ORACLE OPENWORLD, SAN FRANCISCO, Dec. 6, 2004 -- Today Oracle President Charles Phillips welcomed nearly 25,000 attendees to Oracle OpenWorld San Francisco, the largest customer and partner conference in Oracle's history. This year's show combines Oracle's previously separate applications and technology conferences into one event. Phillips said that combining the conferences mirrors the power that businesses can realize when they consolidate their information in one place.

"CEOs have come to believe that information itself is almost as valuable as the products they make," Phillips said. "CEOs can log on Goggle and find answers in seconds, and they want to be able to do that with their own company data." According to Phillips, managers want facts to make decisions and are no longer willing to make decisions by "shooting from the hip." Industry observers have called this new phenomenon the "Information Driven Enterprise."

Phillips said that information gives companies the power to change their business in ways never before possible. "Information is the most important asset a corporation has," he said. "Most other things can be bought or replicated, but not the data about your customers."

"Oracle's core competency is managing information," explained Phillips. Therefore, Oracle designed its software, the Oracle E-Business Suite, as an "Information-Age" application. The definition of an Information-Age application is a modern application that has not been built to support a specific business process, rather it has been built to support the information needs of an organization in a timely, consistent, complete and global way.

Another example of an Information-Age application is Oracle Collaboration Suite. By putting all unstructured data in one database, Oracle Collaboration Suite is able to provide managers with access to all their email, voicemail, fax, web conferencing, files and other unstructured documents from one system.

Phillips said that some companies couldn't, for various reasons, move to the complete Oracle E-Business Suite, so Oracle developed Data Hubs -- a fundamentally new concept to computer architecture for linking in legacy systems to modern, Information-Age applications.

With a data hub, a customer can get the benefits of a central data repository tied, in real time or any time-frame desired, to other applications systems from any vendor. Feedback from the customers about the data hub has been "tremendous" and more are on the way: Product Hub, Citizen Hub, Financial Consolidation Hub, and a Financial Services Hub.

Phillips said that there are three paths to the Information Age: the full Oracle E-Business Suite; Oracle E-Business Suite tied to legacy systems or Oracle Data Hubs running on Grid technology. Phillips explained that a year ago Oracle unveiled Grid technology and now Oracle Grid 10g is the only technology that runs real world applications unchanged on multiple machines, something competitors cannot match.

In summary, Phillips said Oracle was launching two new programs to further the Information Age: a new certification for developers for the entire Oracle product platform, and a large-scale partner effort and 40-city global road show with Dell, Intel, Novell and Red Hat called "the Architecture of the Future" -- a blueprint for the modern data center.

His entire presentation, called "The Evolving Information Age," can be viewed via web cast at http://www.oracle.com/broadband/showiseminar.html?3546172 .

Oracle OpenWorld runs December 6-9, 2004 at Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco.

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