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Oracle Taps OATSystems for Better Asset Visibility

by Diane Himes, MA Editorial Staff

Posted on Wednesday, June 04, 2008 5:28:18 PM       Sign Up to receive Daily News Alerts in your E-mail Inbox                               

RFID software and infrastructure provider OATSystems today announced a partnership with business software giant Oracle Corp. through which the companies will augment the inventory and asset tracking capabilities of Oracle's supply chain and retail software with OAT's RFID technology.

As part of the alliance, OAT has written a new application interface that links its RFID software to Oracle's applications, giving Oracle users real-time visibility into supply chains, distribution centers, work in process, and retail settings, OAT officials told Managing Automation today.

"The goal of the partnership is to allow Oracle customers to extract more value from the applications they use today by increasing visibility into their supply chains," said Paul Cataldo, vice president of marketing at OATSystems.

Oracle users will be able to access OAT's RFID functionality in two ways, said Venkat Krishnamurthy, chief technology officer at OAT. They can directly RFID-enable existing Oracle applications by using the new interface to tap into OAT's software, or they can import OAT RFID capabilities via Web services into Oracle's business process management suite and build their own applications.

Oracle customers can access OAT technology via the interface, while new customers can create RFID-enabled versions before deployment. The new technology is limited to the integration interface; OAT has not made major changes to its core application suite to enable the integration with Oracle. "The new code is localized to the integration piece," Krishnamurthy said.

OAT is discussing possible deployments of RFID-enabled Oracle applications with a variety of customers, officials said, most notably companies that are already customers of both vendors. In addition to retail, fulfillment, and CPG settings, the companies envision deployments across several manufacturing sectors, including pharmaceutical, oil & gas, and industrial manufacturing — areas where "Oracle's footprint is already fairly broad," Cataldo said. The OATSystems integration technology is available now.

Cataldo and Krishnamurthy said some of the major benefits of the integrated applications will mirror those of RFID itself. For example, Oracle's inventory applications can track where objects are supposed to be; RFID can tell manufacturers where those objects actually are.

"The combined OAT/Oracle technology actually acts as a new application," Cataldo said, by tracking mobile assets "in a fundamentally real-time way" — something not possible with Oracle's inventory tracking application alone.

In a retail setting, the integrated application can convert item information that is not traditionally serialized into SKUs at an aggregate level.

While OAT and Oracle have maintained various partnerships prior to today's announcement, this new relationship "introduces OAT into Oracle applications in a much more intimate way — by allowing customers to take advantage of RFID without retooling their existing applications," Cataldo said. "If they have an Oracle application they're using to track assets in the supply chain, the integrated solution will give them more visibility to get the right assets to the right place in a seamless fashion."

"We believe RFID is moving toward a broader rate of adoption, based on improved reliability and reduced cost," said Jon Chorley, Oracle's vice president of SCM product strategy, in an interview. "OAT lets us bring their core competencies in getting RFID systems up and running, marry them to our applications, and deliver a complete solution to our customers."

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