Ellison: Fusion Applications in 2010

Oracle plans to launch its long-awaited Fusion Applications in 2010, and they will be deployable both on-premises and as SaaS (software as a service), CEO Larry Ellison said Wednesday during a keynote address at the OpenWorld conference in San Francisco. Oracle has placed special emphasis on improving the user experience with Fusion, as well as embedded BI (business intelligence) throughout the applications, Ellison said. Fusion Applications, which Oracle first announced several years ago, will combine the best elements of Oracle's various business software product lines into a next-generation suite.

Ellison's keynote contained the most specific information the company has provided about Fusion Applications since first announcing the project several years ago. We're absolutely committed to do that," he said to applause. "We can afford to not only maintain the software you're running today, but also build the software you may want to move to tomorrow." Ellison did not provide details regarding licensing and pricing models, including whether Oracle will sell the new applications via subscription, as is the norm with SaaS. But Oracle is nonetheless ensuring the products are ready for SaaS, including by developing monitoring tools that will track their performance, Ellison said. The CEO took pains to tell the packed room of Siebel, JD Edwards and E-Business Suite users that Oracle has no plans to abandon the product lines anytime soon. "Oracle will continue to enhance those applications for the next decade and beyond. While SaaS vendors provide users with service-level agreement guarantees, "there aren't very good tools for figuring out whether you're actually getting the service levels you're paying for," he said. This gives Oracle "a huge advantage" because the SOA model will allow users easily to tie together "the Fusion generation and all the stuff you have deployed today," Ellison said. "We don't think all customers are going to replace what they have today with Fusion," he added. "We think they will augment what they have with some Fusion.

Oracle's tools will enable it to "not only contractually commit but prove we're delivering the service levels." Fusion Applications are based on a SOA (service oriented architecture) provided by Oracle's Fusion Middleware stack, Ellison said. Fusion is designed to be delivered that way. ... We have replacement applications and then we have net-new applications." The initial suite will include modules for financial management, human capital management, sales and marketing, supply chain management, project management, procurement management and GRC (governance, risk and compliance), but other key areas, such as manufacturing, will come later. Oracle has worked "very, very closely" with customers to design and test Fusion Applications, work that has resulted in a superior user interface, Ellison said. Ellison stressed the benefits of the modular approach. "You assemble the components in the order you want to use them, in the order that makes sense for your industry," he said. Embedded BI is another major focus of the suite. "You can't use the system without using business intelligence," Ellison said.

The application allowed the user to bring up a dashboard showing which order manager was responsible for the particular transaction, and then begin an instant-messaging conversation with him directly from the tool. In a demonstration, a pair of Oracle executives showed how the system alerted one user that a particular shipment had been delayed. In turn, the order manager was able to search for less critical orders and reroute them to fulfill the first one. "We tell you what you need to know, what you need to do, and we tell you how to do it," Ellison said. While Oracle "definitely has the capability to deliver this as SaaS, it's really up to them to figure out if they want to enter [that market] large-scale," Wang added. Ellison's presentation proved that "Fusion apps are real," said Ray Wang, a partner with the analyst firm Altimeter Group.

In some product areas, such as talent management, "they can't compete without the SaaS option," he said. In a presentation Tuesday, on-demand CRM (customer relationship management) vendor and Oracle rival Salesforce.com compared multitenancy to an office building, where individual tenants share the overall infrastructure but customize their office spaces. SaaS applications are different from straight application hosting, because they use a "multitenant" architecture wherein customers share a single instance of an application but their data is kept private from other customers. Oracle "will definitely" offer a hosted version of Fusion Applications, although it remains to be seen exactly how their SaaS strategy for the software plays out, Wang said. They're playing catch-up." Meanwhile, the work ahead of companies looking to adopt Fusion Applications sooner rather than later is "not trivial," said Floyd Teter, head of the Oracle Applications Users Group's Fusion Council, which has been educating group members about the upcoming applications release.

When Fusion Applications arrive, they will also raise the competitive stakes between Oracle and its main rival, SAP. But SAP spokesman Saswato Das dismissed Oracle's announcement. "Basically, our Business Suite 7 is the most comprehensive and flexible suite of applications on the market," Das said. "Oracle has been talking about Fusion for a long time, and our suite is available now. One key step customers should take is to catalogue their application customizations and determine which ones could be retired, Teter said. "A lot of us have done a lot of custom things. The skill set now is more Java and specifically [Java Enterprise Edition]. You also better have some knowledge of JavaScript." In addition, Fusion Applications rely on Oracle's JDeveloper IDE (integrated development environment), rather than other Java development tools like Eclipse. If you're a long-term Oracle customer, it's easy to lose track." Fusion Applications will also require some companies to acquire new development skills, Teter said. "A lot of us run a lot of customizations through MOD PL_SQL. That's going to be gone. For many companies, there will be plenty of time to plan, since the first version of Fusion Applications won't include certain functional areas. In the meantime, we'll continue to stay current on EBS." But Teter said the vendor's work on Fusion has produced impressive results, particularly in regards to user experience.

The lack of manufacturing has prompted the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology, which uses E-Business Suite, to wait for a future version, said Teter, who is a project manager at the lab. "When I get a full-functionality replacement, we'll look at it. Earlier in his keynote, Ellison turned to Oracle's recently announced Exadata 2 appliance for data warehousing and transaction processing. Exadata 2 uses Sun hardware, while the original machine, announced at last year's OpenWorld show, used Hewlett-Packard iron. He claimed the machine widely outperforms and is much less expensive than competing technologies, such as from IBM, calling it "the fastest computer that has ever been built to run data warehousing applications." "This system will outperform any of the competition," he said. Oracle is in the process of buying Sun Microsystems but the deal is on hold while European officials conduct an antitrust review. Ellison temporarily ceded the stage to California Gov.

Ellison didn't discuss the acquisition during his keynote, but Sun and its officials have played an active role in this year's OpenWorld conference. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who delivered a joke-peppered talk espousing the value of technology, from biotech to the Hollywood special effects that powered his long career as an action star. "Think of Conan the Barbarian fighting the giant snake," he said, referring to his role in the 1982 film based on Robert E. Howard's tales of a legendary warrior king. "I never could have done that and look so studly without technology," he said to an eruption of laughter from the crowd. Schwarzenegger also congratulated Ellison and Sun chairman Scott McNealy on the pending acquisition, stressing the companies' importance to California's economy. "Working together, I know the sky is the limit for you and your employees," he said.

U.S. Dept. of Education ties desktop encryption to employee ID cards

The U.S. Department of Education is rolling out desktop encryption software in a way that links the cryptographic process to employees' government-issued Personal Identity Verification (PIV) smart cards. The system, which is based on PGP's disk encryption technology, is intended to meet government rules for safeguarding sensitive financial and personal information, says Phillip Loranger, chief information security officer at the Department of Education. "There is a large amount of financial resources we're responsible for; we are in the student-loan business and we interface with universities and colleges," Loranger says. Tying encryption to the PIV card is a novel approach that will offer stronger authentication than a simple password. The Department of Education is actually "one of the largest banks in the country, with grants, student loans and school financial requests," he says.

The agency picked PGP in part because the encryption software company is willing to do some custom development to make sure that its Whole Disk Encryption software works with the government-issued PIV smart card and Microsoft Active Directory, Loranger says. Biometrics: The human body as proof of identity The Department of Education intends to first deploy PGP's Whole Disk Encryption on all mobile computers to protect data at rest. Loranger says he's in favor of the more stringent security tied to the PIV smart cards, but he acknowledges there will be situations when end users forget their PIV cards or lose them. In such circumstances, employees won't be locked out of their computers but will be granted a temporary password they can use for 24 hours, he says.

Unisys introducing software for private clouds

Unisys announced Monday software and services that will enable organizations to deploy and run their own internal private clouds, as part of its strategy to offer customers a variety of cloud computing options. In a poll of customers conducted in June by the company, 72 percent said security was their biggest concern about moving workloads to the cloud. The private cloud offering addresses the requirement of organizations that prefer a private cloud for mission-critical applications that use sensitive data, so they can retain greater control over their own and their customers' information, Rich Marcello, president for Consulting and Integration Solutions at Unisys Technology, said in a telephone interview on Thursday. Although there is no technical reason for this, some customers are still not convinced that an external cloud is reliable or robust, and are likely to move in stages, Marcello said.

The company also plans to launch next year a hybrid cloud that combines private and public cloud capabilities. The new Unisys Secure Private Could Solution, which will be available from next month, follows the company's introduction earlier this year of technology and services for a managed cloud service on shared IT infrastructure that is hosted by Unisys. Customers will be able to run many of their applications unchanged in a private cloud, and Unisys is also offering these companies services to help move their workload into the cloud, Marcello said. Organizations of any size can set up their private clouds with an up front investment of US$50,000 for the management server, software, and services, Marcello said. Customers can also use their own hardware, or buy hardware from Unisys, he added.

The software will include provisioning, virtualization, and management software that provides for features such as a self-service portal, he added. Unisys' Stealth technology, that cloaks data through multiple levels of authentication, encryption, and bit-splitting into multiple packets, is also available for private clouds though at an extra price, Marcello said. Ongoing maintenance will involve extra fees for hardware and software support and updates. He did not however expect customers to deploy Stealth on private clouds, as they would have their own firewalls and other security mechanisms in place. Unisys has also announced that its managed cloud service will support new platforms including Microsoft's .Net, IBM Websphere, and Oracle software platforms from this month, so that customers can move their applications that were developed on these software stacks unchanged to the cloud. Stealth is a key component of Unisys' managed cloud service.

When the service was launched earlier this year it supported only Java, Marcello said. This new service provides business continuity and disaster recovery services on a subscription basis, it added. The company has also added disaster recovery as a service for customers of its managed Secure Cloud Solution.

Critical Zero-Day Flaw Opens Holes in IE 6 and 7

A newly discovered threat that doesn't yet have any patch can allow for a Web-based attack against up-to-date Internet Explorer 6 and 7 browsers, according to security companies. The site could be a specifically created malicious site, or one that was hijacked and had the attack code inserted. Both Symantec and Vupen Security have posted alerts about the bug, which involves the way IE handles cascading style sheets, or CSS. According to the posts, browsing a Web site with embedded attack code would trigger the assault. According to Vupen's post, the flaw affects both IE 6 and 7 on a fully patched XP SP3 computer and could allow for running any command on a vulnerable system, such as installing malware.

Symantec's post says its tests confirm the published exploit works, but that it "exhibits signs of poor reliability," ie. it doesn't always work. There aren't yet any reports of active attacks, but exploit code is publicly available. An additional e-mail from Symantec says that Vista is affected as well, but Microsoft has not yet confirmed the vulnerability. According to Vupen, disabling Active Scripting in the Internet and Local intranet security zones will block attacks against this flaw, but doing so would likely block Web site functionality as well. Zero-days that affect IE are typically major threats, so attackers will likely begin hiding attacks that target this flaw on compromised Web sites, and spewing out e-mails and online comments with links to sites that contain attacks.

Current reports do not list IE 8 as vulnerable, but Symantec warns that "there are possibilities that other versions of IE and Windows may also be affected." Your best bet may be to use an alternate browser such as Firefox until a patch is available.

Is e-mail a perfect cloud application?

In the beginning there was e-mail. The network was devoid of PCs. So all e-mail was accessed via a terminal and a command line interface. And e-mail was run on a Unix server.

E-mail management a mighty struggle for US agencies So, by some current definitions, e-mail began as a "cloud" application. And, since network-based storage was expensive and local storage was inexpensive, thus began a logical move to downloading e-mail from the network and storing it on local devices/media. Then came the PC. And along with the PC, came local storage. Now, many of us use our e-mail archives as a primary record-keeping mechanism, and our historical e-mail files are perhaps our most precious resource. Whether your primary e-mail is a part of a corporate network or simply your personal copy, odds are darn good that you have your e-mail set to delete the messages from the server as soon as they are downloaded to the PC. And even a copy of the e-mails may still exist somewhere in the bowels of the IT department, recovering these e-mails is a major issue.

But what happens if the e-mail files are not backed up regularly? This issue hit really close to home this week when one of our associates had a crashed hard drive on an almost-new notebook. At this point, we could start yet another rant about how we all need to have current backups, and how corporate networking departments need to somehow enforce a policy of regular backups for all materials on the users' notebooks. And, of course, all of the e-mail archives were on that disk – with no recent backup. But that would simply be "preaching to the choir." Instead, we would like to offer a different solution. This has the advantage of potentially recovering not only the correspondence itself, but also the vast majority of important files.

Had our associate been using a network-based service, such as Gmail, then all of the e-mail would be "safe." In fact, this is exactly how our associate is now rebuilding everything. After all, virtually every file of any import is sent and/or received via e-mail. In the meantime, we invite you to join the discussion of this topic at TECHNOtorials. In the next newsletter, we'll look at some of the advantages and disadvantages of the use of public and/or private "cloud" services for e-mail. Com.

Mac News Briefs: PDFpen has new OCR engine

SmileOnMyMac Software has updated PDFpen, incorporating Nuance Communications' OmniPage OCR engine into the PDF editing program. SmileOnMyMac lauded the OmniPage OCR engine for its accuracy. PDFpen 4.5 uses version 15.5 of the OmniPage OCR, replacing the Tesseract open-source OCR engine in PDFpen on Intel-based Macs. Beside the new OCR engine, PDFpen 4.5 lets Snow Leopard users scan directly into the application from Image Capture or TWAIN scanners.

The 4.5 update is free for registered users of PDFpen 4.x. The PDF editing application costs $50, with a Pro version available for $100. Both PDFpen and PDFpenPro run on Mac OS X 10.4 and later.-Philip Michaels Typinator features DropBox syncing Ergonis Software released a new version of Typinator, its text-replacement utility. There's also a new text highlighting tool that selects and highlights text in a single action. Typinator 3.6 features automatic syncing with DropBox, a tool for syncing files across multiple machines (and online). Taking advantage of the new capability is as simple as modifying Typinator's preferences to store its settings folder within the DropBox folder. Typinator 3.6 is available now from the company's web site, for €19.95 per single-computer license, or €34.99 for a two-machine license. The updated Typinator also allows abbreviations that begin with a space, features a simplified registration interface, and offers numerous speed and memory usage improvements. The update is free to anyone who bought the application in the last two years.-Rob Griffiths Real Software updates development applications RealBasic and Real Studio 2009, Release 4 shipped Tuesday, adding 97 enhancements and 39 new features to the cross-platform software development tools, according to developer Real Software.

The report editor lets developers visually create a layout for printing by dragging and dropping labels, fields, images, and more. Leading the changes to this latest version of RealBasic is a new report editor, which Real Software says will be included in all RealBasic versions. The editor creates both single- and multi-page reports. The feature lets developers automate the most common functions of building applications without having to write IDE scripts. Real Studio also gets a new build animation feature for its Project Editor. A complete list of what's new in Release 4 is available on Real Software's downloads page.

It supports many formats including AVI, WMV, MOV, MPG, ASF, and DivX. The application automatically provides ideal default settings and offers the flexibility to crop video, set duration, adjust quality, and control many other audio and video preferences. The software maker also provides a video highlighting new features in RealBasic and Real Studio.-PM Macvide announces VideoFlash Converter 2.9 Macvide has announced VideoFlash Converter 2.9, an update of its video-to-Flash conversion utility for Mac OS X. VideoFlash Converter allows conversion of QuickTime-compatible video files to Adobe Flash. Version 2.9 also includes a new Web update and other fixes. VideoFlash Converter gives you the option of creating an HTML file along with the video and lets you customize how viewers see it. You can use the program to have Flash videos play directly in a Web page, not in a new window or separate page. You can designate that the video start automatically and continuously play when viewers access the page, for example.

The software works with OS X 10.4 (Tiger) or 10.5 (Leopard) and is a Universal app. The app also integrates with iWeb. VideoFlash Converter is available for $40 per single license, and can be downloaded from the Macvide Web site.-Jackie Dove Algoriddim releases Djay3 Algoriddim has released Djay 3, a revamped version of its music software application for Mac and iTunes. The program's interface has also been redesigned. It offers a host of new features, including automatic tempo and beat detection, auto-cut scratching, and MIDI support. With the new version, users can match the playback speed of two songs for a perfect transition.

The changes are aimed at making the program easy enough for novices while letting professional DJs do more with their mixes. In addition, the Auto-Cut feature allows users to scratch music in sync with a song's beat and rhythm. Djay 3 costs $50. A free 15-day trial is available from Algoriddim. The software runs on Mac OS X 10.4 or later.-JD

Cisco, EMC joint venture makes progress

A month since its introduction, the joint data center venture between Cisco and EMC is percolating with activity before it starts business in the first quarter. These so-called "VBlocks" are intended to allow channel partners to easily sell and integrate simplified data center and private cloud computing packages to customers. Acadia is being formed by the two companies to accelerate the adoption of technologies forged from the Virtual Computing Environment coalition, of which Cisco, EMC and VMware are developing pre-integrated compute, networking, storage and virtualization systems. Acadia's role is to wrap the VBlocks in the training and consulting services needed to initially build and operate the VBlock infrastructure, then transfer it to the partner.

Sources say Elias is chairing the board but he would not confirm that. The Acadia board is made up of Howard Elias, president and chief operating officer, EMC Information Infrastructure and Cloud Services; Gary Moore, Cisco's senior vice president of Advanced Services; Rob Lloyd, Cisco's executive vice president of Worldwide Operations; and Mitch Breen, EMC senior vice president, Global Channel Strategy and Sales. He has help from Moor, though, in leading Acadia for the time being. "The two of us have really sponsored the work to get Acadia formed and beginning to stand up," Elias said. Acadia will employ 130 and begin operations in early Q1. The venture is not only looking for "the best and brightest" from the parent companies but also recruiting from across the industry, Elias said. In addition to the formation of the board and management team, employees are being hired, Elias said.

Elias said Acadia's opportunity is "substantial and unique" – enabling existing channel partners to easily and broadly implement private cloud computing infrastructure to increase their own opportunities. "We're offering this intellectual property that Acadia is creating to our partner ecosystem so that they can then deliver and help accelerate the adoption of those VBlock packages by our customers," he said. How do I get access, proof of concept?' We're going to have to hit the ground running in Q1 to be able to start to fulfill some of this interest and demand. He says the company's challenge is to meet high expectations. "There's a lot of interest and demand out there, talk of 'What does this mean? It's about setting expectations all around, " Elias said.