Oracle today previewed the next release of its business applications, the Oracle® E-Business Suite 11i.10. The upcoming release will include a greatly enhanced integration layer and significantly increased industry and core business process functionality. With more than 85 percent of Oracle application customers currently active with Oracle E-Business Suite 11i, the vast majority of customers will be able to easily upgrade to the Oracle E-Business Suite 11i.10 when it becomes available.
Integration Capabilities
With the Oracle E-Business Suite 11i.10, Oracle is significantly advancing its integration capabilities to provide companies that run Oracle with other applications the ability to automate business processes across the enterprise. The enhanced integration capabilities will provide comprehensive support for business-to-business, enterprise application and process integration. Additionally, Oracle is exposing hundreds of interfaces as Web services to facilitate low-cost integrate projects.
The Oracle E-Business Suite also supports open-standard interfaces established by the Open Applications Group (OAG), which defines unifying standards for business applications. With the Oracle E-Business Suite 11i.10, Oracle will now natively support more than 150 standards-based OAG business objects, such as how to define a purchase order. Oracle is also expanding its support for industry-specific integration protocols, such as RosettaNet for high-tech manufacturing and HL7 for healthcare.
Additionally, with the Oracle E-Business Suite 11i.10, Oracle has exposed more than 800 integration points as business events to allow customers to integrate to either internal or external application systems.
Also new to 11i.10 is an integration interface repository that catalogs the published application program interfaces (APIs) of the Oracle E-Business Suite. This interface repository will ease integration projects by providing a single definition for all Oracle E-Business Suite interfaces, and offers a powerful viewer for searching and viewing all available interfaces.
The Oracle E-Business Suite also leverages the Oracle Application Server 10g to enable integration with third-party applications and business partners, such as suppliers and customers. These capabilities include connectivity to third party applications via out-of-the-box adapters, data translation and transformation, business process integration and management, business activity monitoring and trading partner management for business-to-business integration.
Expanded Industry Specific and Core Business Process Functionality
Oracle E-Business Suite 11i.10 will also include significant enhancements to meet the needs of both industry-specific and horizontal business processes. The new enhancements aim to further automate, integrate and streamline internal processes, expand integration between sales and marketing, promote margin growth and support compliance and risk management efforts. Significant industry enhancements have been made in industries such as construction and engineering, consumer-packaged goods, government, financial services, healthcare, high-tech manufacturing, professional services and telecommunications.
One example of the Oracle E-Business Suite 11i.10 industry enhancements is the new capabilities for radio frequency identification (RFID), also announced today. These new capabilities will help suppliers of Wal-Mart and the Department of Defense comply with the mandate to incorporate RFID tags in pallet shipments (please see accompanying release issued yesterday, “Oracle Unveils RFID Capabilities for Warehouse Management”).
Other notable enhancements include new clinical trial management, clinical data analysis and stability studies for the pharmaceuticals industry; functionality to facilitate Basel II compliance for the financial services industry; and provisioning automation functionality for the telecommunications industry.
“The Oracle E-Business Suite 11i.10 is a major milestone for Oracle and offers a significant expansion of industry-specific and core business process functionality,” said Ron Wohl, executive vice president, Oracle applications development. “Customers now can use the sophisticated integration capabilities of the Oracle E-Business Suite 11i.10 to reduce the time and cost associated with integration projects.”
Availability
Oracle E-Business Suite 11i.10 is scheduled to be available mid-2004.
