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San Diego, Calif.—Oracle is focusing on a couple of areas at its annual AppsWorld user conference held this week in San Diego, including information quaility, integration and how the pieces fit together.
To this end, Oracle will announce tomorrow its Customer Hub that is, essentially, the companys answer to a formal integration offering. The Hub is a new application set that culls customer data information from a variety of sources—from Oracle applications, Oracle data base and outside sources—brings it all into a central location and adds capabilities like business intelligence on top of that.
The idea of the Customer Hub is to provide the mechanism for companies to integrate and maintain information in one place—and have that scalable across a grid. The product is already on the market, according to Oracle co-president Chuck Phillips, but tomorrows announcement will formalize the offering and include services.
While some at the conference question whether the Customer Hub is Oracles late entrance into the integration space, behind SAP AGs NetWeaver integration stack or Siebel System Incs Univeral Application Network, Philips said that is not the case.
“Most companies built [their suites] by modules that dont talk to each other. By definition that put them in the integration business,” said Phillips, during a media Question and Answer session. “[Our products] are designed to tie products together internally… We do a lot of integration, but didnt talk about it or package it.”
The hub also allows Oracle, of Redwood Shores, Calif., to sell into its competitions user base by providing a set of applications that does not require the E-Business Suite to run, officials said.
Oracle also announced today enhancements to its outsourcing service that looks to provide better business continuity, officials said. A new Outsourcing Automation Platform provides a centralized management console acle to manage customers key processes automatically, including availability, security, performance, problem and change management.
Outsourcing is Oracles fastest growing line of business that saw an 82 percent increase uptick last quarter alone, Phillips said.