06/15/2005

ebizQ, an interactive online community (www.ebizQ.net) focused on business integration, today announced that Oracle is the winner of its first annual Enterprise Information Integration (EII) Buyers’ Choice Award. Receiving votes on ten judging criteria, Oracle received its highest marks in the areas of technical excellence, flexibility and ease-of-use.

First unveiled in February, ebizQ conducted a live Webinar and an on-line poll of its members to determine the most important criteria for choosing an integration solution. Then, up until April 15th, only end-user customers (vendors were carefully screened out) were permitted to vote only once (multiple votes were also screened out) for their favorite EII and EAI vendors, based on these criteria. The awards are based on the average raw scores each vendor received in each category, multiplied by the weight ebizQ members gave to each criterion.

“We view EII as an emerging category in the integration market. As a result, we did not see any of the newer start-ups represented in our voting,” said Beth Gold-Bernstein, vice president of strategic products and services for ebizQ. “Oracle scored highest in four of the five categories deemed most important by end users: technical excellence, flexibility, ease-of-use, and skills.”

Judging criteria includes ease of use, technical excellence, flexibility and reuse, maintenance and support, security, support for standards, skills required to implement the solution and ROI. For EAI and EII, ebizQ members stated the most important criteria are ease of use, technical excellence, flexibility and reuse, skills required, and ROI. “Judging from the heightened interest we are seeing in using EII technologies to implement an information access and management services layer for service-oriented architecture (SOA), we predict the EII market to grow significantly over the next few years,” added David Kelly, president of Upside Research.

“Receiving the Enterprise Information Integration Buyers’ Choice Award is a great honor and is a testament to our best-in-class integration capabilities,” said Amlan Debnath, vice president, Server Technologies, Oracle. “Deployed in heterogeneous IT environments or in Oracle® only environments, organizations rely on Oracle’s integration technologies to improve the efficiency of their business with customers and trading partners.”

At 12 noon EDT on June 29th, ebizQ will hold a Webinar with Oracle and the winner of the Application Integration Buyer's Choice Award. Customers and executives of these two companies will join Ms. Gold-Bernstein in this webinar, focusing on the formal results of the Buyers’ Choice Awards.

NOTE: Please visit http://www.ebizq.net/to/eiiaward to sign up for this Webinar.