ORCL: Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g to Deliver Comprehensive, Integrated Application Management

Oracle today announced it is broadening the capabilities of Oracle(r) Enterprise Manager 10g to deliver new, wide-ranging management functionality for Oracle Applications and third-party applications.
In addition to providing extensive functionality for managing customer built applications running on Oracle and non-Oracle databases and middleware, Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g will greatly enhance management and monitoring of Oracle E-Business Suite, Oracle's PeopleSoft Enterprise, and Oracle's Siebel environments. Delivering a single, unified management solution, Oracle will help customers reduce the complexity and cost of administering applications and the underlying infrastructure to enable improved application availability and business transaction performance.

Over the coming months, Oracle plans to deliver advanced application management, monitoring, and service level capabilities in the form of three new Oracle Application Management Packs for Oracle E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft Enterprise and Siebel with support for additional packaged applications to follow. Because these applications depend upon a variety of infrastructure software, these solutions take advantage of the broad heterogeneous system management functionality that has been added to Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g over the past year through its partner initiatives. The Oracle Application Management Pack for PeopleSoft Enterprise is planned for availability in Q4 of 2006. The remaining Oracle Application Management Packs are planned for availability spring of 2007.

With new capabilities for application management, Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g will be the only solution to deliver comprehensive management functionality from the operating system through the application layer -- regardless of the underlying infrastructure -- all the way to the end-user. These capabilities help to drive down enterprise systems management costs and improve business results through higher quality of service.

"We're taking a significant step forward to fulfill our commitment to provide superior management of applications," said Jay Rossiter, vice president of System Management Products, Oracle. "Oracle Applications and third-party application customers will have a single solution at their disposal to manage their applications and underlying systems comprehensively. With a consolidated view of their entire environment, customers will be better able to identify and resolve application availability and performance issues quickly and accurately, resulting in improved service quality."

"Applications deployed and managed by IT deliver critical business processes and services at Edmunds.com," said Sheng-te Yang, Senior Manager, Enterprise Applications Support, Edmunds.com. "Oracle Enterprise Manager has played a key role in helping us meet our business objectives. Now by delivering a common way to manage applications and system components, it is introducing a new dimension of superior IT management. It will result in higher overall quality of service, more productive IT and improved business performance."

New Capabilities Improve Oracle Applications Availability and Performance
Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g's rich application management capabilities offer lifecycle management of an application deployment including service level management, application performance management, configuration management, and change automation. These capabilities are integrated with Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g's management of underlying Oracle and non-Oracle infrastructure system components. This comprehensive application management solution enables customers to reduce the total cost of ownership by helping to minimize application downtime, cut the cost of application management, and streamline maintenance and support.

The service level management functionality built into Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g and the Oracle Application Management Packs will help customers deliver the service quality required by the business. Customers will be able to ensure proper service levels for their complete set of Oracle Applications by capturing and monitoring the performance of critical business transactions and understanding application user experience by simulating end user behavior.

Application performance management features will allow administrators to monitor the entire application environment, proactively measure the real users' experience, and identify the root cause of problems regardless of where they occur in the application stack. The combination of these solutions gives administrators the information and power to anticipate potential problems before service levels are violated and proactively resolve issues before end-users are affected, ultimately resulting in improved application performance and availability.

The comprehensive configuration management capabilities in Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g and the Oracle Application Management Packs enable administrators to discover and manage application assets and help ensure that their configurations are in compliance with enterprise standards and best practices. Administrators will be able to track system changes, validate changes, and take snapshots of their environments to prevent configuration-related problems and application outages.

Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g's automation capabilities will enable administrators to further streamline labor-intensive and potentially error-prone administrative tasks such as provisioning servers, patching software, and cloning QA/Staging environments into production.

"Today's announcement is evidence of Oracle's continued execution on our 'Applications Unlimited' strategy," said John Wookey, senior vice president of Applications Development, Oracle. "With the expanded breadth of Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g, we're helping our customers maximize the use of their Oracle Applications, improve service levels, and lower operational costs."

New Management Pack for Oracle's PeopleSoft Enterprise Delivers Immediate Benefits
The Oracle Application Management Pack for PeopleSoft Enterprise delivers comprehensive application management capabilities that allow customers to monitor and manage their PeopleSoft Enterprise applications and application infrastructure components in a manner far superior to previously offered solutions.

In addition to Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g's system and application monitoring capabilities, this solution provides administrators with a comprehensive set of management tools within its centralized, graphical console. PeopleSoft Enterprise administrators can perform domain management actions such as start, stop and purge cache from the console and can carry out configuration management tasks via a meta-data driven user interface that guides them as they define configuration attributes. New service level management capabilities allow administrators to monitor services from an end-user perspective using service pre-packaged and custom service tests to ensure that service levels are met.

Administrators also benefit from Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g's broad set of monitoring and service level management features including alerts, automatic performance data collection and trending, blackout windows and templates, and lights-out monitoring to provide total system service monitoring for the PeopleSoft Enterprise application stack. A graphical topology display of a PeopleSoft Enterprise environment is now available to clearly outline the relationship between the various PeopleSoft Enterprise components. With this view, administrators can manage and monitor the entire domain of PeopleSoft Enterprise servers as a single system as opposed to managing servers individually.

Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g's Web-based console provides a more intuitive, user interface with step-by-step guidance for common tasks to improve ease-of-use. Log management has been centralized so that administrators can view specific logs with the option of searching, viewing or exporting them to their local machine. Logs can also be purged or archived either individually or via a scheduled job.

The Oracle Application Management Pack for PeopleSoft Enterprise is priced at $6,000 per CPU or $120 per Named User Plus. The Oracle Application Management Pack for PeopleSoft Enterprise is compatible with PeopleTools 8.48.

About Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g
Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g, an industry-leading family of management products, is a comprehensive application and system management solution. Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g manages packaged and custom applications and a wide variety of IT infrastructure, including Oracle and non-Oracle technologies. With a broad set of administration, configuration management, provisioning, end-to-end monitoring, service level management, and security capabilities, Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g helps reduce the cost of ownership of enterprise applications and their dependent IT resources.