While Oracle may not be making announcements at the Oracle Applications Users
Group (OAUG) meeting this week in Atlanta, a number of third-party players are.

Last year a dispute between the OAUG and Oracle over hosting led to Oracle
pulling back from the OAUG and launching its own user events. Even so, many
third-party vendors and a projected 5,000 user attendees are expected at the
Spring 2001 OAUG Conference, which runs from April 24-28 in Atlanta. Conference
registration begins Monday.

ClearOrbit, formerly BPA Systems, will be launching a new suite of products
called the Gemini series at the conference.

The software is designed for enterprise users to extend their Oracle ERP (enterprise
resource planning) systems to support supply-chain execution for discrete manufacturing,
said Michael Palmer, chief technology officer of Austin, Texas-based ClearOrbit.

While most ERP systems provide 80 percent of the functionality that enterprises
need to tackle supply-chain execution, the Gemini series will optimize ERP systems
to gain the additional 20 percent of functionality, Palmer said. "We can
reduce shop floor labor by 20 percent," he said. "We can increase
inventory accuracy by 20 to 30 percent."

While a stand-alone supply chain management solution may offer enterprises
100 percent of the functionality needed for execution, it commonly will overlap
with an ERP system and require substantial integration, Palmer said.

"Now you have to interface the two together and decide which to neuter,"
Palmer said. "Integration isn't a problem, it's the problem."

Noetix also will launch a new suite at the conference. Noetix Enterprise Technology
Suite, an updated version of its query server, is designed to extract data from
15 Oracle modules in two days or less, sometimes in real time, said Ann Markley,
vice president of marketing at Bellevue, Wash.-based Noetix.

"We take the data that is locked up in Oracle applications and we are
able to translate them in business terms," she said. "Oracle applications
are structured for transactions, processing. They're not really designed to
get information out, reports out."

For example, BellSouth has used the suite to slash the time it takes to generate
reports from its financial module for analyst from several weeks to real time,
she said.

Last year, the OAUG rejected Oracle's offer to serve as host for OAUG events,
arguing that it had to maintain its independence from the vendor. In return,
Oracle decided to sponsor alternative conferences focused on Oracle applications
and make those events the forums for Oracle product news.

Since then, the two conferences have been competing for attendees. For the
OAUG show this week, users want to get practical information that can be applied
to their implementations.

Raman Batra, Oracle infrastructure manager at Legerity, an Austin, Texas-based
communications chip and integrated circuit company, said that while Oracle's
AppsWorld conference provided a lot of technology road maps for new products
and services, much of the material was "academic."

"With OAUG, these are real-life experiences," Batra said. "There's
no substitute for experience. People can criticize Oracle. There's no Larry
Ellison watching over the conference to make sure you're not bashing them."

Batra, whose company has been using the financial, manufacturing, inventory,
shipping, purchasing, and human resources modules of Oracle's 11i applications
suite, will be looking for details from other users at the show about Oracle's
CRM (customer relationship management) solution. Legerity does not have a call
center operation, but the company is interested in stripping those features
out of the Oracle CRM system to use minimal functionality, he said.

Legerity officials also are interested in finding out how difficult it is
to integrate their reporting systems and business intelligence reports to Oracle's
portal product, Batra said. The company plans to deploy personalized portals
to employee desktops that would provide access to business intelligence data
and details about employee benefits, he added.

"We're trying to build a whole information system around that, where
you have a whole bunch of reports and people can dig data out," Batra said.

Conference attendees from S4R, a Carlsbad, Calif.-based managed IT services
firm, also will be eyeing Oracle's CRM solution and seeking details on a rumored
new price-quoting module, said Erika Barajas, S4R's Oracle project manager.

Barajas said a quoting module would help the company's sales representatives
more easily provide prices to customers. They now use Excel spreadsheets.

"It's very tiresome," Barajas said. "It doesn't go into a database.
It's all being tracked in Excel, which is not very secure.

S4R is an Oracle 11i user, with modules including financials and purchasing
in place.

The OAUG was formed by users in the San Francisco Bay area in May 1990 when
32 users of the Oracle Application suite gathered to create an independent forum.

Based in Atlanta, the OAUG counts more than 15,000 user members worldwide,
and can be reached at www.oaug.org.

» posted by ITworld staff

InfoWorld

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