Oracle and Vodafone Mobilise The Enterprise Workforce
Wednesday October 22, 9:19 am ET
biz.yahoo.com
PARIS, Oct. 22 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- ORACLEWORLD -- Oracle Corp. (Nasdaq: ORCL) and Vodafone today announced a joint initiative to offer enterprise customers integrated mobility solutions based on Oracle® 10g and Vodafone Network Services. The initiative covers joint development work, marketing efforts and an intention to launch further products. The two companies will enable customers to offer field workers, such as sales staff or service engineers, mobile access to key business systems.
Oracle and Vodafone plan to jointly market and support these capabilities to enterprise customers to enable mobile access to business applications and data. Currently, pilot customers in health care, government, utilities and media industries are performing final trials before general availability, currently planned for November 2003.
Scottish Water plans to use the joint offering to connect the company's call centres directly with its field engineers across Scotland to allow on-the-spot scheduling of service calls through Oracle TeleServices and Oracle Field Service applications. A number of enterprises including Equity Technology (Sweden), ID Systeme (Germany), Franhofer and Damstadt Echo (Germany) have also signed up for the Oracle 10g wireless proposition with Vodafone.
"Increasing productivity through mobilising software applications is one of the key growth opportunities for Vodafone," said Peter Bamford, Group Marketing Officer at Vodafone Group. "We are pleased to be working with Oracle as one of our partners in addressing this opportunity. Oracle has a strong mobile technology foundation and extensive portfolio of applications that enable mobile access to back end systems. With this joint proposition we have been able to reduce complexity, with an end-to-end solution based on open standards."
"Mobile workforces equipped with real-time access to relevant company information can do their jobs more efficiently and effectively, offering better customer service," he continued. "This improves business profitability and customer loyalty, which are important goals in today's competitive marketplace. Vodafone will be promoting this as part of its enterprise business proposition."
As well as providing the mobile-enabling middleware, Oracle has also provided mobile access to Oracle Collaboration Suite, with tools such as e-mail, calendar, voicemail, faxes and files; as well as key aspects of the Oracle E-Business Suite and its integrated set of business applications.
"Mobility is becoming critical for the enterprise market," said Sergio Giacoletto, executive vice president, Oracle EMEA. "The workforce is becoming increasingly mobile and, to remain productive, employees need instant access to relevant, accurate and up-to-date corporate information. Working with Vodafone, we can provide this as a global proposition, starting today with functions already available."
Vodafone's Network Services and the Oracle 10g product family will also enable developers easily and quickly to create and extend current and future Oracle-based applications to be accessible by mobile devices. Vodafone Network Services application programming interfaces (APIs) are embedded into Oracle 10g Application Server. Oracle and Vodafone also offer a support programme for developers, providing white papers, toolkits and e-mail support.
"Oracle sees great value in the growing alliance with Vodafone," said Jacob Christfort, vice president and chief technology officer for Oracle's Mobile Products & Services Division. "Oracle has already developed specific SMS, LBS, and MMS drivers to Vodafone's API gateways within Oracle9i Application Server Wireless. This means that all applications that run on the Oracle Application Server, including Oracle E-Business Suite, Oracle Collaboration Suite and bespoke applications, will come pre-enabled for Vodafone's Network Services. This reduces the complexity of deploying mobile enterprise applications and can dramatically reduce the cost and time for enterprises to implement mobile access to back-end systems." |
