SAN FRANCISCO, ORACLE OPENWORLD, Dec. 8, 2004 -- According to Chief Executive Officer Larry Ellison the world has arrived in the Information Age. Yet companies are grappling with fragmented and incomplete information. Instead of just buying business intelligence tools, organizations need modern applications that can provide real-time access to 360-degree views of their businesses.

Ellison recognized the Oracle E-Business Suite as Oracle's complete path to a single global database, but also recognized that even as one of the world's premier information technology companies, Oracle needed five years to migrate to a single global instance. "It was a long, arduous task," Larry said. "Customers recognize the nirvana of the single global instance but consistently ask how they can quickly achieve the same benefits."

Data hubs are Oracle's Information-Age answer. "Data hubs take information from hundreds of thousands of databases and put it into a central data hub to continue services to application users," Ellison said. "Data hubs synchronize whatever systems you have -- ERP, CRM, custom or legacy -- and get information into the hands of people who need it to move their companies into the Information Age."

The Oracle Customer Data Hub achieves the same goal of the Oracle E-Business Suite by different means. It allows customers to keep their legacy applications by integrating with adaptors and connectors in Oracle middleware to collect their separate customer data in one global hub. "The data hub is different from a data warehouse because it doesn't periodically dump data into the system," said Ellison. "The data hub works in real-time to create the illusion of data in a single database, and the result is a 360-degree view of customers."

Ellison compared data hubs to their inspiration: the global credit database. "The global credit database is the most integrated database in the world. It tracks every creditworthy consumer on planet Earth," Larry said. Banks and creditors access the information, which is updated continuously, to make decisions about a person's creditworthiness.

Ellison also underscored the relevance of enterprise grid technology, because grids allow data hubs to run economically and with scalability and reliability. "We've moved from running on a small number of mainframes to running a large number of inexpensive computers," Larry said. "If one computer fails, the data hub keeps running with grid technology, and with a performance difference of five- to ten-times faster and at one-fifth the cost."

Ellison concluded his keynote by indicating consolidation of information in data hubs is the solution to information fragmentation. "The solution exists in the underlying infrastructure," Ellison explained. "The world is moving in the direction of fault tolerant, real-time information systems at low cost."

Ellison's entire presentation, called "Doing Business in the Information Age" can be viewed via webcast at http://www.oracle.com/broadband/showiseminar.html?3546178 .

Oracle OpenWorld San Francisco continues through Thursday, December 9, 2004, at the Moscone Center.

SOURCE Oracle Corporation

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