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Oracle simplifies business software apps

The company unveils Oracle Business Models, a new offering intended to simplify and standardize installation of its business software applications.

Kim Girard
Kim Girard has written about business and technology for more than a decade, as an editor at CNET News.com, senior writer at Business 2.0 magazine and online writer at Red Herring. As a freelancer, she's written for publications including Fast Company, CIO and Berkeley's Haas School of Business. She also assisted Business Week's Peter Burrows with his 2003 book Backfire, which covered the travails of controversial Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina. An avid cook, she's blogged about the joy of cheap wine and thinks about food most days in ways some find obsessive.
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Kim Girard
2 min read
Oracle today released a new road map intended to further simplify and standardize installation of the company's business software applications.

The Redwood Shores, California-based firm unveiled Oracle Business Models (OBM), a set of software models and templates to help clients get financial, manufacturing, supply chain, human resources, and customer relationship management applications up-and-running quickly.

Business Models will help customers better assess risk and return on an investment, and pare down the complexity of business software installations, the company said. The program is also expected to help protect Oracle from some of the large IT project delays that are hurting business industrywide.

Oracle Business Models offer an alternative for customers who don't want to commit to a large software installation that will disrupt an ongoing Year 2000 readiness project, said Renee Knee, vice president of Oracle Consulting.

"[This allows us] to retain customers and allows them to keep improving their business operations and for us to get new technology out on the market as well," she said.

Oracle Business Models offering includes a standard set of tools and methods intended to help customers avoid wasting time and money when implementing applications. Business Models is available now through Oracle Consulting and the company's Partner Program (OPP) members.

The offering includes support for Oracle Release 10.7 and 11.0. Tools include the company's applications configurator, object business modeler, requirement workbench, reverse engineering tool, and software testing.

For business software vendors, the emphasis of late is on speed. Last December, PeopleSoft unveiled a program designed to get small and midsize firms in a variety of industries up and running quickly on PeopleSoft's software. The new program was the latest addition to PeopleSoft Select, a program that offers users a one-stop shop for hardware, software, and services to quickly implement PeopleSoft software.

That same month, Oracle offered a new version of its quick implementation program for small to midsized manufacturers. Oracle FastForward Manufacturing contains Oracle's financial and manufacturing software preconfigured to fit standard industry business practices.