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Oracle's Q2FY09 dominates Asia Pacific market

Singapore/Dhaka

Organizations across key industries in Asia Pacific & Japan continue to adopt or expand implementations of Oracle Database, Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle Enterprise Performance Management and Oracle Business Intelligence, and Oracle Applications for their strategic company-wide business systems.

"Organizations in Asia Pacific are embracing Oracle solutions to help address critical business challenges, such as achieving cost efficiencies, improving business agility, and delivering superior customer service," said Steve Au-Yeung, Senior Vice President, Oracle Asia Pacific. "Customers continue to choose Oracle because we offer the industry's most comprehensive and integrated portfolio of business solutions - all built on open standards, which gives customers the freedom to enhance their IT environment without replacing existing software investments."

Selection of Q2FY09 Customer Wins

Communications, Media, Utilities: Aircel (India); Bharti Group (India); BSNL (India); China Mobile Group Zhejiang Co. Ltd (China); China Mobile Hunan Ltd (China); GrameenPhone Ltd (Bangladesh); IDEA Cellular Limited (India); News Limited (Australia); SK Telecom Pte Ltd (Korea); Tata Consultancy Services (India); Telekomunikasi Indonesia Tbk (Indonesia); Tikona Digital Networks Pvt Ltd (India); Trustpower Limited (New Zealand), WiTribe Ltd. Pakistan (Pakistan).

Manufacturing, Retail: Capitaland Limited (Singapore); Chamber of Commerce & Industry (Australia); Chartered Semiconductor Mfg Limited (Singapore); Hyflux Limited (Singapore); KT&G (Korea); Origin Energy Holdings Limited (Australia); Suzuki (Japan); Tech Mahindra Limited (India); Toll Holdings Ltd (Australia); Wesfarmers Resources Limited (Australia).

Financial Services: Askari Bank Ltd. (Pakistan); Axis Bank (India); ANZ Bank Limited (Australia); Banco de Oro (Philippines); Bank Of China Ltd (China); Bendigo and Adelaide Bank Limited (Australia); China Jianyin Investment Securities Co., Ltd. (China); Hana Bank (Korea); HDFC Bank (India); KB Finance Group (Korea); Shinhan Bank (Korea); Tong Yang Life Insurance (Korea); Yes Bank (India).

Government, Education, Healthcare: Chamber of Commerce and Industry (Australia); Expressway & Transportation Research (Korea); Health Department of Western Australia (Australia); Hong Kong University of Science & Technology (Hong Kong); IP Australia (Australia); National Health and Medical Research Council (Australia); OMGI - Orissa Modernized Government Initiative - General Administrative Department, Government of Orissa (India); PT Kalbe Farma Tbk (Indonesia); State Intellectual Property of People's Republic of China (China); State Water Corporation (Australia); Universiti Putra Malaysia (Malaysia); University of Southern Queensland (Australia), Victoria University (Australia).

Supporting Quotes

Petro Vietnam Drilling & Well Services Corporation (PV Drilling) successfully deployed Oracle Financials, part of the Oracle E-Business Suite.

"PV Drilling has a number of subsidiaries, and it is really important for us to have access to all subsidiaries' data at the corporate level for the purposes of reviewing, analyzing and providing financial information," said Ms Ho Ngoc Yen Phuong, Chief Financial Officer, PV Drilling Corporation (Vietnam). "Oracle Financials will help us better control process and enhance information management and bring more benefits to our business." See press release here.

Orient Overseas Container Line Ltd (OOCL) selected the Oracle® Business Process Analysis (BPA) Suite to support its SOA infrastructure. "OOCL has always been the industry forerunner in the use and development of IT, as evidenced by various award-winning solutions delivering breakthrough performance to the enterprise and the container transportation industry for more than a decade," said Steve Siu, Chief Information Officer, OOCL (Hong Kong). "To continue to be successful in an increasingly competitive environment, we need to adopt comprehensive modeling, analysis and simulation tools that can help bridge the gaps between business strategy and implementation.

The Oracle BPA Suite allows us to maximise our SOA leverage and increase enterprise agility by empowering business users to participate in all stages of the business process lifecycle." See press release here.

Bangkok Dusit Medical Services (BDMS) chose Siebel CRM to extend and enhance the total customer experience at all 19 BDMS network hospitals.

"Providing the hospital team with an easy-to-use, yet powerful way to define and refine our practices and approaches is a key ingredient to enable our agility in the healthcare business," said Dr. Chatree Duangnet, Executive Vice President of Marketing, Bangkok Dusit Medical Services (Thailand).

"By leveraging Siebel CRM, we are able to provide local and international patients with suitable intelligence and suggestions. Our bottom line is treating our customers with the most advanced technologies and a caring approach to enhance everyone's life with good health." See press release here.

GETCO Telecommunication Limited (GETCO) chose Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management software.

"We had a requirement of real-time billing, rating and data sharing with our customers and with the government.

We found Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management was that only solution that was able to deliver all this at an affordable total cost of ownership (TCO). Moreover, Oracle Communications captures billing at the BSS layer which is more efficient and is several times cheaper than a billing solution used at the network layer," said Khandker Md. Nur-a-alam, Director GETCO Telecommunications Limited (Bangladesh). See press release here.

New music site launched

Bangladeshi web portal nexplanet.com having international standard presents a new music world for the music loving people. The music site of the portal contains immense collection of Bengali, English and Hindi audio and video songs. Users have an opportunity to download unlimited number of songs in it without registration. At the same time latest music news enriches its content. Brows: http://music.nexplanet.com for the details.

Taking the plunge into Windows 7

Dwight Silverman

It's not an exaggeration to say that the upcoming Windows 7 is Microsoft's most important release of its operating system in a decade.

That's not necessarily because of its advances, or what it does for Windows users, but rather because of what it means for Microsoft as a company.

Although Windows Vista has sold relatively well - if only because it's the default OS that comes on most PCs now - it has not exactly been embraced with open arms, particularly by big business, which is Microsoft's bread and butter.

As I've written, this has more to do with perception than reality - on a modern machine with decent hardware, I think Vista's a pretty nice OS.

Still, Vista has the reputation of being buggy, bloated and intrusive. With Windows 7, Microsoft needs to release an operating system that specifically addresses those issues, and then some.

And now, you have the chance to find out for yourself if Microsoft has succeeded. Last week, during the International CES in Las Vegas, CEO Steve Ballmer announced that the first public beta would be released last Friday. Anticipation was so high that, on release day, the company's servers were swamped. The beta was pulled and re-released Saturday, and you can now download both 32- and 64-bit versions at www.microsoft.com/windows7 through at least Jan. 24.

Of course, just because you can doesn't mean that you should. I've been playing with Windows 7, and although it's of impressive quality for a test version, installing and living with an unfinished operating system is not for the risk-averse. And, it's certainly not a great idea to put something like this on a computer on which you depend for important tasks.

Still, if you're the adventurous type, your machine is powerful enough (it has the same system requirements as Vista), and you are curious about what the future of Windows will bring, here's how to get it and install it:

Go to the link above and choose the type of Windows 7 you want. The safest choice is 32-bit, since it will also run on 64-bit processors. If you're not sure what you have, check with the manufacturer of your computer.

You'll be prompted to enter a Windows Live ID. If you use Hotmail or Windows/MSN Messenger, you have one of these. If not, you'll need to sign up, then log in once you have one.

Next you'll be given a product key, which will let you activate Windows 7. Unlike a finished version of Windows, you can put this beta copy on as many computers as you like. Print out the key; you'll need it during the installation process.

Click the download link under the key, then go away for a while. On my Comcast connection, which is pretty fast, it took about two hours to download. The 32-bit version is about 2.3 gigabytes; add another gig for the 64-bit version.

What you'll end up with is a file with an ISO extension. It's a file-based image of a disc, and you'll need to burn it to a writeable DVD. If you have disc-burning software such as Roxio Easy Media Creator or Nero, you can use that - check the help files for details. If you don't have the necessary software, try downloading ImgBurn, which is free and makes burning a disk image easy.

Once you have the DVD burned, boot your computer from it. You may need to change some settings in the computer's BIOS to do this; check the computer's manual to see how. Once it boots, follow the on-screen instructions.

Windows 7 will upgrade a Vista installation, but it won't do that with Windows XP. Microsoft has decided that the only way XP users will get to put Windows 7 on their systems is to blow away the existing operating system and start over. Given that there are so many people out there who skipped Vista and are interested in Windows 7, I'm not sure about the wisdom of that choice. However, that's the way it is - if you upgrade an XP machine, here's hoping you have all your critical documents and data backed up.

I've been working with the Windows 7 beta for several weeks, and I like it a lot. It feels snappier and more responsive than Windows Vista. The User Account Control - the popup that all-too-often asks if you really want to do that - is much less intrusive, and you can control how often it nags you. There are design changes to the desktop and the taskbar that make Windows much easier to use. And it makes connecting devices and setting up home networks much easier.

Next week, I'll go into detail about these new features and more. You may also want to keep an eye on my blog, where I've written quite a bit already about Windows 7.