Oracle Unveils Next-Generation Release of EPM System
Oracle has announced the Oracle Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) System, an integrated suite of EPM solutions. A component of Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle EPM System supports strategic, financial and operational management processes across a common foundation.
The EPM System addresses a need that exists at many companies, John O'Rourke, senior director of product marketing, Oracle, told 5 Minute Briefing. While these organizations have implemented ERP systems to automate their operational processes, “when we look at the management processes in a company, they are often not well-automated and often not well-integrated like their ERP and operational processes.”
Management processes such as the budgeting and planning process, reporting process and some of the business intelligence processes, are often handled with a combination of spreadsheets and disparate tools. “In many cases, companies haven't brought these processes and systems together the way that they could be brought together to help them achieve what we call management intelligence,” said O'Rourke. “Oracle's EPM is a single system that really brings those management systems together and helps to address the strategic as well as financial and operational management processes.”
A key enhancement to the Oracle EPM System is a new profitability and cost management application that helps organizations gain insight into costs and profitability across different lines of business. The Oracle Hyperion Profitablity and Cost Management is expected to help organizations that often rely on spreadsheets and manual processes for producing allocations and calculating profitablity information, which can result in disparate data that is difficult to analyze and difficult to act on quickly.
The EPM system also includes enhanced integration with the Oracle E-Business Suite, allowing for drill-through from EPM applications directly into transactional systems for faster analysis; and integration with Oracle Fusion Middleware, including Oracle's data integration, business process management, and identity management technologies, enabling customers to leverage existing IT investments and lower cost of ownership.
Additionally, Essbase Studio, a new wizard-driven design environment for Oracle Essbase, simplifies the creation and management of multidimensional analytical cubes and applications; and a new common Calculation Manager enables customers to graphically design, validate and administer business rules across planning and financial consolidation applications.
Built on service-oriented architecture (SOA) standards, the Oracle EPM System is hot-pluggable and integrates with non-Oracle data sources and platforms such as SAP. Oracle EPM System deployment options include Oracle On Demand or on-premise models. For more on Oracle Enterprise Performance Management and Business Intelligence, go here.
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Sypherlink Accelerates Data Integration with Automated Discovery and Mapping Software
Sypherlink, a provider of information-management software, has introduced version 5 of Sypherlink Harvester, featuring advanced discovery and heuristics-mapping capabilities, tighter integration with the extract, transform and load (ETL) process, and an improved graphical user interface.
“Where we are focused is the initial discovery and mapping tasks that are very critical for every business intelligence, data conversion or data integration process,” James Paat, Syperlink CEO, told 5 Minute Briefing. The first several steps in any large-scale project are knowing the data that is available across multiple sources, understanding what metadata is available, what schema information is available, and then mapping the relationships between the source to the target - and that traditionally has been a very manual process, making it error-prone and time-consuming, he said.
Sypherlink's technology helps automate the process. Harvester version 5.0 “builds on patented technology that we spent almost four years developing,” said Paat. It allows a computer application to leverage heuristic algorithms and artificial intelligence so that users can look across multiple disparate data sources and in an automated fashion, “discover quite a bit about each of the individual sources,” he said.
And then the second part of the patent, Paat said, is around heuristic matching. “We perform a series of heuristics in an automated fashion so that we can help identify which fields have the highest likelihood of relating.” By combining Harvester’s discovery and mapping capabilities and mapping best practices, users can accelerate the process by at least 50 percent, according to Paat. “We are not removing the requirement to have domain experts. We are just accelerating and optimizing the use of their time.”
Among the highlights in Harvester 5 are expanded database statistics and sample data, including additional data profiling metrics to speed the mapping process, such as row counts, frequency distribution, uniqueness, and cardinality metrics; and richer metadata, including primary and foreign keys, and indexes on columns, which give analysts a better idea of how data may be queried or used by an end application.
Additionally, users can now define how the automated analysis is run against the expanded data and metadata collected by Harvester. Specifically, the “Name Matching” and “Data Matching” heuristics can be turned “ON” or “OFF” individually, and weighted in importance, to more tightly control its ability to automatically determine the field-level relationships across multiple sources at once. There is also a refined graphical user interface and improved integration with ETL processes and vendors. For more details, go here.
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Oco and Business Objects Sign Deal to Bring Complete On-Demand BI Solution to Market
Oco, a provider of software as a service (SaaS) business intelligence (BI) and data integration solutions, has formed a partnership with BusinessObjects, an SAP company. Oco will become a strategic go-to-market solution provider to BusinessObjects Business Intelligence OnDemand.
Together, the companies' SaaS-based technologies provide BI solutions for customers across avariety of industries such as retail and manufacturing, and enable both companies to expand their market reach, functionality, and offerings. The partnership agreement includes joint sales, marketing, services, and product development efforts.
"Oco's industry-specific service offerings and its delivery approach complement our ad hoc reporting, advanced dashboards, and OnDemand business model," said Mani Gill, vice president of OnDemand at Business Objects, at the time of the announcement. "The partnership will enable us to reach more customers and provide them with a comprehensive, end-to-end solution that is quick and simple to deploy."
The joint solution is available immediately from Business Objects, an SAP Company, and from Oco. For more information, go here
or here.
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Dataupia Joins the IBM Cognos Partner Program as a Technology Partner
Dataupia Corp. has formed a partnership with Cognos, an IBM company that provides business intelligence and performance management solutions, as an IBM Cognos Technology Partner. The Dataupia Satori Server data management system is an all-in-one solution with server, storage and optimization software packaged as a data warehouse appliance to deliver persistent access to data. As an IBM Cognos Technology Partner, Dataupia will engage in joint marketing activities, receive sales support and have access to Cognos technical support and knowledge base.
The Dataupia Satori Server will work with IBM Cognos’ business intelligence and performance management solutions to provide customers with increased mixed workload capabilities, including massively parallel processing for complex joins, data exploration and point queries, enabling interactive reporting functionality across multiple databases and new applications.
The partnership is intended to help customers achieve efficiency in query performance, while simplifying data administration across a wide range of services such as BI reporting, operational data stores and long-term data archive analytics. Additionally, because the Dataupia Satori Server’s Omniversal Transparency layer augments current technology infrastructure without changing existing business applications, according to the vendors, customers will be able to quickly produce reports that include complete drill-down details on large amounts of real-time data. “Our partnership with Dataupia allows us to offer customers a superior reporting and analysis tool that delivers immediate results and complements our IBM Cognos solutions,” said Bradley Jeffers, director of industry and technology alliances at Cognos. For more about Dataupia, go here. For more about Cognos, go here.
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Parasoft Enhances its Application Security Solution
Parasoft, a provider of solutions and services that focus on quality throughout the software development lifecycle (SDLC), has announced the availability of a new version of its Application Security Solution with enhanced data flow analysis capabilities that help organizations rapidly identify high-risk runtime security vulnerabilities as well as monitor security policy compliance. Parasoft’s Application Security Solution establishes a continuous process to ensure security verification and remediation tasks are deployed across every stage of the SDLC, and also ingrained into workflow.
Parasoft is a 20-year-old organization and “we have always come at the idea of quality from a much different angle than what is traditionally the QA-led practices,” Wayne Ariola, vice president of strategy, Parasoft, told 5 Minute Briefing. Instead, Parasoft looks at the whole software development lifecycle to see where in the evolution of a project, analysis can be done to prevent errors from occurring - “and when I say 'errors' this also includes security,” Ariola said. “The application is truly the last line of defense for security and there's tons we can do within the application itself to actually bolster it.”
When an audit tool is used near the end of an application development cycle and it produces a signficant amount of potential issues, a project manager or a vice president of development must then decide whether to remediate that code,delaying the project, or send it out into the market, said Ariola. “Our position here is why have to make that choice when there is technology - especially Parasoft technology - which allows you to actually do this analysis in-line.”
Parasoft’s Application Security Solution expands traditional data flow analysis from software quality to application security. This server-based technology statically simulates complex application execution paths to help teams quickly find vulnerabilities that might not be noticed until they are exploited. Vulnerabilities that could be detected include SQL injection, cross-site scripting, exposure of sensitive data, and other potential issues. Since tests are performed automatically, teams increase the scope of their security testing without slowing project progress.
The latest enhancements draw on an extensive knowledge base of common attack patterns, and also enable organizations to map the data flow logic to their own security policy. The result, according to the vendor, is realistic and accurate validation that is closely aligned with the team’s security priorities. For more information about Parasoft Application Security Solution, go here.
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