Ms. Brooks, who served as editor of the News of the World and the Sun tabloids before running all of News Corp.’s newspapers in the U.K., was charged by the Crown Prosecution Service with perverting the course of justice. Prosecutors also charged her husband, Charles Brooks; her former assistant; her chauffeur; and two men who provided security for Ms. Brooks.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Jurors have reached no conclusion in the case and Judge William Alsup has sent them home for the weekend with instructions to try again on Monday.

The jury had indicated Thursday in a note to Alsup that it was stuck on some point. Alsup warned lawyers for both sides that they might have to prepare for a deadlocked jury. Obviously, the situation here is fluid. I’ll have more in this post as it comes in.

There are four questions the jurors are tasked to answer, and they’re said to be unanimously agreed on three of them, but unable to reach consensus on the fourth, though its unclear which are which.

For what its worth, below is the form with the four questions the jurors have to answer.

Jury Questions

Late yesterday, NASA announced the discovery of a planet just outside our solar system that is the most like Earth to be found so far.

Located using the Kepler universe-trotting telescope, the planet that has been named the poetic Kepler 22-b is a balmy 72 degrees.

That’s because it is in a habitable “Goldilocks” zone (see chart below) and seems to circle a sun much like our own.

Yes, I am hoping this Earth 2.0 is just like Counter-Earth from the comics, too.

But, at more than twice the size of Earth, it is likely all ocean and rock and gas at this point, and is more than 600 light years away. So, if any geek is planning a star trek, it will take a lot of rocket fuel.

(Photos courtesy of NASA)

The reason? A scary vulnerability in Java that was detected over the summer, and which Oracle has subsequently fixed, is being exploited by people who create the malware and crimeware that causes so many headaches for home users and corporate IT departments.

The risk is especially acute at large companies with big fleets of desktops and notebooks to manage. If you’re a home user, the patch is easy to install. But most employees don’t have administrative privileges on their work desktops or notebooks, so someone from the IT department has to come and install the patch for them.

That’s a big, time-consuming process, says HD Moore, chief security officer at Rapid7, a Cambridge, Mass-based company that specializes in helping companies stay ahead of new computer security vulnerabilities. He’s also the chief architect of Metasploit, which Rapid7 owns.

One of the reasons this particular vulnerability is so bad is that even after it was detected and fixed, it wasn’t fully understood how dangerous it is, Moore says. Crimeware creators somehow figured it out ahead of most security researchers, and started adding code to Web sites designed to take advantage of it. And that’s especially dangerous at this time of the year, when people are shopping online both at home and the office. “It’s kind of like a perfect storm,” Moore told me yesterday. Add to that the fact that many companies have IT staff taking vacation during the holiday season, and the timing couldn’t be worse.

Enterprise is historically bad at patching Java vulnerabilities anyway, because it doesn’t have the same automatic update tools that Windows or Adobe Flash does. “The tools for patching Java aren’t that great,” Moore told me. “A Java update just isn’t treated with the same fervor as a Windows update.”

So how bad is this one? The National Vulnerability Database rates it a 10 out of 10 on the severity scale, and also rates it as “low” on the access complexity scale — meaning it’s really easy for the bad guys to carry out an attack using it.

Security blogger Brian Krebs discovered the vulnerability being “weaponized,” that is, built into the software that computer criminals buy on the black market. For instance, those who have bought something called the Blackhole Exploit Kit, a $4,000 software toolkit used to target Windows machines, are getting automatic updates that include tools to take advantage of the Java vulnerability.

What to do until you can get all your machines updated with the latest version of Java? Simple, really: Disable it and block it at the firewall, until all the machines on the network that need the update have it, Moore says.

Rapid7, incidentally, is a security company on the rise. Just last month it raised a $50 million series C round of funding, led by Technology Crossover Ventures and joined by previous investors Bain Capital Ventures; Tim McAdam, a TCV partner, joined Rapid7′s board.

It’s the third board seat that Schwartz has taken since leaving Sun. He also sits on the board of Taleo, a cloud-based talent management software company, and has a seat on the board of SilverSpring Networks, a smart-grid outfit.

He’s also the CEO of Picture of Health, a start-up focused on applying technology to problems in the health care field.

So what is Moxie? It plays in the same space that Jive Software, Yammer and Salesforce.com’s Chatter do. Its software not only connects employees internally, but with customers and partners as well. It’s the kind of “big theme” that Schwartz likes. “If you’re a company, you have to interact with the customer,” he said to me last night. “Now, do you want to dump a product spec on them, or do you want to captivate their interest over a long period of time? To me, it feels like an I.Q. test.”

Moxie’s software is used in 270 million individual social enterprise interactions per month, and its customers include the consumer electronics companies Epson and Sharp, as well as the Web retailers Newegg.com and Tupperware.

Schwartz, who is also on the board at SilverSpring, was approached for the Moxie board seat by Warren Weiss, a director and lead investor in Moxie and a general partner at Foundation Capital. Weiss and Schwartz are both alums of Next, the Steve Jobs-owned computer company that Apple acquired in 1996, beginning its legendary turnaround.

The patent amassing firm, which was started by former Microsoft executive Nathan Myhrvold, said it has filed suit in Delaware federal court.

“Intellectual Ventures has successfully signed licensing agreements with many of the top handset manufacturers in the world, and has been in discussions with Motorola Mobility for some time,” Chief Litigation Counsel Melissa Finocchio said in a statement. “Unfortunately, we have been unable to reach agreement on a license.”

Finocchio said the company’s preference is to negotiate deals rather than head to court, but Thursday’s move shows its willingness to do the latter.

“We have a responsibility to our current customers and our investors to defend our intellectual property rights against companies such as Motorola Mobility who use them without a license,” Finocchio said. “Our goal continues to be to provide companies with access to our portfolio through licensing and sales, but we will not tolerate ongoing infringement of our patents to the detriment of our current customers and our business.”

Of course, Intellectual Ventures is far from alone in filing mobile patent lawsuits. Oracle is suing Google, Apple is suing HTC and Samsung (and vice versa), Microsoft is suing Motorola and Barnes & Noble, to name just a few of the court actions under way.

Unlike those businesses, though, Intellectual Ventures doesn’t make products of its own, making it tough to countersue them for patent infringement. For more on the company, check out our coverage from 2008, when Myhrvold appeared at D6.

IV vs. Motorola

In his first on-the-record interview since joining Oracle last year, co-President Mark Hurd tells AllThingsD that Oracle is experiencing a lot of company-specific momentum in Europe, where it saw 14 percent revenue growth in quarterly results reported last week.

“When I look at each segment of our business in Europe, if I read to you the growth rates of each of our product segments, it would sound very consistent,” Hurd said. “We didn’t have any one big deal or transaction that stood out. Europe was a bright spot in the quarter for us.”

Hurd also talked about the state of Oracle’s hardware business, much of which it picked up in its acquisition of Sun Microsystems last year. Hurd reiterated previous comments that Oracle aims to focus more of its efforts on selling hardware that contains more Oracle intellectual property, and thus commands a higher price and profit margin, than on commodity hardware. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison raised eyebrows when he said that Oracle wouldn’t mind if its business selling hardware running Intel-based chips — its so-called x86 business — fell to zero.

“We’re focused on adding value to customers. If there’s no Oracle intellectual property in it then you ought to buy it from someone else,” Hurd said. “All of our products are designed to be the best-of-breed in the markets that they serve. If it’s some product that comes from a third party that comes through Oracle where we add no value, that’s the stuff we have no interest in.”

The comments came in an interview with AllThingsD today, Hurd’s first since he joined Oracle last year, which followed his resignation from HP a month before. A fuller version of the interview will be posted soon.

According to reports, the companies’ CEOs, Larrys Ellison and Page, are still at an impasse over how to settle Oracle’s patent-infringement lawsuit against Google over the use of Java in its Android operating system.

The latest sticking point: A recommendation from Oracle’s damages expert arguing the company is owed more than $2 billion for copyright infringement and $201.8 million more for patent infringement.

That’s significantly less than the $6.1 billion Oracle claimed Google owes it in court papers, but it’s still far too heady a figure for the search giant.

Reuters reports that in a Tuesday letter to the judge presiding over the case, Google attorney Robert Van Nest urged the court to reject that recommendation, slagging it as deficient. According to Van Nest, its failure to explain just how the figure was calculated and the forecast for how much revenue Oracle might have earned by partnering with Google on Android are grounds enough for ignoring it.

Meanwhile, talks between the dueling Larrys drag on, with an October trial date looming if they fail to reach a settlement.

On Monday, Nortel announced that Google had bid $900 million to acquire the bankrupt company’s patent collection.

In a blog post, Google said the current litigious environment justifies the pricey bid.

“The tech world has recently seen an explosion in patent litigation, often involving low-quality software patents, which threatens to stifle innovation,” said Google general counsel Kent Walker. “Some of these lawsuits have been filed by people or companies that have never actually created anything; others are motivated by a desire to block competing products or profit from the success of a rival’s new technology.”

Google has been on the receiving end of a number of patent lawsuits, both directly and indirectly. Oracle, with its Sun acquisition, has sued Google over Android, while Microsoft has sued and threatened to sue Android handset makers, saying that the mobile operating system infringes on Microsoft’s intellectual property. Microsoft has already sued Motorola and Barnes & Noble and reached a licensing deal with Taiwan’s HTC.

Microsoft is looking to make the case that Google’s Android isn’t really free to handset makers and has been arguing both privately and through its legal actions that it believes it deserves royalties for any use of Android.

And it is not just Microsoft seeking to use patents as part of its smartphone battle. Apple has also sued HTC, while Nokia has also been active on the patent assertion front.

Walker argues that what is really needed is significant patent reform but–given the current situation–the company is best off trying to assemble a patent army of its own.

“Google is a relatively young company, and although we have a growing number of patents, many of our competitors have larger portfolios given their longer histories,” Walker said. “So after a lot of thought, we’ve decided to bid for Nortel’s patent portfolio in the company’s bankruptcy auction. Today, Nortel selected our bid as the ‘stalking-horse bid,’ which is the starting point against which others will bid prior to the auction. If successful, we hope this portfolio will not only create a disincentive for others to sue Google, but also help us, our partners and the open source community–which is integrally involved in projects like Android and Chrome–continue to innovate.”

With the deal, RIM will now have access to Intellectual Ventures’ collection of 30,000 patents as it winds its way through the murky litigious waters of the smartphone market. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

“Intellectual Ventures offers an efficient way to access the invention rights companies need to stay competitive within the market,” Intellectual Ventures’s telecom licensing head Mario Obeidat said in a statement Wednesday. “RIM has always been an innovator on the forefront of the mobile communications world, and by becoming a licensing customer of IV, they can have access to a broader set of patents to assist them in the management of their IP-related business matters.”

RIM knows firsthand what it is like to be on the wrong side of a patent infringement verdict, having been through a long and costly battle with NTP.

The smartphone market battle continues to be fought in the courthouse as well as in the marketplace. Apple and Nokia are locked in courtroom battles, as are Microsoft and Motorola, and Google and Oracle, just to name a few.

Intellectual Ventures, the IP shop started by former Microsoft exec Nathan Myhrvold, has thousands of patents, including at least some in the smartphone space.

“Through some odd twists in the road over the past year, and a tardis encountered along the way, I find myself starting employment at Google today,” Gosling wrote in a blog post. “I don’t know what I’ll be working on. I expect it’ll be a bit of everything, seasoned with a large dose of grumpy curmudgeon.”

And a dash of litigation as well. Gosling’s hiring at Google comes as the company faces an Oracle lawsuit accusing that it “knowingly, directly and repeatedly infringed Oracle’s Java-related intellectual property.” I imagine having on your payroll the father of the programming language at issue in the suit will come in handy when it goes to trial.

Sales were $8.6 billion, helped mostly by new software license sales that grew 21 percent to $2 billion, while updates and product support revenue grew 12 percent to $3.7 billion. The consensus estimate was $8.34 billion. Sales grew 47 percent from the same period a year ago.

Non-GAAP per-share earnings were 51 cents, beating the 46-cent forecast estimate of analysts surveyed by Thomson Financial. Earnings after one-time items were 37 cents, up from 29 cents a year ago.

Gross margins on Sun-branded hardware increased to 53 percent.

Shares are up almost 4 percent in after-hours trading.

There’s a quote from CEO Larry Ellison, reminding us how fast his new products are, and digging once again at the competition:

“Sun’s new SPARC Supercluster computer shattered the world record for database transaction processing performance by running 3 times faster than IBM’s fastest computer, and a stunning 7.5 times faster than HP’s best ever database performance,” said Oracle CEO, Larry Ellison. “Our new generation of Exadata, Exalogic and SPARC Supercluster computers deliver much better performance and much lower cost than the fastest machines from IBM and HP.”

Here’s another quote, from Oracle co-President (and former HP CEO) Mark Hurd, about the Exadata product line:

“Since joining Oracle I’ve met with and visited many customers that have expressed a high level of enthusiasm around our strategy of engineering hardware and software that works together,” said Oracle President, Mark Hurd. “That enthusiasm translates into an Exadata pipeline that has now grown to nearly $2 billion. That number is a good leading indicator that customers are planning to increase their investment in Oracle technology.”

Yes I would say there’s enthusiasm. It was precisely because of the Exadata line that Macquarie Research upgraded Oracle today.

More from the conference call, which starts at 5 pm ET.

4:53 pm: Seven minutes to go before the Oracle earnings conference call starts. Right now it’s all mellow classical guitar.

Call is running a little late.

5:10 pm: And we’re underway with the safe-harbor statement.

Ellison, Hurd and president Safra Catz are on the call.

Americas grew 32 percent in U.S. dollars.

5:15 pm: Balance sheet: $24.8 billion in cash and short-term investments.

Generated $3.7 billion in free cash flow.

5:15 pm: Safra Catz is now speaking. We exceeded the high point of license guidance. Even excluding a payment for legal fees, we beat guidance by 4 cents.

5:16 pm: All geographies reported double-digit growth.

5:16 pm: “We continue to take share from SAP.”

5:17 pm: With Sun, included operating margins were 44 percent, which is better than SAP. [Another dig.]

5:18 pm: Hardware guidance: $1.1 to $1.2 billion in revenues.

Non-GAAP EPS expected to be 48 to 50 cents, and 34 to 36 cents on a GAAP basis.

Here’s Larry:

5:19 pm: Our goal is to be No. 1 in high-end market for servers. Right now our numbers are behind HP and IBM.

5:20 pm: IBM’s and HP’s servers are slow, and software is slow and expensive and have no software value-add. [Another dig at the competitors.]

5:22 pm: Exadata pipeline continus to grow. We expect our new generation of Sun machines will enable us to win significant share, and position us in the No. 2 position behind IBM very soon. And then we’ll fight it out for No. 1.

5:23 pm: Now Mark Hurd is speaking.

5:23 pm: I want to focus on our opportunities to grow significantly.

5:24 pm: Deal volume was spread across companies of all sizes and strength in the public sector as well.

5:24 pm: All of our customers and competitors are reacting to us.

5:25 pm: 150,000 Middleware customers. We ended the quarter with a record hardware backlog.

5:26 pm: Now going to Q&A:

A question from UBS. Are you starting to see a halo impact on adoption of the Oracle suite?

Larry: Close rates are improving. You’ll see great improvement in Exadata sales from Q2 to Q3. Because it’s new, people were running a lot of benchmarks and trying it out first. We’ll sell a lot more Exadata in Q3 than in Q2.

As for the halo effect, when you buy these servers you buy them to run specific software. Engineer them at the same time and make sure they run well together. We have a huge advantage over IBM and HP. The notion of systems, hardware and software that run well together will dominate the high end of the business.

Q: You clearly have a lot of irons in the fire with Fusion apps coming up and Exadata. Focus on Exalogic. Can you share early feedback from customers and compare that to Exadata ramp.

Mark: Exadata experience benefits Exalogic. We’ve matured the use case, we think we know where the targets are. The Exadata experience is a big deal for us.

5:31 pm: A question about Fusion Middleware.

Larry: We’ve been in the middleware business for a long time. With release 11 everything has been rewritten. It’s a much better user experience, you can patch our entire suite with a single file. We think the fact that we have an integrated suite gives us a huge advantage over IBM.

5:33 pm: A question about Europe. It was better than expected. Apps business was really strong. Look at competitors. You’ve been gaining share against SAP. We are seeing a pickup in general environment.

Hurd: I’m not an economist, but we’re doing well in Europe. It was broad-based. It was not singular to a deal or country. It was broad-based to countries where we have been gaining share. It’s been one quarter after another, a pretty steady beat.

Larry: We had a wonderful set of industry specific applications, in telecommunications and banking and retail, and that’s unique vis-a-vis SAP. that has helped us a lot to establish us in a lot of industries. Also Fusion is right around the corner.

5:35 pm: Q: How frequently is an Exadata deployment resulting in the displacement of a competitor’s product?

Hurd: About 70 to 75 percent of the time. About 20 to 25 percent of the time it’s a consolidation.

We’ve sold Exadata now in 50 countries, and 30 to 35 percent of our customers have made a second purchase. You’re starting to see repeat purchases. We’ve learned a lot about this and so as we launch Exalogic we can accelerate our learnings.

5:36 pm: Q: Margin was also great. What can we expect going forward and what were one-time items?

Catz: In general, it’s the business. The only nonrepeatable thing is the $120 million legal settlement, which we will not repeat. Hardware margins and operating margins, this is something we’ve done for many years.

5:38 pm: Q: What is visibility for database licenses?

Larry: A couple quarters ago, someone noticed database licenses were growing nicely. We think Exadata is going to be a nice turbocharge to our database business. Across the board our database business is going to get strong with Exadata.

I just looked at after-hours trading in Oracle shares and they’re up more than 4.5 percent.

Hurd: “The secret to Exadata is bringing the smarts to the data, versus bringing the data to the smarts.”

5:42 pm: Q: What continues to drive the database business? Is it just core database, add-ons?

Larry: We think our technology is getting faster and more reliable at a faster rate than that of our competitors.

5:43 pm Larry: As far as applications, we think there are lots of reasons we continue to gain share every quarter over the last few years over SAP.

It’s the industry-specific applications. We have telecom companies that are running only Oracle software. We have some banks that are making the same kind of commitments up and down the stack. SAP just doesn’t have that.

5:44 pm: Larry: We’ve got this extremely modern Java-based suite called Fusion that is going to strengthen our competitive stance against Salesforce.com and against Workday.

5:46 pm: That seems to be it. The call is concluded.

One month after resigning his position at Hewlett-Packard amid allegations of business-standard improprieties, ousted HP CEO Mark Hurd has a new gig: Co-president of Oracle.

Ending a long weekend’s worth of speculation, Oracle on Monday said Hurd will serve as co-president alongside Safra Catz, taking up a role vacated by current president and fellow scandal cultivator Charles Phillips, who has evidently resigned.

“Mark did a brilliant job at HP and I expect he’ll do even better at Oracle,” Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said in statement. “There is no executive in the IT world with more relevant experience than Mark.”

Indeed, Hurd’s knowledge of HP’s (HPQ) server and data-storage-systems business will undoubtedly come in handy at Oracle (ORCL), which has been aggressively moving into that very space ever since its acquisition of Sun. In that sense, Hurd’s hiring is a real coup for Oracle. Who better to put the screws to a rival than a former CEO with a bone to pick?

Perhaps that’s what Larry Ellison was thinking when he spanked HP for canning Hurd. “The HP board just made the worst personnel decision since the idiots on the Apple board fired Steve Jobs  many years ago,” he said at the time. “That decision nearly destroyed Apple and would have if Steve hadn’t come back and saved them.”

“We’re not cutting Sun to profitability, we’re growing Sun to profitability.”

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said that back in January as the company closed its $7.4 billion acquisition of Sun. Interesting, then, to read Oracle’s latest 8-K filing in which the company adds up to $825 million in restructuring costs to the buyout–some 80 percent of them evidently earmarked for employee severance payments at Sun’s European and Asian outposts. The company had initially projected about $325 million in restructuring costs for the Sun integration, so this is a significant increase.

Oracle (ORCL) refuses to say how just many employees will lose their jobs in this latest round of the cuts, but it’s safe to say the number will be significant, judging by the size of the restructuring charge it plans to take. Prior to the close of its acquisition by Oracle, Sun sacked 3,000 employees, about 10 percent of its global workforce, and took a restructuring charge of $75 million to $125 million.

The new restructuring charges Oracle just announced are nearly seven times that figure. And while it’s impossible to accurately extrapolate the number of jobs to be eliminated this time around from that earlier figure, it’s easy enough to see that it’s going to be a large one.

“The Sun integration is going even better than we expected,” said Oracle President Safra Catz. “We believe that Sun will make a significant contribution to our fourth quarter earnings per share as well as meet the profitability goals we set for next year.”

Oracle (ORCL) said its net income for the quarter fell to $1.2 billion, or 23 cents a share, from $1.3 billion, or 26 cents a share last year. But revenue rose to $6.4 billion from $5.5 billion. Excluding items, earnings for the quarter were 38 cents a share, which is what analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters had been expecting.

Two last details worth noting: Revenue from new software licenses rose 13 percent during the quarter. Another sign that enterprise spending on technology is on the rise.

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison is a funny guy. From the company’s earnings release:

“Every quarter we grab huge chunks of market share from SAP,” said Oracle CEO, Larry Ellison. “SAP’s most recent quarter was the best quarter of their year, only down 15%, while Oracle’s application sales were up 21%. But SAP is well ahead of us in the number of CEOs for this year, announcing their third and fourth, while we only had one.”

Oracle Reports GAAP EPS of $0.23, Non-GAAP EPS of $0.38

REDWOOD SHORES, Calif., March 25, 2010 — Oracle Corporation (NASDAQ: ORCL) today announced fiscal 2010 Q3 GAAP total revenues were up 17% to $6.4 billion, while non- GAAP total revenues were up 18% to $6.5 billion. Excluding the impact of Sun Microsystems, Inc., which Oracle acquired on January 26, 2010, GAAP total revenue grew 7%. GAAP new software license revenues were up 13% to $1.7 billion, and up 10% to $1.7 billion excluding Sun. GAAP software license updates and product support revenues were up 13% to $3.3 billion, while non-GAAP software license updates and product support revenues were up 12% to $3.3 billion. GAAP operating income was down 5% to $1.8 billion, and GAAP operating margin was 29%. Non-GAAP operating income was up 13% to $2.9 billion, and non-GAAP operating margin was 45%. GAAP net income was down 10% to $1.2 billion, while non-GAAP net income was up 9% to $1.9 billion. GAAP earnings per share were $0.23, down 11% compared to last year while non-GAAP earnings per share were up 9% to $0.38. GAAP operating cash flow on a trailing twelve-month basis was $8.2 billion.

“Our solid top line growth, coupled with disciplined expense management, was key in generating $8.0 billion of free cash flow over the last twelve months,” said Oracle CFO Jeff Epstein.

“The Sun integration is going even better than we expected,” said Oracle President, Safra Catz. “We believe that Sun will make a significant contribution to our fourth quarter earnings per share as well as meet the profitability goals we set for next year.”

“Exadata is the fastest growing product in Oracle’s history,” said Oracle President, Charles Phillips. “Introduced a little over a year ago, the Exadata pipeline is now approaching $400 million with Q4 bookings forecast at nearly $100 million. This strengthens both sales growth and profitability in our Sun server and storage businesses.”

“Every quarter we grab huge chunks of market share from SAP,” said Oracle CEO, Larry Ellison. “SAP’s most recent quarter was the best quarter of their year, only down 15%, while Oracle’s application sales were up 21%. But SAP is well ahead of us in the number of CEOs for this year, announcing their third and fourth, while we only had one.”
In addition, Oracle’s Board of Directors declared a cash dividend of $0.05 per share of outstanding common stock to be paid to stockholders of record as of the close of business on April 14, 2010, with a payment date of May 5, 2010. Future declarations of quarterly dividends and the establishment of future record and payment dates are subject to the final determination of Oracle’s Board of Directors.

“The combination of Oracle and AmberPoint is expected to extend Oracle’s leadership in Fusion Middleware Solutions and provide customers with advanced capabilities in SOA Governance and SOA Management through a comprehensive, end-to-end SOA Management and Business Transaction Management offering,” Richard Sarwal, Oracle’s SVP of Product Development, said in a letter to customers.

“Adding AmberPoint’s capabilities to Oracle’s solutions is expected to provide customers with more agility and visibility into their business processes,” Sarwal continued, “enabling increased control and performance of critical applications.”

Terms of Oracle’s (ORCL) acquisition, which is expected to close in the first half of 2010, were not disclosed. Below, Sarwal’s letter in full.

On February 8, 2010 Oracle announced it has agreed to acquire AmberPoint. AmberPoint’s solutions help organizations diagnose and resolve issues in application performance and business transactions. Acknowledged as a leader in SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture) Management, AmberPoint has been recognized for its innovation in SOA Management, Business Transaction Management and run-time SOA Governance. The combination strengthens Oracle Fusion Middleware solutions to further enable customers to reduce IT costs and improve customer satisfaction. The transaction is expected to close in the first half of 2010.

Effective SOA Management has become increasingly important as organizations seek to improve business processes and application performance. Management of transactions such as account provisioning and insurance claims processing typically requires multiple applications to work together. The complexity is further magnified since these applications are often developed, deployed and managed by different teams. Having an effective SOA Management solution in place can accelerate the diagnosis and resolution of issues in application performance and business transactions before the business is impacted.

The combination of Oracle and AmberPoint is expected to extend Oracle’s leadership in Fusion Middleware Solutions and provide customers with advanced capabilities in SOA Governance and SOA Management through a comprehensive, end-to-end SOA Management and Business Transaction Management offering. Adding AmberPoint’s capabilities to Oracle’s solutions is expected to provide customers with more agility and visibility into their business processes enabling increased control and performance of critical applications.

In addition to AmberPoint’s technology solutions, AmberPoint’s employees have significant domain expertise in SOA Management, and are expected to join Oracle after the transaction closes. We are dedicated to maintaining and improving the quality of innovation, support and service you have come to expect from Oracle by continuing to develop and offer market-leading solutions that are complete, integrated and standards based. As a leading provider of Oracle Fusion Middleware solutions, we look forward to continuing to provide our customers the best and most comprehensive SOA offering that improves performance and lowers your organizations’ IT costs.

Thank you for your continued support.
Sincerely,
Richard Sarwal
Senior Vice President, Product Development