October 16, 1996
Oracle today outlined strategy, products and partnerships for enabling secure commerce over the Internet. With today's announcements, Oracle delivers an open electronic commerce solution offering plug-and-play technology from market leading hardware, software and payment providers to form a comprehensive and secure electronic commerce solution for business to business and business to consumer transactions.
Today's announcements, combined with Oracle's already shipping packaged commerce applications, deliver a complete electronic commerce solution incorporating electronic cash, marketing and promotional tracking, catalog shopping and delivery of secure transactions and payment options. Specifically, Oracle announced strategic partnerships and previewed new products, including:
* Project Apollo, a merchant server designed to allow small businesses to quickly establish a retail commerce presence on the Web.
* The Oracle Payment Server, a server that comes both integrated with Project Apollo and as a stand alone product, which delivers a choice of electronic payment methods.
* Oracle Security Server, authentication software designed to recognize and protect consumer identity and information, and authorize payment service.
* Strategic relationships with CyberCash, Hewlett-Packard, Quark and VeriFone designed to quickly move retailers to the Web.
Based on Oracle's recently introduced Network Computing Architecture, which has been publicly endorsed by more than 60 industry leaders including Hewlett-Packard, Novell, Netscape, and Sun, Oracle's Electronic Commerce solution allows consumers and corporations to securely use any client, over any network, to access any server, allowing for the execution of secure electronic commerce transactions.
"Oracle software has been providing businesses with information management and transaction systems for nearly 20 years," said Jerry Held, senior vice president of Oracle's Server Technologies Division. "Today's announcements extend Oracle's core strengths to deliver the ease and efficiency of on-line transactions to any retailer while providing access to an unlimited potential customer base."
Project Apollo is a Web cartridge which allows any business to establish a commerce presence on the Internet, and set up electronic storefronts with rich content and integrated transactions. The Apollo server manages product browsing, personalized marketing and promotions, order entry, inventories, payment processing and order fulfillment. These features combine allowing merchants to grow their sales channel and open up to the vast potential customer base delivered through the Internet. Because Project Apollo is based on Network Computing Architecture, Oracle's open standards-based architecture for intranet computing, merchants are assured of integration with back end systems already in place with suppliers, partners and financial institutions.
The Oracle Payment Server offers a flexible electronic payment system to merchants, application developers and system integrators. The leading electronic payment providers including CyberCash, First Data and VeriFone, announced Web cartridges that plug into the Oracle Web Request Broker which acts as a bridge offering virtually any payment and authorization option between client and server devices or consumer and merchant systems.
The need for a secure environment is widely acknowledged as a critical element for conducting electronic commerce. Oracle also announced today Oracle Security Server, a Web cartridge designed to verify user identity. Oracle is also working closely with several firewall vendors to enable secure database access through corporate firewalls.
For business-to-business commerce, Oracle revealed plans to Web-enable its entire application line and also plans to integrate the applications with Project Apollo by the end of 1997. Today, applications users can use Oracle Web Suppliers and Oracle Web Customers to perform secure electronic business- to-business commerce across the Internet using any Web browser.
In a related announcement, Oracle and Quark disclosed that the two companies will integrate Quark authoring and multimedia products with Oracle server software. All published catalogs may now be repurposed for personalized high-fidelity, multimedia viewing over the Web.
Oracle Corp. is the world's second largest software company, and the largest supplier of software for information management. With annual revenues of more than $4.2 billion, the company offers its database, tools and application products, along with related consulting, education, and support services, in more than 90 countries around the world. For more information about Oracle's Electronic Commerce Solutions, visit Oracle's Electronic Commerce Web site.