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Oracle today announced that seven customers who have adopted enterprise grid computing infrastructures are on track to achieve an average of 150 percent return on investment (ROI) over five years, according to a third-party study. Chicago Stock Exchange, Ohio Savings Bank, Oslo University, and Vanderbilt University, among others, participated in the report titled "Making Enterprise Grid Computing a Reality with Oracle 10g Software." Researched and produced by Mainstay Partners, the study determined that customers can benefit significantly by upgrading from traditional, single-server systems to high-performance, lower-cost clustered servers and operating systems running Oracle 10g infrastructure software including Oracle Application Server 10g, Oracle Database 10g, Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g and Oracle Real Application Clusters 10g. With an enterprise grid infrastructure, organizations are increasing the flexibility, performance and scalability of their Information Technology (IT) systems while lowering operating costs. "It's clear from the research findings that these customers are realizing considerable benefits from migrating to an enterprise grid computing infrastructure using Oracle 10g software," said Robert Shimp, vice president of Technology Marketing, Oracle Corporation. "Customers are achieving higher levels of efficiency, manageability and performance from their IT systems than was previously possible." Oracle 10g Delivers Significant Cost, Performance and Labor Benefits According to Mainstay Partners' findings, Oracle 10g customers are achieving substantial savings -- on average 150 percent ROI and 43 percent internal rate of return are predicted over five years. Oracle 10g helps customers to reduce hardware costs through consolidation as well as reduce software license and maintenance costs. Study participants achieved a 123 percent average savings on hardware in the first year with projected hardware savings of 278 percent over five years. Additionally, the customers have considerably improved their availability by moving from a single- or dual-node environment to a multi-node environment, dramatically increasing availability. Each of the study participants has improved business continuity with disaster recovery times reduced from three or four hours to minutes. Overall, software savings among the study participants averages 24 percent. Customers are gaining greater accountability by eliminating the number of vendors and associated integration issues. The result of the integrated offering from Oracle is an increase in performance, availability and service level agreements. According to the study, the customers are experiencing an average of 10 percent computing performance improvement. Labor savings are also being achieved with Oracle 10g software, which helps customers reduce the cost of administration. By automating and reducing development and deployment costs with Oracle's integration capabilities, administrators, on average, have been 15 percent more productive. Companies saved administrator time provisioning and managing storage for Oracle Database 10g as well as gained an additional cost savings by achieving 20 percent higher utilization of their database storage by using Oracle Automatic Storage Management. The study also found a decline in maintenance activities leaving administrative staffs more time for engaging in strategic activities more central to the business such as application development. "The ROI studies show that the Oracle 10g infrastructure software makes a compelling case for companies to begin the evolution to a grid computing model," said Timothy Guyre, Managing Director, Mainstay Partners. "Study participants are now better able to leverage hardware and software investments, while increasing their labor productivity to achieve overall lower costs, increased flexibility and improved quality of service." Chicago Stock Exchange to Earn 171 percent ROI over Five Years Founded in 1882, the Chicago Stock Exchange (CHX) has grown into a leading equity exchange in the United States, trading more that 3,500 NYSE, Amex, NASDAQ and CHX-exclusive issues. With a need for a highly available solution to support its trading and reporting functions, CHX deployed an enterprise grid using Oracle 10g software running on HP hardware. The move to Oracle 10g is expected to deliver a 171 percent ROI over five years to CHX and its IT systems are experiencing a higher rate of CPU utilization than before. "Using an enterprise grid, I can add, subtract, and swap servers wherever and whenever they're needed most," said David Milne, director of Database Technologies, Chicago Stock Exchange. "Being able to have such choices is as valuable as being able to save money or increase productivity." Vanderbilt University Reduces TCO with Oracle 10g A private, higher education institution comprising 10 schools, a medical center and a comprehensive research program, Vanderbilt University was founded in 1873 and has an enrollment of 11,000 undergraduate and graduate students. Vanderbilt University is the second largest private employer in the state of Tennessee with more than 14,000 full and part-time faculty and staff. Operating two IT infrastructures on aging hardware platforms in the late 1990s, Vanderbilt University consolidated its IT systems in 2002 using Oracle Database and Oracle Real Application Clusters with Intel-based hardware running Linux. Since then, the university has deployed an enterprise grid taking advantage of the grid capabilities of Oracle Database 10g, Oracle Application Server 10g and Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g. Migrating to an enterprise grid has put the university on track to achieve a 120 percent ROI over five years as well as in higher application and system availability and reduced management costs. "By moving to the Oracle 10g infrastructure software on an Intel/Linux platform, we are witnessing approximately a 50 percent reduction in costs with increased performance," said Darryl Boone, project leader, DBA lead manager, Vanderbilt University. Report Availability "Making Enterprise Grid Computing a Reality with Oracle 10g Software," researched and produced by Mainstay Partners, is available for download at: http://www.oracle.com/technologies/grid/grid_roi.html . About Oracle Oracle is the world's largest enterprise software company. For more information about Oracle, visit our Web site at http://www.oracle.com/ .