(am I being too sensitive here...?)

Have you noticed these nasty-looking characters on advertisements displayed prominently in many U.S. airports? www.Downwithbigerp.com There are images of these greedy fat cats, "It's not about you, it's about us!"

"Big ERP".... And do they think they are talking about me??? Ouch.
Boy, those are some expensive ads. A lot of money, and, can we talk? These ads are mean! Someone could get their feelings hurt. What if I ran ads saying, "Down with the San Francisco Giants," with cartoons of their miserable bullpen? Not exactly an uplifting message from these advertisers.

Here is an observation: this advertiser is too late. Their message is targeted at huge, rigid, monolithic, heavily-customized, interwoven business architectures from the client/server days. Circa 1998.

Oracle has moved on. These people need to go to a seminar on Service Oriented Architecture. The Oracle Applications business has grown well beyond the footprint of tight, well-integrated business transaction systems. Our customers are making plans for agile, heterogeneous, well-orchestrated enterprise business systems.

High Value Business Applications to Surround ERP

Institutions of Higher Education have made significant investments in core enterprise business application systems, often referred to as "ERP" - Enterprise Resource Planning. The traditional 3 pillars of Higher Education ERP are Human Resources, Financial Management, and Student Information Systems. Most Higher Education ERP systems, once modernized, use relational data structures, so the institution is ready to take advantage of their investment to extend and build on the business system platform. Typical high value targets include projects for improved administrative efficiency, student experience, self-service, shared services, enterprise performance management, business planning insight, data quality, compliance and controls.

Oracle is a major provider of Higher Education ERP applications, featuring our PeopleSoft Enterprise and Oracle E-Business Suite offerings. We compete in this sector with other software enterprise provider firms, a variety of specialists, and the Higher Education open source movement (Kuali). Of course, legacy and custom systems remain in the landscape.

As college and university senior managers plan for expansion and build on their core business transaction system platform, Oracle offers a set of high-value business applications. Rated best in class, these applications can operate as key components alongside any brand of core ERP. Summarized below, these new applications deserve the attention of Higher Education executives.

Financial Planning and Analysis

Oracle Hyperion solutions for Enterprise Performance Management provides a complete environment for key budget, measurement, and planning collaborative processes, including:

• Operational planning and budgeting
• Strategic planning
• Program contribution analysis / cost and profitability modeling
• Position Budgeting for workforce management
• Financial consolidation with master financial data management
• Multidimensional data analysis and modeling (Oracle Essbase product line)

Student Recruiting, Retention, and Services Center

Oracle CRM On Demand can be implemented quickly by school, department, special program, distance learning, non-credit workforce development programs, or enterprise-wide.

• Subscription-based offering, software as a service ("SaaS")

Governance, Risk, and Compliance Management

Oracle Governance, Risk, and Compliance Suite offers a unique, proactive, closed-loop approach to regulatory compliance, risk management, and controls automation.

Business Intelligence / Decision Support

• Oracle Business Intelligence includes a full set of graphics-enabled reporting, dashboard, Web and portal publishing, and drill-down tools to be used with any business application.
• Data marts, fact tables, key performance indicators are pre-designed and delivered for most critical business decision areas, such as Recruitment/ Talent Management or Spend Management.
• Oracle Business Intelligence can be used both internally for performance management, peer analysis, institutional research, and for external purposes such as governance reporting or longitudinal outcomes analysis.

Person Data Synchronization

• Oracle Higher Education Constituent Hub provides multi-way synchronization, governance, and cleansing of your most valuable data asset.
• Oracle Higher Education Constituent Hub's value proposition increases with heterogeneous campus application systems to include SIS, Learning Management, CRM, Library, Housing, Identity Management, Directory Services, Emergency Contact and Donor Management (Advancement).

Capital Assets, Maintenance, Real Estate, Facilities, and Project Management

Best in class process and business applications acquired as intellectual property from JD Edwards, Primavera, and PeopleSoft provide compliance, control and performance management information in these high-dollar asset areas.

User Readiness / Process Documentation

• User acceptance and competency ramps are significantly improved using the Oracle User Productivity Kit. Teaching, assessment, and documentation techniques are supported.
• Accuracy and cross-training effectiveness increase, especially for business processes that are infrequent or complex in nature.
• Process design modeling with user involvement is supported by Oracle User Productivity Kit.

Applications Integration

Oracle Fusion Middleware is an open, standards-based platform for customer architectures designed to manage the cost and durability of software integration.

Oracle Fusion embraces service-oriented architecture (SOA) for heterogeneous, managed software integration, including:

• Oracle SOA Suite
• Oracle Service Bus (repository)
• Oracle Application Integration Architecture
• Oracle Identity Management

HEUG Alliance Conference 2010 - San Antonio Approaches

Oracle is eager to discuss these new areas of our expanded product footprint. All of these capabilities, in the context of our product roadmap, will be covered by our product experts at the Alliance conference, as well as at AACRAO in April.

Speaking of the Higher Education User Group (HEUG), I want to take this opportunity to thank and congratulate Stan Jakubik of University System of Maryland. Stan is concluding a very successful term as President of the HEUG, which featured a remarkably high level of collaboration between Oracle and our Higher Ed customers. Stan was featured in a recent published article, "A Case for Synergy," discussing his observations on how user groups and vendors can work together toward mutually beneficial accomplishments. Thanks Stan, and best of luck as a "Past President" of HEUG.