INDUSTRY

REDWOOD SHORES, CA -- Oracle Corporation (Nasdaq: ORCL), the world's largest enterprise software company, today announced the introduction of Oracle's Information Architecture for Life Sciences, an open e-business platform designed to integrate scientific and business applications for pharmaceutical and biotech companies as a mean of unifying data and streamlining business processes. Oracle partner companies -- Acero, Dendrite, geneticXchange, MDL and Sun Microsystems have expressed their support of Information Architecture for Life Sciences as a means to provide the marketplace with an end-to-end solution for the entire value chain, from drug research through sales and marketing. Oracle's Information Architecture for Life Sciences builds on Oracle's Information Architecture which underlies each module of the Oracle® E-Business Suite. It enables companies to achieve a unified and global information management strategy efficiently, quickly and at lower IT costs. An open, standards-based applications foundation, Information Architecture consolidates data across Oracle and non-Oracle applications to help improve the quality of information and business intelligence delivered. The key component, the single data model, allows a consistent definition of a customer, supplier, partner or employee across all application modules and the entire enterprise. In addition, the Oracle Information Architecture is accessible from any device, using any standard browser and is easily configurable. In today's competitive market, pharmaceutical and biotech companies need to maximize product profitability over the entire lifecycle. Information Architecture for Life Sciences satisfies this need by automating the transaction flow across the value chain, giving these companies increased efficiency throughout the discovery and development process and reducing time-to-market. In addition, by enabling the collation of key business and scientific data out of disparate applications and creating a system of open ``information out,'' Information Architecture offers a single source of truth to make timely, informed decisions on how to run business practices. ``Oracle is the only company that can provide a platform of applications and technology for the Life Sciences value chain that enables transactional automation and information out for that value chain,'' said Jon Simmons, vice president, Life Sciences Oracle Corp. ``This solves the main challenges facing the industry: the bottlenecks that occur in taking a drug to market and the inability to make global business decisions in real-time that ultimately drive share holder value. What we are doing is marrying Oracle's business object with the science object. By partnering with the leaders in the industry we can build an integrated solution, not only with drug research but across the value chain.'' ``With MDL software, content, and services providing the enterprise-wide discovery informatics framework for comprehensive and successful discovery research, we are pleased to continue our ongoing relationship with Oracle in support of the Information Architecture for Life Sciences,'' said Lars Barfod, executive vice president and chief business officer of MDL Information Systems. ``By leveraging Oracle's unique extensible indexing, we have developed and deployed industry-wide the MDL Relational Chemistry Server data cartridges (formerly ISIS/Direct), which we will enhance further to support Oracle 9i Database with Real Application Clusters. The MDL Relational Chemistry Server data cartridges enable researchers to manage fully relational molecule structure and reaction databases in an open Oracle environment.`` ``Since the intersection of biology into technology, the Life Sciences industry faces the next big problem: the implementation of biotechnology into real medical cures and therapies,'' said Howard Asher, director of Global Life Sciences, Sun Microsystems, Inc. ``As we now move to the post genomic age, Sun has teamed up with the leading technology companies, such as Oracle, to lead the IT convergence into the life sciences of tomorrow.'' ``The industrialization of techniques like sequencing and high-throughput screening has produced unprecedented quantities of scientific data, but what's been missing is a flexible scientific data integration layer that significantly enhances the power of the Oracle database technology,'' said Jeff Edwards, president of geneticXchange. ``Working closely with partners like Oracle, we can provide biotech customers with ubiquitous access to the widely dispersed scientific data sources and algorithms they need -- all in a unified way within their Oracle systems. This gives researchers a more complete view of the data and the tools to uncover new relationships and potential drug targets faster than ever before.'' ``With Oracle's Life Sciences Information Architecture, customers will be able to leverage their investments in market-leading pharmaceutical applications like ours while taking advantage of the Oracle E-Business Suite's functionality, all in one consolidated system for increased operational efficiency,'' said Nigel Whitehead, Dendrite vice president of Global Strategic Alliances. ``Our combined solution has breakthrough open architecture that will enable customers to implement Dendrite or Oracle products to interface with existing software tools -- helping provide faster, more cost-efficient deployment of complete pharmaceutical-specific CRM capabilities.'' For more information visit www.oracle.com