Oracle unveiled Oracle Primavera Portfolio Management 8, designed to assist
organizations in project portfolio management from conception through
execution, on April 6. This is just one of several Oracle product announcements
over the past few weeks, as the company seems to be stepping up its effort to
provide systems solutions to the enterprise.
Primavera Portfolio Management 8 allows managers to compare a project's
progress against both historical data and projected milestones, theoretically
improving accountability. Various business intelligence tools can be used to
identify risks and potential impacts, including "metric thresholds"
that produce red flags when performance isn't meeting projections and, in
theory, allow organizations to pivot and redeploy resources in order to meet
those metrics.
"Organizations are under pressure to ensure that they are not only
spending money on the right things, but also flawlessly executing on those
investments," Joel Koppelman, senior vice president and general manager of
Oracle's Primavera Global Business Unit, said in a statement. "With the
launch of Oracle's Primavera Portfolio Management 8, Oracle is effectively
delivering an enterprise portfolio 'GPS'
that gives organizations the information and capabilities they need to optimize
both the selection and management of any type of investment."
On April 5, Oracle also released AutoVue 20.0, a document visualization and
collaboration tool that can be integrated into enterprise applications,
allowing users to access and view documents stored across the breadth of an
enterprise. This new version includes an offline mode that uploads to an
enterprise server any updates made by mobile workers while offline, as well as
additional support for industries such as engineering and construction, utilities,
oil and gas, and manufacturing.
AutoVue functionality can be accessed via the Primavera dashboard, as it was
baked into Oracle Primavera P6 Enterprise Project Portfolio Management 7.0 and
Oracle Primavera Contact Management 13.0. Performance enhancements to AutoVue
20.0 include enhanced three-dimensional large model handling and simplified
access to larger Word files.
The announcements come not long after Oracle's March 31 release of Tuxedo
11g, which integrates technology from the company's 2008 acquisition of BEA
Systems. Redeployed as part of the Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g platform,
Tuxedo 11g is an application server that operates as an SOA (service-oriented
architecture)-ready system, supporting the development and deployment of C/C++
and COBOL, as well as the newly added Ruby and Python developer languages.
Oracle claims that Tuxedo 11g will support the deployment of tens of thousands
of application domains within an application grid architecture.
As part of that release, Oracle also issued Tuxedo
Application Runtime for CICS and Batch11g, and Tuxedo Application Rehosting
Workbench 11g, which work in concert to allow the rehosting of mainframe
applications to a grid architecture of massively multiple microcomputer
processors. The applications allow developers to create new applications as
well as migrate legacy C/C++ and COBOL mainframe applications to cloud server
platforms. By creating a CICS API emulation
batch environment, Oracle Tuxedo Application Runtime for CICS and Batch11g can
run on Tuxedo 11g in a multinode grid environment with centralized production
control.
In addition to its multitude of releases, Oracle
has also been working on digesting its $7.4 billion acquisition of Sun
Microsystems. On March 16, the company announced the availability of its Oracle
Enterprise Manager Ops Center,
a platform through which IT administrators can use both physical and virtual
Sun Microsystems environments. The platform also allows for life-cycle
management of Oracle Solaris Containers and Oracle VM Server for SPARC, and the
updating of Oracle Solaris through a proprietary software dependency engine; on
top of that, Oracle Enterprise Management Connector for Ops
Center allows a view into
underlying Sun servers, Oracle Solaris and related virtualization.
Oracle's goal throughout 2009 and 2010, in addition to acquisitions, seems
to have been integrating applications into existing portfolios, with an eye
toward creating complete software stacks that can then be offered to
enterprises as end-to-end packages. "We have a deep interest in the systems
business," Oracle CEO Larry Ellison
told an audience at the Churchill Club, in San Jose,
Calif., in September 2009. "We've
already beaten IBM in software. Now we want
to beat them in systems."
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