REDWOOD SHORES, Calif.    Oracle unveiled its PeopleSoft Enterprise Performance Management 9, the latest product to be delivered from Oracle's PeopleSoft Enterprise 9 suite. PeopleSoft Enterprise Performance Management 9 demonstrates Oracle's commitment to continuing enhancement of its applications as part of the "Applications Unlimited" program, while furthering Oracle's strength in business intelligence.

PeopleSoft Enterprise Performance Management is an integrated suite of analytic applications that enables organizations to drive world-class performance by aligning the right information and resources to strategic objectives. The new release demonstrates Oracle's focus in building out analytic applications by extending the suite's capabilities, while continuing to emphasize usability. New features of PeopleSoft Enterprise Performance Management include expanded enterprise planning and compliance management capabilities and new industry functionality.

"I am pleased to see this announcement and Oracle's continued commitment to release education-specific enhancements to its enterprise applications," said Higher Education User Group Vice President of Technology Kari Branjord. "The features included in the Campus Solutions Warehouse (Enterprise Performance Management release 9) are a result of the close collaboration between the HEUG members and Oracle in developing product enhancements that will bring value to all education institutions."
 

Delivering Deeper Industry Functionality

In keeping with Oracle's focus on building out industry-specific solutions, PeopleSoft Enterprise Performance Management 9 introduces extensive packaged content, and reporting and analysis for the Higher Education industry. In particular, this release includes a new Campus Solutions Warehouse and associated data marts.

Fragmented data, rising education costs, increasing global competition for students, faculty, and staff, and heightened regulatory requirements are driving the need for insight and analysis among educational institutions. Oracle's PeopleSoft Campus Solutions Warehouse captures detailed student-related information into a single environment, and combines it with complex analysis of recruiting, admissions, student records and student financials data. With this level of insight, institutions can make the right strategic decisions to help maximize student recruiting efforts, improve retention rates, identify successful and unsuccessful programs, analyze faculty workloads and more tightly manage tuition awards and payments.

PeopleSoft Campus Solutions Warehouse includes content-specific data marts that can be deployed together for a comprehensive, integrated analytic platform, or deployed modularly to meet specific business and budgetary requirements.

"The California State University is looking forward to deploying Oracle's student data warehouse," said CMS Data Warehouse Project Director Donna Furon. "The pre-release design we've seen appears to provide a significant value proposition to the university. The ability to report from student administration, human resource and finance data marts within one application is a valuable tool for higher education."
 

Enterprise Planning and Analysis

Oracle's PeopleSoft Enterprise Performance Management 9 includes enhancements specific to planning, budgeting and forecasting processes. For many organizations, total employee compensation can be the largest single expense area for any given budget. Global organizations need to plan for the changing workforce makeup and anticipate compensation requirements.

To meet this need, PeopleSoft Planning and Budgeting now integrates with PeopleSoft Workforce Rewards. By offering integration with both PeopleSoft WorkForce Rewards and PeopleSoft Human Capital Management, PeopleSoft Planning and Budgeting offers comprehensive compensation planning. With the new integration, different compensation scenarios can be modeled and projected, enabling "what-if" analysis of total compensation requirements. PeopleSoft Planning and Budgeting can use data from either or both Workforce Rewards and Human Capital Management for a full spectrum of compensation planning solutions including payroll, stock options and benefits.

For industries that are capital intensive or have balance sheet-centric budgeting processes, new balance sheet planning enhancements, along with current configurable formula methods, will facilitate modeling of direct and indirect cash flow analysis. Future cash flow analysis can help identify future available working capital and help determine projected financing requirements.
 

Expanded Compliance and Audit Capabilities

Oracle's PeopleSoft Enterprise Performance Management 9 will give customers increased transparency into the financial close process and expanded compliance capabilities to help improve financial control and reporting processes.

A new feature in PeopleSoft Enterprise Global Consolidations 9, an application in PeopleSoft Enterprise Performance Management that brings together financial data from disparate sources, provides parent companies with an analysis of ownership and control rules of its subsidiaries, and gives users the ability to drill down to the related ownership rules.

PeopleSoft Enterprise Performance Management 9 also provides deeper integration between PeopleSoft Global Consolidations and PeopleSoft Internal Controls Enforcer. New control diagnostics for setup, segregation of duties and security access in Global Consolidations 9 are designed to help monitor the controls inherent in organizations' financial control and reporting operations.
 

About Oracle Applications

Oracle Applications, including the Oracle E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft Enterprise, JD Edwards EnterpriseOne, JD Edwards World and Siebel Business Applications, enable information-driven business processes that connect and automate an organization Developed to deliver business insight, adaptive industry processes and a superior ownership experience, Oracle Applications enable efficient management of all core business functions, such as customer interactions, financial management, human resources and supply chain management.

About Oracle

Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) is the world's largest enterprise software company. For more information about Oracle, please visit our Web site at http://www.oracle.com

For further information on the PeopleSoft Enterprise Performance Management 9, please contact Ivan Mifsud, Business Development Executive on (356) 21421600 (Ext. 270) or email on ivan.mifsud@megabyte.net