ORACLE OPENWORLD, SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 20, 2005 -- Delivering on its strategy to help companies achieve greater business insight, Oracle (Nasdaq: ORCL) today announced enhancements to the Oracle(R) Corporate Performance Management (CPM) suite. The introduction of Oracle Profitability Manager and the new release of Oracle Enterprise Planning and Budgeting (EPB) will enable faster strategic decision-making, agility in the planning process and greater ability for customers to manage profitable growth.

"The increasing need for organizational agility, and a better grasp on performance from a compliance and governance point of view, mandates that organizations change their budget routines," said Gartner Research Vice President, Nigel Rayner. "Organizations need to build planning models based on an enterprise-wide network of business drivers in order to model financial outcomes based on changes in their business driver assumptions."

Integrated Functionality for Profitability Analysis and Management

The new Oracle Profitability Manager integrates the functionality of Oracle Performance Analyzer and Oracle Activity-Based Management applications into one solution to calculate, analyze and report profitability.

Beyond traditional cost allocation, the integrated solution delivers the ability to analyze profitability by a number of different business dimensions including profitability by customer, product, sales channel, etc. Oracle Profitability Manager extends the scalability and flexibility of its predecessor products and reconciles inputs back to the source system of record, providing auditability and traceability on how results are derived.

Companies often need to model various scenarios to determine how changes in business processes can affect costs over time. Oracle Profitability Manager has a flexible architecture that includes "what if" analysis and produces different costing scenarios across many industries. With integration to Oracle's other CPM applications, these scenario results can be input directly to the planning and control cycle.

Simplifying the Planning and Budgeting Process

Most companies' current planning and budgeting initiatives result in the proliferation of disconnected spreadsheets, a piece-meal approach that presents several challenges, including the inability to monitor processes in real-time, the lack of a process model in spreadsheets, an inconsistency of business models across departments, poor security and time-consuming, costly administration. However, spreadsheets are a ubiquitous user-interface for planning, budgeting and forecasting. The new release of Oracle Enterprise Planning and Budgeting is designed to leverage the user's familiarity with spreadsheets while mitigating drawbacks. The new release also incorporates important features that enhance ease of use and streamline administration. These include the ability for users to work offline on spreadsheets and easily import the data to the system, produce professional quality reports and export an EPB report directly out to XML Publisher format, to create or apply templates and output a report in PDF format. Oracle Enterprise Planning and Budgeting also streamlines administration, making it easier to reforecast on a more frequent basis. Integration with Oracle General Ledger allows users to seed budgets with historical figures and provides the ability to frequently update forecasts with actual data for more accurate forecasts. New SQL access provides the ability for both Oracle and non-Oracle applications to report off the data.

"We are leveraging Oracle's Enterprise Planning and Budgeting solution to achieve integrated business processes for our business planning and budgeting," said CIO of Blue Coat Systems, Inc., Toni Taylor. "After comparing numerous solutions, Oracle's EPB architecture, integration with other Oracle applications, reporting capabilities, user-customizable business processes, and ease of use made EPB a natural choice."

Single, Unified Architecture

Oracle's CPM applications leverage a single, unified architecture for reporting, planning and budgeting, profitability analysis, financial and other operational transactions, delivering a single source of truth for confident reporting.

"Corporate performance management is top of mind for many executives today, and they are increasingly looking for an integrated approach with a lower cost of ownership," said Vice President of Applications Strategy at Oracle, Chris Leone. "As one of the key tenets of our Greater Business Insight strategy, CPM continues to be a major area of investment for Oracle applications."

Availability

Oracle Profitability Manager and Oracle Enterprise Budgeting and Planning are generally available today.

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The above is intended to outline our general product direction. It is intended for information purposes only, and may not be incorporated into any contract. It is not a commitment to deliver any material, code, or functionality, and should not be relied upon in making purchasing decisions. The development, release, and timing of any features or functionality described for Oracle's products remains at the sole discretion of Oracle.