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Chapter 2
Oracle, is a popular software choice for managing human resources and financial activities
at universities. Currently Oracle offers PeopleSoft’s ERP solution under the PeopleSoft
28 Enterprise Applications name; it offers JD Edwards ERP solutions as JD Edwards
EnterpriseOne and JD Edwards World.

Oracle
Oracle is now SAP’s biggest competitor. Oracle began in 1977 as Software Development
Laboratories (SDL). Its founders, Larry Ellison, Bob Miner, and Ed Oates, won a contract
from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to develop a system, called Oracle, to manage
large volumes of data and extract information quickly. Although the Oracle project was
canceled before a successful product was developed, the three founders of SDL saw the
commercial potential of a relational database system. In 1979, SDL became Relational
Software, Inc., and released its first commercial database product. The company changed
its name again, to Oracle, and in 1986 released the client-server Oracle relational
database. The company continued to improve its database product, and in 1988 released
Oracle Financials, a set of financial applications. The financial applications suite of
modules included Oracle Financials, Oracle Supply Chain Management, Oracle
Manufacturing, Oracle Project Systems, Oracle Human Resources, and Oracle Market
Management. Oracle Financials was the foundation for what would become Oracle’s ERP
product.
Much of Oracle’s recent growth in ERP applications has been through acquisition. In
addition to PeopleSoft and JD Edwards, in 2005 Oracle acquired Siebel, a major customer
relationship management (CRM) software company. (CRM is discussed in more detail in
Chapter 3.) In 2010, Oracle completed its acquisition of Sun Microsystems, a major
manufacturer of computer hardware and software that developed the Java software
development platform. According to Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, with this latest acquisition,
“Oracle will be the only company that can engineer an integrated system—applications to
disk—where all the pieces fit and work together so customers do not have to do it
themselves. Our customers benefit as their systems integration costs go down while
system performance, reliability, and security go up.”
In 2010, in an effort to consolidate its customer base on a single software platform,
Oracle released Fusion Applications, which is a software suite designed to give its
PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, and Siebel customers a modular and flexible upgrade path to a
single Oracle ERP solution.
The concepts of an Enterprise Resource Planning system are similar for the large ERP
vendors, such as SAP and Oracle, and for the many smaller vendors of ERP software.
Because of SAP’s leadership in the ERP industry, this textbook focuses primarily on SAP’s
ERP software products as an example of an Enterprise Resource Planning system. Keep in
mind that most other ERP software vendors provide similar functionality, with some
having strengths in certain areas.

SAP ERP
SAP ERP software (previous versions were known as R/3, and later, mySAP ERP) has
changed over the years, owing to product evolution—and for marketing purposes. The
latest versions of ERP systems by SAP and other companies allow all business areas to
access the same database, as shown in Figure 2-4, eliminating redundant data and
communications lags.

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