Oracle has announced in Metalink Note 552692.1 that JInitiator 1.3 will no longer be supported for Oracle Applications 11i. Instead customers will have to migrate to the native Sun Java Runtime Environment (JRE). JInitiator is these days an increasingly irrelevant technology, licensed by Oracle from Sun in the days when standards compliance was poor and a specific Oracle implementation of the JRE was required in order to support certain aspects of Oracle Forms.

Oracle has announced new capabilities for its Application Integration Architecture (AIA). The product enables integration of a customer's on-premise Oracle E-Business Suite implementation with a hosted instance of Siebel CRM On Demand. New integration packs are to due to be released to enable a Siebel CRM On Demand instance to be integrated with a customer's on premise implementation of Siebel and JD Edwards applications.

Oracle has 5 million CRM users worldwide, relatively few of which are hosted. Research firm IDC ranks Oracle as a leader in CRM.

Las Vegas is a city with a population of 600,000. This has grown remarkably from the early 1980s in which it was less than 175,000. The city authorities have introduced Oracle BPEL Process Manager (part of Oracle Fusion Middleware) in order to spearhead their move into service-oriented architecture (SOA). The software has been implemented in order to control sensor monitoring at the city's water pollution control facility and integration with the existing Oracle E-Business Suite (HRMS and Financials). This integration, for example, reorders parts that are low through Oracle purchasing, and completes an automated procurement-to-pay cycle. A previous integration project had failed after two years' work. By contrast the integraton using Oracle BPEL was completed in ten weeks.

Morrisons is the UK's fourth largest supermarket chain, with 9 million customers visiting weekly and 115,000 staff. Oracle and Morrisons jointly announced that they will be implementing the Oracle suite of retail applications covering planning and merchandising as well as the Oracle E-Business Suite financials, HRMS and manufacturing modules.

The broad scope of Oracle E-Business Suite is very well illustrated by an implementation announced today by New York YMCA. They have chosen to implement the HRMS (Human Resources), Grants Accounting, Financial Management and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) modules. This is in a Not For Profit organisation with 4,400 employees. Oracle E-Business Suite is very well suited to charities and DB Consulting has extensive experience working with charity sector customers.

Oracle announced today that its Database Vault product is now certified for use with the Oracle E-Business Suite. Database Vault is used to help protect data from unauthorised access, by enabling companies to set up policies around who is permitted to view and change what data at what times of day, etc. It can be used to enforce so-called "separation of duties" so that, for example, DBAs can perform administrative operations without having access to read the data in the database.