FT.com / Technology - What’s new: SMEs offered business intelligence from Oracle

FT.com / Technology - What’s new: SMEs offered business intelligence from Oracle

What’s new: SMEs offered business intelligence from Oracle
By Geoff Nairn

Published: July 11 2007 09:43 | Last updated: July 11 2007 09:43

Oracle is bringing business intelligence to the masses with Oracle BI Standard Edition One aimed at SMEs and departmental users.

Oracle did the same with its flagship database to produce a cut-down version called Oracle 10g Standard Edition One, which this lies at the heart of the new BI offering and includes tools for creating dashboards, ad hoc reporting and publishing. The BI SE One software costs $1,000 for each user, minimum five, maximum 50.

Asset management
Infor, the fast-growing US enterprise software vendor, has unveiled Infor EAM Enterprise Edition, a new version of its enterprise asset management (EAM) solution.

The product aims to help businesses in the fleet management, manufacturing, facilities and life sciences industries track their capital assets.

Future releases will include more industries. The product was previously known as Infor Datastream and stems from Infor’s 2006 acquisition of Datastream, an EAM specialist.

Searching the abstract
Xerox says its new search technology, FactSpotter, goes beyond the limitations of traditional keyword-based searches.

FactSpotter looks not only for keywords in a query but also the context of the document containing those words. It can also handle abstract concepts.

Xerox plans to target FactSpotter at the legal and regulatory compliance market and possibly other vertical applications, but there are no plans to compete with the likes of Google in consumer search.

Power saver
Hewlett-Packard offers green storage with a trio of mid-range disc arrays named EVA4100, 6100 and 8100, which improve power efficiency by up to 45 per cent over their predecessors.

HP claims a big data centre with a monthly storage electricity bill of $3,000 could save as much as $18,000 a year in power and cooling costs.

Social integration
IBM’s Lotus software hopes for a new lease of life thanks to social networking technologies such as wikis and blogs.

IBM claims Lotus Connections will make it easier for businesses to integrate social networking into their existing IT infrastructures and commonly used applications.

Lotus is best known for Notes, once the leading business e-mail application before Microsoft’s Exchange took the top slot. Lotus Connections costs $110 per user.

Google and Linux
Google has finally released a version of its popular Google Desktop search application for the Linux operating system. The free program is already offered for Windows and Mac OS X users and now there is a Linux version, although in a typical Google move, it is currently only a beta version. The software was developed by Google’s Beijing engineering team. As well as two Chinese languages, it comes in English and eight other tongues.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007