the world.

Cabel and Oracle have collaborated since 2016 to localize the Oracle FLEXCUBE solution to improve the process of marketing new products and services to the Italian market, where client requirements are evolving rapidly. In recent months, the Oracle FLEXCUBE solution has been adapted to the regulations governing the Italian banking market and is now fully able to support the typical activity of the Italian banking system.

“The attitude of the banking system towards innovation is changing and at the same time there is a growing interest in the world of fintech. Invest Banca, thanks to the Oracle FLEXCUBE solution, has taken a decisive step forward. We went live with this Open Banking Platform May 7th and Oracle FLEXCUBE now allows us to easily and efficiently integrate with a series of specialized solutions already in use by our retail and institutional clients, but moreover, it allows us to keep apace with ever more demanding banking regulations, such as MiFID, PSD2 and GDPR. It also facilitates our interaction and experimentation with the latest technology advances such as Robo-Advisor, artificial intelligence, data science, social trading and blockchain,” said Stefano Sardelli, Managing Director of Invest Banca.”

Cabel implemented the Italian version of Oracle FLEXCUBE making it possible to integrate in an already live and running banking system covering other banking operations. The solution can be outsourced or used on premise.

"This is a radically innovative solution, because it is a technology that facilitates the creation of lean products and services that are independent and based on completely different and more modern logic than traditional core banking systems in Italy,” said Francesco Bosio, President of Cabel Holding S.p.A.

“Oracle’s strategy is to work with leading local partners, who bring local domain skills to our best-in-class global solutions," said Chet Kamat, Senior Vice President, Banking, Oracle Financial Services. "Cabel is an innovation-oriented company and we chose to work with Cabel knowing it could fully utilize our modern, flexible technology to respond to the changes imposed by the digital age. As a result, Italian banks will see a significant improvement in their own productivity and market offerings—and their customers will get the benefit of excellent customer experience.”

Oracle (NYSE:ORCL) today announced availability of the Internet Intelligence Map, providing users with a simple, graphical way to track the health of the internet and gain insight into the impact of events such as natural disasters or state-imposed interruptions. The map is part of Oracle’s Internet Intelligence initiative, which provides insight and analysis on the state of global internet infrastructure. To access the free Internet Intelligence Map, visit internetintel.oracle.com.

For more than a decade, members of Oracle’s Internet Intelligence team have broken some of the biggest stories about the internet. From BGP hijacks to submarine cable breaks, Oracle’s Internet Intelligence team frequently publishes objective data and analysis that informs public understanding of the technical underpinnings of the internet and its effects on topics like geopolitics and e-commerce. With today’s news, Oracle is now making core analytic capabilities available to everyone via the Internet Intelligence Map. Using one of the world’s most comprehensive internet performance data sets and backed by years of research and analytics, Oracle has developed the premier resource and authority for reliable information on the functioning of the internet.

“The internet is the world’s most important network, yet it is incredibly volatile. Disruptions on the internet can affect companies, governments, and network operators in profound ways,” said Kyle York, vice president of product strategy for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and the general manager for Oracle’s Dyn Global Business Unit. “As a result, all of these stakeholders need better visibility into the health of the global internet. With this offering, we are delivering on our commitment to making it a better, more stable experience for all who rely on it.”

The Internet Intelligence Map presents country-level connectivity statistics based on traceroutes, BGP, and DNS query volumes on a single dashboard. By presenting these three dimensions of internet connectivity side-by-side, users can investigate the impact of an issue on internet connectivity worldwide.

“It’s important to have a global view of the internet in order to understand how external events prevent users from reaching your web-based applications and services. It is only when you have this insight that you can work around those issues to improve availability and performance,” said Jim Davis, Founder and Principal Analyst of Edge Research Group.

The Internet Intelligence Map is just one of many advanced awareness and visibility tools that help Oracle improve the experience of the cloud by making it better and more reliable every day. This offering is powered by Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, which offers a set of core infrastructure services to provide customers the ability to run any workload in the cloud. Only Oracle Cloud Infrastructure provides the compute, storage, networking, and edge services necessary to deliver the end-to-end performance required of today's modern enterprise.

Oracle (NYSE: ORCL) today announced the availability of its next-generation Oracle Cloud Platform services featuring built-in autonomous capabilities, including Oracle Mobile Cloud Enterprise, Oracle Data Integration Platform Cloud, and Oracle API Platform Cloud. With embedded artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, these platform services automate operational tasks to enable organizations to lower cost, reduce risk, accelerate innovation, and get predictive insights.

To continuously innovate while keeping pace with dynamic business environments, enterprises need secure, comprehensive, integrated cloud services to build new applications and run their most demanding workloads. Only Oracle’s cloud services can intelligently automate key operational functions, including tuning, patching, backups, and upgrades giving organizations more time to focus on strategic business activities, while delivering maximum performance, high availability, and critical security features.

“There is tremendous value for our customers in embedding AI and machine learning capabilities throughout our entire cloud portfolio,” said Amit Zavery, executive vice president of development, Oracle Cloud Platform. “Customers have embraced our vision for an autonomous enterprise. With Oracle’s autonomous platform services, organizations can capitalize on AI to reduce costs, speed innovation, and transform how they do business.”

Last year, Oracle outlined its vision for an autonomous enterprise, unveiling the world’s first Autonomous Database. Since then, the company announced it would extend autonomous capabilities to its entire cloud platform portfolio. Delivering on that promise, Oracle recently made available a number of autonomous platform services, including Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse Cloud, Oracle Analytics Cloud, Oracle Integration Cloud, and Oracle Visual Builder. With today’s availability of another set of autonomous platform services, Oracle continues to build momentum. Later in 2018, Oracle plans to release more autonomous capabilities focused on Blockchain, security and management, and additional database workloads, including OLTP and NoSQL.

Mutua Madrid Open became the first ATP World Tour Masters 1000 and Premier WTA tournament to incorporate an AI-equipped chatbot to improve communication with tennis fans. Implemented with Oracle Cloud Platform, the chatbot, named “MatchBot,” used AI to maintain natural conversations that provided fans with information on the event, players, and results, as well as details on hospitality services, discounts on merchandise, ticket sales, access, and parking.

“We wanted to position the Mutua Madrid Open as the tournament of the 21st century,” said Gerard Tsobanian, president and CEO of Mutua Madrid Open. “Development of the MatchBot positions us at the forefront of technology and innovation. With this new technology, we were able to provide visitors with an amazing experience—a pleasant, simpler, and faster way to get the information they wanted about the tournament.”

By adding autonomous capabilities to its latest set of Platform Cloud services, Oracle helps organizations easily develop new innovative user experiences with chatbot and voice capabilities, enables business users to perform intelligent data integration tasks, and exposes business logic and data via robust API design/management.

Oracle Mobile Cloud Enterprise provides a complete, open, and proven enterprise platform to develop, deliver, analyze, and manage mobile apps and AI-powered chatbots that connect and extend any backend system in a secure, scalable manner. Learn more here.

• Self-learning chatbots observe interactions, preferences to automate frequently performed actions.
• Automated learning from conversations ensures higher accuracy in the machine learning for the smart bots, including seamless handoffs to human agents via trained AI algorithms.

   

• Automatic generation of QnA chatbots extract knowledge from unstructured data by leveraging machine learning.

Oracle Data Integration Platform Cloud helps organizations make better and faster decisions by providing access to all data, and unlocking value from data faster through a combination of machine learning and artificial intelligence powered features that stream, migrate, transform, enrich, and govern data from anywhere. Learn more here.

• Simplifies and automates creation of big data lakes and data warehouses through one click self-defining tasks to deliver streaming or batch data, thereby improving standardization and efficiency for big data projects.
• Delivers self-optimizing data pipelines for rapid data delivery into Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse Cloud.
• Enables trusted, governed cloud-based analytics through system-guided data sharing between SaaS, on-premises, and hybrid business applications.
• Speeds up self-service data preparation through machine assisted data curation and eliminates manual work when creating data pipelines.

Oracle API Platform Cloud supports agile API-first design and development, enabling hybrid deployment of the API gateway across Oracle Cloud, on-prem and 3rd party clouds.  It provides insight on KPIs covering every aspect of the API lifecycle, while employing the most up-to-date security protocols. Learn more here.

• Continuously learns about usage patterns, and recommends plans allocation limits and configurations.
• Based on other policy usage and configurations, recommends policies and policy configurations using predictive algorithms to API Managers.

Oracle Developer Cloud is a complete development platform included with all Oracle Cloud services that automates software development and delivery cycles, and helps teams manage agile development processes. With an easy-to-use web interface and integration with popular development tools, it helps deliver better applications faster. Learn more here

• Builds automation for multiple development languages and environments supporting a variety of popular build frameworks such as Maven, Ant, Gradle, npm, Grunt, Gulp, and Bower.
• Tests automation with popular testing frameworks such as JUnit and Selenium enables automation of both logic and UI testing.
• Environment provisioning automation via command line interfaces for Docker, Kubernetes, and Terraform.
• Continuous integration automation through visual pipeline flows. Monitor live execution of pipelines and build job execution history from a central location.

Today Oracle announced enhancements to Oracle Retail XBRi Loss Prevention Cloud Service that help retailers quickly identify and investigate fraudulent activities across store and online transactions. With embedded science, Oracle Retail XBRi can detect new data anomalies and alert loss prevention analysts to potential risks and drive quick resolution by providing the transactional insight needed to investigate. The Oracle Retail XBRi enhancements also include embedded science developed over 20 years of research and development in retail including more than 4,000 reporting metrics and attributes representing experiences and best practices of global retailers.

“The opportunity for retail theft grows as retailers reach to meet customer expectations and struggle to manage individual channels of engagement,” said Jeff Warren, vice president, Oracle Retail. “The updates to Oracle Retail XBRi provide customers with the tools to protect their margins and is another example of the continued value we aim to deliver through cloud services.”

“This new generation of cloud services accelerates the path to ROI within months of deployment,” said Chris Sarne, senior director of omnichannel strategy, Oracle Retail.  “The result is a smart, holistic approach to preventing fraud and saving money that scales to grow with your business.”

• Agility, Security and a Path to Lower Total Cost of Ownership. One of the goals of using embedded science is to clarify and lower the total cost of installation, set up, and maintenance of solutions by taking advantage of iterative cloud updates. The cloud-based solution offers even greater precision, building on existing knowledge and adding new features and analytics automatically.
• Prompt Investigation. Upon deployment, the solution immediately identifies exceptions and escalates them to analysts and investigators without requiring manual intervention to initiate the process.
• Comprehensive Discovery. The cloud service employs embedded science to quickly surface anomalous behavior and potential cases. With new insight to emerging fraudulent activities comes opportunities to help store managers train their associates to detect and avoid potential loss before it happens.
• Intuitive Configuration. The Oracle Retail XBRi interface allows analysts to easily configure reports that reflect the unique needs of omnichannel brands without incurring additional costs or relying on IT specialists.
• POS Integration that Streamlines Investigation.  A heightened degree of integration between Oracle Retail XBRi Cloud Service and Oracle Retail Xstore Point-of-Service further enhances the ability of XBRi’s embedded science to pinpoint new sources of risk and deliver purpose-build reports that streamline and support investigative activities while leveraging the best practices built into the Oracle Retail portfolio.

Oracle will continue to add new knowledge from the Oracle Retail customer community to combat new patterns of fraud that emerge in the complex omnichannel retail environment.

To successfully adapt to a rapidly changing business environment, thousands of wholesale distributors have selected NetSuite to improve business performance, increase customer satisfaction and stay ahead of the competition. For example, Kitchen Art, one of the largest distributors of kitchen cabinets in the southeastern United States, and Circle Valve, a distributor of industrial valves, fittings, filters, and measurement control devices, selected SuiteSuccess for Wholesale Distribution and implemented NetSuite to streamline the management of financials, inventory and reporting.

Started in 1989, Kitchen Art provides design and installation services out of its three offices in Florida through more than 900 job sites a month. To successfully grow its business and manage increasing complexity, Kitchen Art selected NetSuite SuiteSuccess for Wholesale Distribution in September 2016. With SuiteSuccess, Kitchen Art is able to quickly and easily track orders, inventory, finances and operations, while also customizing business-specific workflows across processes like product selection and order entry. As a result, the Kitchen Art management team has been able to improve decision making and drive efficiencies by gaining unprecedented visibility into business operations.

“As we continue to achieve great success in our industry, NetSuite is helping us expand even further in Florida and the southeast US,” said Rick Cuseo, VP of Finance, Kitchen Art. “NetSuite, along with our outstanding employees and valued customers, are the secret sauce that help to fuel our growth.”

• Circle Valve Prepares for Next Stage of Growth with NetSuite

Founded by two friends in 1986, Circle Valve Technologies has grown into a world class supplier of precision valves, fittings and controls. Today, the company operates an 8,000-square-foot facility that houses roughly $1.2 million in inventory. To continue to expand its business, Circle Valve Technologies needed a strong business management system. After a careful evaluation, Circle Valve Technologies selected NetSuite SuiteSuccess for Wholesale Distribution in August 2016 for its comprehensive functionality, cloud-based architecture and ease of implementation.

“Circle Valve Technologies has been built on strong technical expertise, inventory management and customer service,” said Chris Simmons, General Manager, Circle Valve Technologies. “To support our next stage of growth, we needed a new business management system and NetSuite has been phenomenal. It’s everything we need all in one system. The amount of detail I can get from a customer record just by clicking the dashboard view is staggering.”

For more information on SuiteSuccess for Wholesale Distribution, visit: www.netsuite.com/suitesuccesswd.

Oracle (NYSE: ORCL) CTO and Chairman, Larry Ellison, today unveiled the world’s first automated enterprise cloud application upgrade product that will enable Oracle customers to reduce the time and cost of cloud migration by up to 30 percent. By providing a complete set of automated tools and proven cloud transition methodologies, the new “Soar to the Cloud” solution enables customers with applications running on premises to upgrade to Oracle Cloud Applications in as little as 20 weeks.

“It’s now easier to move from Oracle E-Business Suite to Oracle Fusion ERP in the cloud, than it is to upgrade from one version of E-Business Suite to another,” said Ellison. “A lot of tedious transitions that people once did manually are now automated. If you choose Oracle Soar, it will be the last upgrade you’ll ever do.”

Oracle Soar includes a discovery assessment, process analyzer, automated data and configuration migration utilities, and rapid integration tools. The automated process is powered by the True Cloud Method, Oracle’s proprietary approach to support customers throughout the journey to the cloud. It is guided by a dedicated Oracle concierge service to help ensure a rapid and predictable upgrade that aligns with modern, industry best practices. Customers can keep the upgrade on-track by monitoring the status of their cloud transition via an intuitive mobile application, which features a step-by-step implementation guide indicating exactly what needs to be done each day.

“We know the power of automation in solving business problems for our customers—it’s baked into all of our applications,” said Beth Boettcher, senior vice president, North American applications consulting, Oracle. “We’ve applied the same thinking to the cloud upgrade process to create an end-to-end solution that will enable our customers to experience a rapid, predictable, and cost-effective journey to the cloud.”

Oracle Soar to the Cloud

Leading organizations are choosing Oracle Cloud:

• Bank of America Selects Oracle Cloud for ERP and Financials
• Office Depot Pivots to a New Future with Oracle Cloud Applications
• Emerging Technology: The Driving Force of Disruption

The Oracle Soar offering is available today for Oracle E-Business Suite, Oracle PeopleSoft and Oracle Hyperion Planning customers who are moving to Oracle ERP Cloud, Oracle SCM Cloud and Oracle EPM Cloud. Oracle will continue to invest in the development of the product, extending the solution to Oracle PeopleSoft and Oracle E-Business Suite customers moving to Oracle HCM Cloud, and Oracle Siebel customers moving to Oracle CX Cloud in the future.

For additional information on Oracle Soar, visit oracle.com/soar

Oracle Financial Services Analytical Applications (OFSAA) and PwC, an Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN) Platinum and Cloud Elite partner, announced today a global collaboration to provide insurance clients with clear visibility into near-term and ongoing compliance with the International Accounting Standards Board’s (IASB) new IFRS 17 standard, which insurers must meet by 2021, and the pending GAAP Long Duration Contract Standard. Together, Oracle and PwC are facilitating risk and finance transformation and insurers’ adoption of IFRS 17.

Oracle provides the data management platform to enable finance transformation and analytical applications for IFRS 17 with pre-built business rules, valuations, contractual service margin calculations and disclosures. The data management platform and its associated tools provide prebuilt integration with the accounting and financial close process, facilitate integration with actuarial systems, and create integrated, auditable results for internal and external reporting, with auditability and lineage.

PwC acts as Oracle’s strategic advisor and provide consulting and implementation services and accelerator tools delivering tailored enhancements. Insurers will benefit from improved decision making, modernized actuarial analytics, and more timely and insightful reporting related to compliance needs.

“Now more than ever, insurers have to meet an array of regulatory and compliance requirements including new financial standards, such as IFRS 17,” said Sonny Singh, senior vice president and general manager, Financial Services Global Business Unit, Oracle. “To do so, they need a comprehensive technological solution to properly comply with these increasingly complex requirements and reduce any adverse impact to their business. Oracle’s award winning risk and compliance platform, which are purpose built for financial services institutions, combine with PwC’s experience in advisory services to help provide insurers the necessary capabilities to address these stringent requirements.”

“PwC is a leading advisor to the insurance industry and plays a major role in helping insurers transform and modernize their businesses while meeting new IFRS 17 requirements,” said Alex Bertolotti, PwC IFRS 17 lead partner. “Together with Oracle, which has a strong technology position in the financial services industry, our extensive market experience enables us to provide advisory and software solutions for the insurance industry, and bring strong market experience in helping our insurance clients meet their specific business challenges.”

Today, four plaintiffs’ law firms agreed to pay Oracle Corporation $270,000 to avoid Oracle’s motion for sanctions over their misconduct in a lawsuit related to Oracle’s acquisition of Micros Systems, Inc. in Case No. 13-C-14-099672, in the Circuit Court for Howard County, Maryland.

In 2014, Brower Piven, Robbins Arroyo LLC, Weisslaw LLC, and Pomerantz, LLP, along with other firms, sued Micros and its directors, claiming that Micros’s shareholders were not adequately informed about the transaction and that Oracle’s offer price was too low. The firms also sued Oracle for aiding and abetting the Micros board, despite the fact that Oracle simply engaged in arm’s-length negotiations to obtain the best price possible. The trial court dismissed all claims with prejudice against all defendants, including Oracle, and then courts at every level of the state system rejected five subsequent motions for reconsideration and appeals brought by these firms, affirming the trial judge’s finding that “with respect to Oracle, the Plaintiffs have failed to allege any acts, alleged acts, by agents or employees or Oracle that were impermissible under the law. The mere fact that Oracle pursued the merger is insufficient.” The outrageous litigation conduct drew the sanctions motion by Oracle, which the four firms identified above agreed to settle rather than defend.

“This substantial monetary settlement reflects the strength of our sanctions motion for what Oracle believes was clearly a “strike” suit brought against Oracle. For more than a decade, plaintiffs’ lawyers have brought these suits, challenging legitimate public mergers, in order to line their own pockets at the expense of shareholders. We are grateful that the Maryland courts recognized that the claims had no merit, and we urge other public companies to challenge these baseless suits. Shareholders’ attorneys cannot simply claim and collect what is effectively an unwarranted tax on mergers,” said Dorian Daley, Oracle’s General Counsel.

In an effort to accelerate blockchain innovation in Financial Services and other industries, Oracle recently joined academia and banking industry leaders as part of the Carolina Fintech Hub (CFH) Generation Blockchain Challenge to encourage students to develop commercially viable and cross-industry blockchain applications.

Thirty students from North Carolina State, University North Carolina Chapel Hill, University North Carolina Charlotte and the University of South Carolina worked together with leaders from Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Ernst & Young, BB&T, Ally Bank, SIA Partners and Oracle Blockchain Cloud Service implementation partner Aurablocks to solve real-world industry challenges covering banking, higher education, energy, healthcare, and real estate. The goal of the challenge was to bring a single source of truth and trusted transactions to complex distributed business processes with the usage of blockchain. For seven weeks, 10 finalist student teams worked with industry mentors to define, test and implement proof of concepts using beta version of Oracle Blockchain Cloud Service and Oracle Digital Innovation Platform for Open Banking.

CFH is an organization focused on accelerating the merging worlds of financial services and digital technology. The CFH Challenge culminated at an event hosted in North Carolina on April 20 by AvidXchange Inc., where student teams were acknowledged by a set of esteemed judges for their innovations and entrepreneurialism. The winning team, Versity, created a decentralized student records credentials platform that allows individuals to validate, store, and share their student records with employers and educational institutions from anywhere, anytime.

“This challenge offered students an incredible opportunity to learn more about blockchain technology and to help them develop their business and technical skills with the help of their industry and academic mentors—and access to Oracle’s advanced enterprise-grade blockchain cloud platform,” said Tariq Bokhari, Executive Director of Carolina Fintech Hub. “The students not only identified problems and created real, viable solutions but through this process have learned important skills they can apply to their employment future.”

Throughout this challenge, Oracle and AuraBlocks led the training of more than 200 students in the Carolinas on blockchain with additional partners including North Carolina State University, University of North Carolina at Charlotte and Sia Blocks. Nearly all of the student teams intend to further hone their projects on Oracle’s platform and develop future companies based on their innovations. The winning student teams who participated in this program have the option to join the Oracle Startup for Higher Education program giving students access to mentorship and other resources required to further develop their entrepreneurial ideas into real enterprises.

“Oracle’s blockchain platform is built to enable rapid experimentation and provide enterprise-grade capabilities to simplify moving POCs and pilots into production,” said Sanjay Mathew, senior director, Global Financial Services Industry, Oracle. “The scope of what the teams designed and built in seven weeks with this unique collaboration is impressive, and we look forward to having the teams evolve these projects into full solutions deployed on Oracle Blockchain Cloud Service. This could not have happened without the outstanding participation from motivated students, industry leaders, partners and academia combined.”

Oracle today announced that it has signed an agreement to acquire DataScience.com, whose platform centralizes data science tools, projects and infrastructure in a fully-governed workspace.

Data science teams use the platform to organize work, easily access data and computing resources, and execute end-to-end model development workflows. Leading organizations like Amgen, Rio Tinto, and Sonos are using the DataScience.com platform to improve productivity, reduce operational costs and deploy machine learning solutions faster to power their digital transformations.

DataScience.com empowers data scientists to deliver the business-changing insights executives expect in less time with self-service access to open source tools, data and computing resources, while also improving the ability of IT teams to support that work. Oracle embeds Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning capabilities across its software as a service (SaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) solutions, including big data, analytics and security operations, to enable digital transformations. Together, Oracle and DataScience.com will provide customers with a single data science platform that leverages Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and the breadth of Oracle's integrated SaaS and PaaS offerings to help them realize the full potential of machine learning.

“Every organization is now exploring data science and machine learning as a key way to proactively develop competitive advantage, but the lack of comprehensive tooling and integrated machine learning capabilities can cause these projects to fall short,” said Amit Zavery, Executive Vice President of Oracle Cloud Platform, Oracle. “With the combination of Oracle and DataScience.com, customers will be able to harness a single data science platform to more effectively leverage machine learning and big data for predictive analysis and improved business results.”

“Data science requires a comprehensive platform to simplify operations and deliver value at scale,” said Ian Swanson, CEO of DataScience.com. “With DataScience.com, customers leverage a robust, easy-to-use platform that removes barriers to deploying valuable machine learning models in production. We are extremely enthusiastic about joining forces with Oracle’s leading cloud platform so customers can realize the benefits of their investments in data science.”

More information about this announcement is available at www.oracle.com/datascience.

Helping customers capitalize on new digital communications services and revenue opportunities, Oracle today announced major new enhancements to Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management (BRM). With new operational user experience features, enhanced security capabilities and updated technology platform support, Oracle Communications BRM supports the rapid design and monetization of consumption and subscription based offerings across cloud, IoT, and future 5G services.

Oracle Communications BRM provides complete revenue management including the high volume, low latency, and convergent usage processing required by new digital communication services. With its Elastic Charging Engine technology, the offering is designed to support advanced charging models for today’s mobile, fixed and cable digital services and provide a foundation for IoT and future 5G services.

“This major release of Oracle Communications BRM underscores Oracle’s ongoing commitment to delivering powerful, scalable monetization solutions that enable our customers to fully capitalize on the digital revolution,” said Doug Suriano, senior vice president, general manager, Oracle Communications. “With this offering, service providers have a modern monetization platform to innovate, profit and grow as they evolve to support broadband technology innovations and deliver new services to market.”

Oracle Communications BRM was recently noted as a Leader in the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Subscription Relationship Management (SRM) 2017 Vendor Assessment.

In today’s competitive business environment, delivering a superior customer experience is more critical than ever. Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management’s Billing Care module enables CSPs to serve their customers through intuitive interfaces that provide real-time views of customer’s balance and allow easy access to all aspects of account history. CSPs and digital service providers can build customer loyalty by awarding non-currency assets such as movie downloads, gigabytes of storage or throughput, or access to games.

Real-time tracking of consumption enables notification to customers when they approach thresholds. Flexible options for invoice design and delivery create additional opportunities to personalize subscriber relationships. Oracle BRM 12.0 enhances these capabilities, empowering CSPs to leverage powerful, scalable monetization capabilities to accelerate customer success and time to market for digital services.

New capabilities include:

• New unified functionality available in the modern, browser based Billing Care user interface:
  • Advanced customer and asset management with subscription group services
  • Corrective invoicing, credit profile management and sharing
  • SEPA Payments, account and bill unit level refunds, item and event level disputes
  • Collections management, write-off and recovery
• Secure and documented Billing Care REST API
• Enhanced security including use of Oracle Wallet
• Updated core technology support

Oracle Communications BRM is part of Oracle’s complete monetization service portfolio, which also includes Oracle Monetization Cloud and Oracle Communications Network Charging and Control. With Oracle’s monetization solutions, customers can fuel disruptive innovation, brand differentiation, and business transformation with a service-, industry-, and business-model-agnostic real-time charging, billing, and settlement solution designed for an increasingly connected world.

1 IDC, “MarketScape: Worldwide Subscription Relationship Management 2017 Vendor Assessment”, Jordan Jewell and Eric Newmark, DC #US43172417, November 2017

Oracle today announced that IDC has recognized the momentum and growth of Oracle Cloud. According to the IDC Public Cloud Services Tracker, April, 2018¹, Oracle gained the most share out of all Enterprise Applications SaaS vendors in CY’2016 as well as CY’2017. In addition, the same report found that Oracle grew the fastest out of the top 10 PaaS vendors in CY’2016 as well as CY’2017.

“Oracle Cloud is redefining how organizations modernize, innovate and compete,” said Thomas Kurian, president, product development, Oracle. “Regardless of where organizations want to start their cloud journeys, Oracle delivers complete and integrated cloud services that deliver faster innovation and business transformation. We believe that the results from the latest IDC Public Cloud Services Tracker further demonstrate the value Oracle Cloud provides.”

IDC’s Worldwide Semiannual Public Cloud Services Tracker® monitors public cloud services with frequent releases of semiannual revenue estimates. It tracks and details individual public cloud services providers’ historical business performance and forecasts market sizes five years into the future—across 53 geographies and up to 80 discrete market segments. In the report, Enterprise Applications SaaS refers to the IDC markets CRM, Enterprise Resource Management (including HCM, Financials, Procurement, Order Management, PPM, EAM), Engineering, SCM, Operations and Manufacturing Applications.

Oracle provides its customers with a unique advantage as it is the only company in the world to deliver a complete cloud portfolio, spanning Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS). Today, organizations in 195 countries and territories process more than 55 billion transactions a day through the Oracle Cloud.

To learn more about how organizations around the globe are rapidly adopting Oracle Cloud solutions, see: Organizations Worldwide Turn to Oracle Cloud to Fuel their Modernization Efforts

1 IDC’s Worldwide Semiannual Public Cloud Services Tracker®, 27 April, 2018 [Enterprise Applications SaaS refers to the IDC markets CRM, Enterprise Resource Management (including HCM, Financials, Procurement, Order Management, PPM, EAM), Engineering, SCM, Operations and Manufacturing Applications.]