Oracle Corp has made a slightly surprising diversification into applications on both side of the Atlantic. In the US, it announced the Oracle Financials suite of applications for for centralised and decentralised accounting departments in companies of any size. The first four products are Oracle General Ledger, Payables, Purchasing and Assets, and are already being shipped to Sequent Computer and DEC VAX users, with versions for all other hardware on which the Oracle database runs to follow shortly. In the UK, the company announced Oracle Personnel and Oracle Accounting, for minis and mainframes. The thinking behind the move is that the horizontal applications market is forecast to grow to UKP290m in 1990, from its current UKP200m, and that there is an increasing need for accounting and personnel departments to have software that is able to accomodate changing demands more efficiently. Oracle says the packages, developed in Richmond, Greater London, will be aimed at users of all major hardware, including IBM mainframes, DEC VAXes, Hewlett-Packard MPE and a host of Unix machines. The packages were written in SQL, and Computer Aided Systems Engineering has been used throughout, and the company claims that it has overcome the inherent inflexibility of previous packages by offering the first accounting and personnel software packages that use fourth generation development techniques. New features include graphical representation of all information; security provided by personalised menus; and European language facilities and multi currency functions; the new products can accomodate the package launched in April for Lotus 1-2-3 users (CI No 915). Prices depend on the size of host.
