"Although organisations want to drive competitive advantage through innovation, inflexible IT systems have made it difficult to implement changes", stated Roger Scott, vice president, Technology Sales Consulting, Oracle Asia Pacific. "Oracle Database 11g is designed to help customers innovate faster by reducing time, risk and cost of change; and ultimately get more value from their enterprise information."

Enterprise Management Associates Senior Analyst Andi Mann added: "IT organisations are constantly dealing with changes - hardware changes, OS changes, software patches and upgrades. Implementing those changes to a production environment is a non-trivial undertaking. Oracle Database 11g's Real Application Testing is a major step forward in helping enterprises cope with changes to IT environments."

Oracle continues to lead the standard for data-intensive software solutions. IDC recently reported that Oracle extended its database leadership by capturing 49% of the APAC relational database management systems (RDBMS) market in 2006, more than double the market share of its nearest competitor. According to the same report, Oracle also grew its RDBMS software revenue by 15.6% year-on-year, faster than the market average.

Customers from a wide range of industries across the globe have successfully completed the Oracle Database 11g beta programme. The beta programme participants evaluated the full spectrum of Oracle Database 11g features, including manageability, performance and scalability, high availability, and security.

"Undertaking system changes such as hardware/software upgrades and the application of patches to our mission critical systems is always a challenge", stated Eric Lee, head of IT & Data Centre Operations, Hutchison Telecommunications HK Ltd. "The Real Application Testing feature of Oracle Database 11g is a valuable tool for reducing the operational risk associated with these changes. Being able to effectively test system changes in test environments by replaying a full production workload is a major step forward in determining the overall impact of the changes. Likewise, the ability to do fine-grain SQL response time assessment and fix any regressions due to the change is a significant contribution to smoother change management."

"With Oracle Database 11g, we can control our costs better, make changes more easily, and be better assured that our changes are going to be okay", Environment Waikato Database Administrator Erica Harris stated.

"We found the scalability could accommodate a very ambitious image management project with compression technology designed to ensure the storage costs of the project do not escalate out of control", stated Naomi Rafael, senior database administrator, Melbourne Health. "Furthermore, the security and compliance elements of Oracle Database 11g ensure only the right personnel can access sensitive data."

Partners in Asia Pacific who participated in the Oracle Database 11g beta programme are touting manageability and change assurance, Grid consolidation, Oracle Real Application Testing and information life cycle management as key features that will help customers innovate at a rapid pace.

"We had a very positive experience working with Oracle 11g in our Solution Readiness Center. It added many new capabilities in the area of Grid Computing, and Change Management", stated Zhao Wei, senior data warehouse architect, Neusoft. "These new capabilities will satisfy our customers, who demand a more sophisticated Information architecture framework. Oracle 11g has made vast improvement in performance and we will recommend it to our customers in China."

Nearly 2000 attendees from more than 500 partner organisations across Asia Pacific have participated in Oracle Database 11g partner enablement programmes to date, including Abeam (Malaysia), ABS (Phillipines), Accenture (India), Accenture Services (India), Ahost (Thailand), Applied Business Systems (Malaysia), Asaba (Indonesia), China National Sofware & Services (China), Crimson Logic (Singapore), Digital China (Hong Kong), GSI (Phillipines), Han Consulting (China), HCL (India), HPT (Vietnam), IBM Global Services (China), Ice Consulting (Thailand), Jatis (Indonesia), KPMG (Taiwan), LG CNS (Korea), PCCW (Hong Kong), Phythis (Vietnam), PriceWaterhouse Coopers (India), RFID Korea (Korea), Satyam (Singapore), Sonata (India), Tata Consultancy Services (India), Tatung (Taiwan).

"Partners in Asia Pacific are ready to leverage new Oracle Database 11g partner enablement programmes to help them to innovate solutions and services faster to further grow their businesses", Roger Scott stated.

To help customers get ready, Oracle University kick-started an intensive 5-day training course on Oracle Database 11g for the Asia Pacific region. Designed to introduce new and enhanced features, this course will help customers learn to use Oracle Database 11g enhancements to innovate and grow their business more quickly by managing their information more effectively.

From August to December 2007, Oracle will be bringing together industry visionaries, Oracle Executives and business leaders in a series of Executive Forums across Asia Pacific. These forums will discuss the challenges facing executives and highlight innovations enabled by Oracle Database 11g.