Oracle and Symbol Align to Bring Business Intelligence to Mobile Scanning Computers - Company Business and Marketing

Edge: Work-Group Computing Report, Nov 15, 1999

Oracle Corp., the number one choice for e-business, and Symbol Technologies, Inc., the leader in mobile data management systems, Tuesday announced their joint effort to bring the enterprise to the handheld environment. Oracle and Symbol plan to work together to empower field personnel, whether in healthcare, utilities, sales, education, retail, government, manufacturing, transportation and other vertical industries, with a platform for enterprise application solutions on industrial strength mobile devices.

"Oracle8i Lite's powerful database software with its open architecture and centralized management capabilities, supports deployment of low-cost enterprise solutions, on Symbol's rugged, specialized devices," said Keith Kanneg, director of software marketing at Symbol.

With the Symbol-Oracle integration, management of inventory flows to the United Center's concession stands and stores can be tracked quickly and accurately. Using Symbol SPT1500 pocketable computers and Oracle8i Lite, data capture is automated and easily synchronized with the United Center's data servers, providing cost-efficient management of mobile assets, materials and products flows to sales force and service workers throughout the complex.

"There has been a tremendous improvement in the accuracy and turn-around time of critical data. It used to take 48 hours to complete our reconciliation, and 10 of those hours were spent on manual data entry. Using the Oracle8i Lite/Symbol-based solution, the reconciliation is now done in about 30 minutes, almost 100 times faster than before," said Joe Inzerillo, technical director at the United Center. "The Oracle8i Lite/Symbol-based solution developed by Braxton Butterfield Consulting has enabled the United Center to fundamentally change the way business is done. The United Center is now able to track its specialty merchandise through its entire lifecycle from purchase order, to receipt at the loading dock, transfer to the merchandise store, to the backend accounting systems."

"We recommended the Symbol devices because of the quick development time using the PalmOS. It took us less than four weeks to develop the handheld portion of this solution," said John Simon, business development manager for Braxton Butterfield Consulting, Inc. "Using Oracle8i Lite's iConnect technology, we can easily interface with key enterprise applications such as Oracle. This made choosing Oracle and the Symbol handheld device an easy business decision."

Oracle Corporation is the world's leading supplier of software for information management, and the world's second largest independent software company. With annual revenues of more than $9.1 billion, the company offers its database, tools and application products, along with related consulting, education, and support services, in more than 145 countries around the world. FMI: http://www.oracle.com .

Symbol Technologies, Inc. is a global leader in mobile data management systems and services with innovative customer solutions based on wireless local area networking for voice and data, application-specific mobile computing and bar code data capture. Symbol's wireless LAN solutions are installed at more than 45,000 customer locations, and more than seven million Symbol scanners and application-specific scanner-integrated mobile computer systems are in use worldwide. Symbol and its global network of business partners provide solutions for retailing, transportation and distribution logistics, parcel and postal delivery, healthcare, education, manufacturing and other industries. Customer information is available from Symbol at 800-722-6234, 631-738-2400 and at http://www.symbol.com.