ORACLE Brings Work to
Slovenian Specialists and Companies

by Iztok Suligoj

Different programs are distinguished not merely by their purpose and capabilities, but also by the opportunities they give the user to adapt the software to their own needs. Some programs focus on the personal needs of the user and the user's professional know-how: this certainly applies to ORACLE, whose user-friendly conception and wide adaptability have made it an essential tool for many people. But ORACLE also has the capabilities to satisfy the most demanding user. Companies now have such complex requirements in their operations, and face such specific problems connected to their field of operation, the demands of the environment and the legislation in their particular country, that in installing and often in maintaining a computer system specialist knowledge in vastly different areas is required, and such work can only be performed by specially trained teams of experts and specialist firms. ORACLE can be proud that it has done so much in Slovenia to establish such specialist teams and firms, and has helped train over 300 Slovenian professionals for the most demanding users, all of which ranks ORACLE as one of the companies whose highly qualified personnel are vital to Slovenia.

Managing Direcor Vasja Herbst, Oracle Software d.o.o.

QUARK: Mr. Herbst, many people in the IT environment know what Oracle is, but nevertheless, please start with a short description of your company and its products.

HERBST: The Oracle Corporation is the world's largest vendor of database software and information management services.
Our software runs on almost every popular computer from the smallest laptop to the very largest supercomputer. It is used to manage everything from personal information to giant corporations. Oracle software is the world's favourite solution for client/server computing, mainframe downsizing, and corporate re-engineering. And it is the leading software choice for the emerging Information Highway and Data Warehousing.
Our products include the Oracle database, plus powerful tools for application development, document automation, and networking. All of our products support not only structured data, but also text, images, audio, and video.
Oracle employs more than 30,000 dedicated software professionals, who provide our clients with consulting, education and support services in 96 countries around the world; in Ljubljana there is a fully owned subsidiary, Oracle Software d.o.o., which employs 27 people.
The company has available a large computer equipment environment, including several UNIX servers with a LAN of PC computers and three classrooms for education, of which one is equipped with a satellite connection to Oracle Channel, with which we can provide so called Interactive Distance Learning.

The main areas of activity are:

Sales and technical support for ORACLE software products such as:

• Relational Database Management System ORACLE7 and ORACLE8; Programming and development tools Developer 2000, Designer 2000 and Discoverer 2000; OLAP (On-Line Analytical Processing) tools for designing Decision Support Systems and statistical data and all other Oracle products.

Consulting
• where our specialists help different organisations to define how to prepare and implement the information system.

Education
• where we teach end users to use ORACLE software in the best possible way. These courses are prepared for and attended by beginners and skilled people who want to expand their knowledge of our products.

Oracle Software staff.

QUARK: Although Oracle has been at the very top of technology in the field of databases for quite a long time, it has only recently become widely known, particularly for its concept of network computers NC. Why?

HERBST: Oracle practically started the war against monopoly; it has been striving for open standards. Consequently, Oracle presented network computer architecture based on open standards such as CORBA. It is true that Oracle is better known now for its network computer architecture than it was known before for its database systems and tools, although here, too, it has retained its leading position in the market. Network computer architecture has united three worlds: the world of client/server technology known for its robustness, security and reliability, the Internet/Intranet environment known for simplicity of usage, and the environment of distributed programming objects. These three different environments are united in a new network computer architecture that has been accepted by more than 600 organisations in the field of computing science. Oracle's initiative in this has been joined from the very beginning t by its strategic partners, such as Sun, IBM and Netscape. The initiative was warmly welcomed also in the USA, partly due to their struggle against the monopoly of Microsoft in the field of personal computers. In fact, the initiative came from President Clinton, who wanted to support an alternative to the >Wintel< monopoly in the global market.

QUARK: What were the responses to the first presentations of network computers?

HERBST: It has been a year since we presented the concept of network computing in the form of a referential design. On this occasion, our president Mr. Larry Ellison promised that network computers would cost less than 500 dollars. Many opponents found this prognosis ridiculous, but today, a year later, the prediction has already come true. Today we have operating products in the market - at last year's INFOS fair we had a network computer by the IDEA company in operation. Software that runs on server has been announced recently. World-wide investigations have revealed that organisations that intend to replace their outdated terminals will choose network computers rather than much more expensive personal computers. Large organisations, those with thousands of employees, are particularly interested in the concept of network computing.

QUARK: What does this mean for the users of your applications and tools?

HERBST: Any user who develops its applications with Oracle's CASE tools Designer/2000 has the possibility of directly generating applications for Web that run on network computers and their servers. This will be enabled by the new system programming equipment on servers within the NCA architecture.

QUARK: What does the new version of the database server Oracle 8 bring?

HERBST: After five years of development and extensive tests, we elaborated and demonstrated a product which is a sort of a crossbreed of relational and object technology for database management. The primary concern of the developers was to reconcile the growing needs of users for higher capacities and the facts implied by quick technological development such as new complex data types and objects related to network computing. The network technology places new demands on data servers. Static network pages will soon loose their leadership in competition with dynamic network pages. And for creating dynamic web pages and applications, we need building elements such as text, graphic objects, video, sound and other elements which should be safely stored and quickly available. We also decided at Oracle that one database could serve for both transaction applications and data warehousing or analytic applications. Transactions require quick availability of data, a large number of users, high reliability, secure access and simple management of data. Analytic applications (management information, olap, data retrieval,.) require the management of a large amount of data, and favourable response time in building and searching in the data warehouse. The amount of data can reach some 100 Tera bytes; a significant feature is also the option of parallel data entry and high scalability. Oracle 8 offers all benefits of both relational and object technology; it will be available in 26 languages and on all important computer platforms.

QUARK: What is the standing of Oracle on the Slovene market?

HERBST: According to independent research, Oracle controls over 50% of the global database market, and even 70% of the Slovene market. We started in the field of relational databases ten years ago. At the moment, we have more than 260 installations in all economic and non-economic branches. We are very proud of being accepted as a standard SQL base in the whole gonernment sector. Oracle was selected in order to save money: a number of different systems would require investment in training, maintenance and consulting. We should also mention our co-operation with the Government Centre for Informatics (CVI ) which co-ordinates the entire business between us and Slovene state and public administration institutions.

Hmezasd racunalniski center d.o.o. is a private company based in &REGalec in Slovenia, dealing with information engineering. Since its founding 26 years ago as the computer center for the Hmezad group, the company has become completely independent in developing many applications for bank data processing, trading and production operations. Our experience, tradition and highly qualified staff guarantee our high standards in providing software support and maintenance services to more than 40 business partners.
	We have 19 employees, and in our last fiscal year revenues exceeded 1 million. $. Focusing the majority of our recources on providing software solutions for banking, we are able to offer Hibis, our fully-integrated banking solution, based on the Oracle relational database. Hibis covers the full spectrum of banking activities, including home-banking or Internet-banking. We ensure continuous development of the product, its enhancement, keeping it in line with branch changes and taking full advantage of the latest development in software design technology.
Pavle Kodrun, General Manager.
Hmezad Racunalniski Center d.o.o. Hmeljarska ul. 7 3310 Zalec Slovenija Tel. +386 63 715 825 Fax.+386 63 716 905 E-mail: hrc@ siol.net

ISA.IT d.o.o. The company ISA.IT (Training, Consulting, Applications, and Information Technologies) formally started to operate on January 1 st 1993 within the Technological Park of the Jozef Stefan Institute. The main activities of ISA.IT are: ¨ development of client/server applications (distributed databases, WINDOWS client) ¨ end user training ¨ project development for Internet usage ¨ complete system solutions (HW, SW and applications) ¨ consultations in implementation and usage of information technologies
	ISA.IT has developed a software application for the military reserve system for the Ministry of Defence of the Republic of Slovenia. The software application covers all functions of the military reserve, beginning with draft, military service, military training, and ending with discharge. The software application was developed with ORACLE CASE Developer/2000. The application runs in a distributed database environment. ISA.IT has also developed a data warehouse application for the second biggest bank in Slovenia, using ORACLE tools.
Rajko Kolar, General Manager.
Rajko Kolar TP IJS Ljubljana Jamova 39 Ljubljana Slovenija

KOPA computer engineering d.d. is a company with twenty years tradition in implementing turn-key solutions in Slovenian enterprises. Solutions are based on the KOPA information system, which has been designed to support all business needs : it is a completely integrated family of applications and tools which support all business processes. The system supports different types of manufacturing, finances, distribution, human resources , etc...
	All KOPA modules are developed on the ORACLE data base using ORACLE 4GL development tools with the CASE method, and are run under different operating systems on different HW platforms. The Oracle relational data base management system eliminates data redundancy and guarantees correct on-line information . The major advantage of the KOPA system is that it is used by over 40 medium-sized and large Slovenian companies continuously to improve their business. KOPA constantly supports customers with local practices and legislation changes. Over 50 highly educated and experienced KOPA specialists are able to offer a wide range of consultancy and software implementation knowledge to meet all our customers' needs .
Osvald Bernard, General Manager.
KOPA racunalniski inzeniring d.d. Kidrieeva 14 2380 Slovenj Gradec Slovenija tel: +386 0602 42626 fax: +386 602 43 758

General manager Franci Mugerle:
MAOP
has been the leading provider of complete software solutions for business applications in Slovenia since 1987. In 1996, MAOP was the first Slovene software producer to receive the ISO 9001 standard certificate for software products development and maintenace. The ORACLE database servers, Designer/2000 and Developer/2000 are state of the art development tools that have helped us to achieve that goal. Our applications are ready made modules of integrated information systems and flexible enough to be	used in small and medium size enterprises as well as in large businesses and government institutions.We provide complete solutions, consulting, engineering, and including education, that conform with information system auditing requests. For small and middle size enterprises, we provide an integrated system with a built-in electronic accountant. The application MAOP Financials has achieved the Certificate of Conformity with Slovene and international standards.
MAOP Racunalniski inzeniring, d.o.o. Moskriceva 39 61000 Ljubljana Slovenija tel: 386 61 1425 313 386 61 1425 314 fax: 386 61 1424 328

Aster has grown into four tightly coupled divisions: Silicon Graphics Distribution, Tandem Distribution, Applications Development and Customer Support. There is a strong emphasis on system integration. Customer support is now becoming a true multi-vendor support service. The group is experienced in networking and integration of different Unix, Windows NT and OpenVMS platforms. Aster has been the authorized distributor for Silicon Graphics for Slovenia since November 1990 and the authorized distributor for Tandem for Slovenia since March 1994. The Applications Development Group develops and supports an integrated financial accounting system DF that is used by some of our large customers as the central financial information system. A purchasing, inventory control, sales and invoicing extension to this system is also used by some of our customers. General Manager Matej Kranjc An implementation of warehousing/logistics subsystem is underway, in cooperation with Ouroumoff Informatique Synform. Recent applications development is done in Oracle and Informix and includes a commodity exchange application, a banking back-office application and some other smaller applications, some of them running exclusively on Web. We are involved in information system design consulting and business process re-engineering for some of our large customers. The applications group has developed a proprietary design methodology using Oracle Designer/2000 and some of the Netscape and Java based tools

IXTLAN Consulting Ixtlan Consulting(r) is an experienced developer of large-scale custom-made applications, including client/server databases, object-oriented systems, graphic user interfaces and Internet/Intranet solutions. Our main customers are government agencies and financial institutions.
	All areas of software development are fully standardized and inadherence to highest possible quality requirements. Ixtlan Consulting Services deliver technical consulting, training and the expertise required by any successful and competitive organization. Ixtlan Consulting houses some of the most talented people in the software industry. Ixtlan Consulting has established an unsurpassed track-record ofsuccessful projects that advance organizational goals, add value tomarketing efforts and result in a measurable return on investment for aclient.
Robert Jober, General Manager
Ixtlan Consulting. Starting The Future. Kersnikova 2 1000 Ljubljana Slovenija tel: +386 61 133 92 22 fax: +386 61 133 92 72