First-quarter profit soars for Oracle

The world's third largest software developer Oracle is smiling cheek to cheek this month as it reported to have gained higher profit for this year's quarter compared to last year's. And just as many people in the industry have been speculating, the increase in profit has been boosted by the company's acquisition of other products. The results of the of the financial conference call was broadcast live at 2:00 p.m. (PDT) / 5:00 p.m. (EDT).

Oracle, whose specialization in software application is in business solution, reported that during this fiscal first quarter year, it has gained about $840 million which translates into 16 cents per share. In comparison, it only gained $670 million or 13 cents last year during the same period. Its revenue soared from $3.59 billion to $4.53 billion.

According to Safra Catz, Oracle President and CFO: “We reported new software license revenues up 35%, the strongest growth of any quarter in ten years. Software sales growth is translating nicely into EPS growth. We’ve now completed thirteen quarters of our five year EPS growth plan of 20% per year, and we are delivering earnings growth well ahead of that target."

Says an elated Oracle President Charles Phillips:

“We continue to take applications market share from SAP. In Q1 Oracle’s applications new license sales grew 65% compared to SAP’s new license sales growth rate of 18% in their most recently completed quarter. We like our growth strategy of expanding into high-end industry specific vertical software as opposed to SAP’s growth strategy of moving down market to sell software to small companies.

"Our Q1 database and middleware new license sales growth rate of 23% was the
highest in seven years. Oracle passed IBM to become the number one database company a long time ago. If we continue to grow our middleware software business at the same rate we grew it this quarter, Oracle will challenge IBM for the number one position in middleware by the end of this year.” quipped CEO, Larry Ellison.

This year's higher earning has been greatly buoyed up the sale of some products which were in the Oracle roster last year. These added products came from Hyperion Solutions, Stellent, MetaSolv and several other software solutions vendors.
Oracle now trades at about 16 times compared to the average outlook for the earnings per share of next year. This is slightly about Microsoft's 16 future price-to-earnings ratio.

Meanwhile, IBM, a technology services company and the number 2 software maker trades at 15 time earning. In terms of database technology, Oracle is still the leader ahead of IMB. In terms of business applications solution, Oracle ranks number 2 just behind Germany's SAP AG. Sap currently trades at 22 times estimated 2008 earnings. Oracle and SAP have been in constant tight competition for top spot in term so enterprise resource planning (ERP) software applications.
Oracle is the world’s largest enterprise software company and innovative solutions for virtually kinds of industries.

SAP xApp Manufacturing Integration and Intelligence (SAP xMII)

So, how is your business today? I hope yesterday's blog on the SAP xApp Lean Planning and Operations (SAP xLPO) has made you gain better insights on how to have manufacturing operations with less wastes and more profit.

Today, let us still focus on the manufacturing aspect of a business but this time we will take the aspect to a broader sense by including integration and business intelligence.

The SAP xApp Manufacturing Integration and Intelligence (SAP xMII) is an application which makes it possible to connect manufacturing with the processes in a business enterprise. Because it also helps deliver actionable intelligence to production personnel, the company will be able to achieve superior performance in production.

Today's business moves very quickly as they are driven by information and information comes from ubiquitous data with the internet and other advance communications technology as conduit. The success or failure of a manufacturer depends on how he can manage his business in real time as information exchange among manufacturing and supply networks and the end customers need to take place any minute of the day (yes, even in one's sleep!).

SAP xMII is a great tool to help a manufacturer become adaptive to the constantly changing industry trends by helping profitably replenish his supply network and responding dynamically to the demands.

Let's break down SAP xMII into its two major parts. The Manufacturing Integration integrates the plant process and business operations seamlessly. Many companies find themselves manually intervening to enter production batch data when they are not implementing factory and ERP systems integration. This manual process is both time consuming and very costly as the company will need to spend more on staff hour salary. Also, because it is a manual operation, it is more prone to human error resulting data redundancy and inaccuracies. SAP xMII can make rapid integration between the mySAP ERP solution and other manufacturing software applications.

On the other part, the Manufacturing Intelligence, SAP xMII comes with manufacturing dashboards leveraging on a powerful real time analytics engine. The rich analytics feature aggregates data in order to deliver actionable intelligence to the staff behind the company. The nicely graphical and easy to use dashboards provide views so one can have visualization of plant floor systems, monitor production for Six Sigma violations and other exceptions, and dig deep into problems to know the root causes and have effective measures in correcting them. The dashboard also displays key performance indicators (KPI) which be configured to suit the organization's needs. The system can also be set to alert key people for expeditious actions under certain circumstances.

Implementing the SAP xMII may be cost effective as it takes advantage of the company's existing IT infrastructure so there is no need to spend extra tools because there is building of a system from scratch. Overall, investing in SAP xMII definitely help in manufacturing performance at the same time decrease total cost of ownership.

I wish you a productive day! Tomorrow, another SAP xAPP.