Rocela is a great workplace!

It’s always satisfying to win awards for company performance or innovation – it’s very different (and much more gratifying) to receive an award recognising that we are a great workplace!

So when it was revealed that Rocela had won a ranking of 6^th out of 10 finalists in this year’s ‘The Great Place to Work® Institute’ listing for Scotland’s Best Small Workplaces (in our first year of entry into the programme) we were especially flattered and excited.

The Great Place to Work® Institute UK is part of the world’s largest consultancy specialising in workplace assessment and enhancement. Every year Great Place to Work® surveys some 5,500 organisations around the world representing around 10 million employees. This gives them unrivalled insight into what makes an organisation’s employees tick and how leaders can improve their business performance by understanding and improving their workplace culture.

Martin Mutch, Rocela CEO said “I am delighted that Rocela, in its first year of entry into this programme, has been awarded with this ranking.  We are committed to providing a happy, healthy and supportive place for our employees to work and continually look to encourage knowledge sharing, innovation, staff development and ideas creation.  This way, with happy employees, we will always have happy customers.

“At Rocela, we empower our staff to create their own environment and it is rewarding to see how successful this is.

“This award truly recognises Rocela as great workplace, echoing the results of our own internal staff surveys and feedback and I am extremely proud of their achievement.”

Oracle experts Rocela events for 2012

Rocela’s Oracle experts have been involved in a considerable number of client side activities this year – from assisting large enterprise organisations declare their Oracle ULA to helping a global utilities company upgrade to Oracle R12.

Our website, twitter and blog all try to educate, deliver value and convey our deep knowledge of ‘all things Oracle’ however there is nothing better than looking us in the eye and asking us the difficult questions.

That is why we are planning a Roadshow of events for 2012 – taking us all around the UK (Edinburgh, Aberdeen, London, Manchester) to talk to large enterprise organisations on;

• Oracle Thought Leadership – a peer to peer ‘behind closed doors’ session discussing Oracle trends, product roadmap, Cloud, ULA’s, Virtualisation, Strategic Vendor Management to name a few.
• Rocela Control ™ Session – a presentation on the complexities of Oracle license management and how our proven SAM methodology, Rocela Control ™ can help. This will also include a client case study, where one of our customers will present on their situation, what problems and impacts this was causing and how engaging with Rocela benefited.
• R12 Sessions – presentations and peer to peer discussions on how we can help assess whether Oracle R12 is best for your organisation and how its new features/functions will benefit.

We have run a number of these sessions before which have prompted the following comments;

“Great to hear from other contacts in the industry and how they have tackled the same sort of issues we are facing.” IT Director, Retail Company

“(This session) has helped us consider whether Oracle R12 is the right move for us.” IT Manager, Public Sector Organisation

“Rocela has given me an invaluable insight into the benefits and pitfalls of Oracle’s ULA’s – many of which I was not aware of before!” License Manager, Financial Institute

If you are struggling with the complexity of Oracle licensing, need to reduce risk and cost or need advice on Oracle R12, then please email Linda Anderson on linda.anderson@rocela.com with your contact details and highlight which event you would be interested in attending.

Have a Merry Christmas and a Prosperous 2012.

Oracle experts Rocela speaking at UKOUG 2011, Birmingham

Oracle experts Rocela will be speaking at this years’ UKOUG Conference in Birmingham’s ICC. We will be presenting on the complexities of Oracle licensing and cost management.

Ian Smith, Executive Director of Rocela will discuss ‘How to master the art of Oracle Compliance and Cost Management’. Ian will explain how a proven software asset management methodology can achieve on-going compliance while ensuring right-sizing of Oracle licensing to aid cost management and control.

If Oracle license management is your responsibility and you need to find ways of reducing cost and risk, then come along to Executive Room 1 on Monday 5th December at 17.45pm to hear more.

For more information on the UK OUG Conference 2011, visit the UK OUG’s website.

We look forward to seeing you there.

Oracle’s Q1 FY2012 Results – Sailing through market turbulence

by Greg Rankin, Head of Marketing at Rocela

Oracle posts Q1 results with non-GAAP total revenues up 11% to $8.4Bn and non-GAAP EPS up 14% to 48c. The devil, as always though is in the details.

In choppy market conditions Oracle’s first quarter for FY12 has proven that their now huge portfolio of software products can help them navigate through rocky waters, with new software licenses growing 17% Q-on-Q from 2010 – and this, after 25% growth Q-on-Q in Q1 2010. On top of this software license updates and product support grew at a similar 16% rate. This is solid performance in the current environment but not as impressive as it has been. This was reflected in after-hours trading where ORCL barely recovered to its opening position of yesterday, though this is likely to change somewhat after the market opens.

Analysts continue to focus on the Hardware division, and every Oracle watcher is keen to see how the Sun acquisition will be leveraged into hard cash. In this area the quarter was not really stellar with Q-on-Q revenue on hardware systems down by 5% – though this was blamed on the low-end server business. On Oracle’s part they again are absolutely clear that the focus is on high-margin products and this time they were emphatic about focus on products such as Exadata, Exalogic and SPARC M-series that contain ‘Oracle IP’.  President Mark Hurd suggested that profitability of these products including all “attach, support and service” would be around 5 times of that for x86 hardware. Larry Ellison made it clear that x86 had had its day and went further by stating that by the end of the next fiscal Oracle would “pretty much only be selling servers and storage with our IP”.

CFO Safra Catz also discussed guidance for Q2, which seems conservative even by Oracle’s usual standards, with predictions of new software growth in the 6-16% range, hardware flat or even down 5% and increase in overall revenue in the 4-8% range. With an announced 350 additional sales people added to the organisation in Q1 you can only imagine that the guidance performance is either highly conservative, will be significantly beaten as the company moves into Q3 and beyond or the current number of sales personnel will not be sustained much beyond the middle of the year.

Regarding new technologies, Larry batted off enquiries about ‘big data’ by saying that as with Object Oriented Db technology, video and audio, Oracle would still be the core platform for delivery of such data and would achieve this by providing interfaces to Hadoop. Furthermore Larry announced that 4 “brand-new engineered systems products” would be released in Q2 including a “fault tolerant SPARC Supercluster, featuring our new SPARC T4 microprocessor that runs up to 5x faster than a T3 microprocessor it replaces”.  At least one of the new systems will be announced at OpenWorld, perhaps lending more weight to the rumours of a mid-market Exadata solution.

So, for Q1 overall, solid results, more solid in software and support than hardware with that trend likely to continue into the next quarter and beyond, despite strong focus on the high margin hardware business. With Fusion pegged for general availability by the end of this calendar year and continued strength in Apps and core technology, it will take a serious uptick in hardware revenues for them to take centre stage on any of the next few earnings calls, despite the continuing improvement in margins in this area.

Control your Oracle licensing, Control your Oracle costs

As Oracle’s product portfolio has grown over the years, so has the challenge of how to manage and co-ordinate the resource that often lies at the heart of modern enterprises.

Even since Rocela was founded and started offering help with software asset management and Oracle licensing, these changes have been wide-ranging and show no sign of slowing.

As a result, we’re announcing the latest service offering from Rocela, which has been carefully developed with all these changes in mind – Rocela Control™.

Taken from our page about it on Rocela.com:

Rocela Control™ is the world’s most sophisticated service for cost saving and optimisation of Oracle licensing.  This service delivers;

• Oracle cost management and control
• Oracle license compliance optimisation
• Reduced license complexity and risk

We think it’s a real step forward and think you’ll agree. To find out more, head to Rocela.com or get in touch.

Rocela takes first and second at Scottish Digital Technology Awards

It’s always great to have your efforts recognised by peers – and just as enjoyable to go along to the ceremony and enjoy the accolade. Luckily, at the recent Scottish Digital Technology Awards, we did both and took home two prestigious achievements in different categories.

The evening was also a good opportunity to look back at how we got there. We’ve put a lot of hard work into the business in the last year, across nearly every area – taking on new members of staff and tweaking processes already in place to a new threshold of quality. The judges seemed to understand and recognise these efforts, highlighting several areas throughout our business where they were particularly impressed, based on their judging criteria below:

• Year on year sales growth
• Investment in research and development – switching from selling services to selling products therefore increasing value to our clients
• Design and execution of a channel marketing campaign enabling more of our clients to reduce Oracle costs

Chief of these, and understandably high up our own list of proud achievements is year on year sales growth. This is thanks to almost 100% client retention and increasing numbers of ‘word of mouth’ referrals during the same time period. This has been an outstanding year for our business in that respect and one I think will provide a springboard to future achievements.

It’s also a good time to thank all our staff, new and old, for their contribution to these achievements. It’s only by hiring and maintaining the calibre of staff we have that our continued success and that of our clients can continue.

So, this year “Outstanding Performance in Business Growth” and second place in “Scottish Digital Technology Company of the Year 2011” – next year who knows. We look forward to finding out together.

Get control of your Oracle expenditure, reduce costs and de-risk audits

Today’s IT budgets are stretched like never before.  Increased levels of customer auditing from major vendors such as Oracle and cost reduction programmes on IT budgets mean that there has never been a more crucial time to look at how you can achieve cost optimisation while mitigating exposure from audit.

On Thursday 30^th June at 6pm, in London’s Vinopolis, Rocela, the leaders in Oracle License Optimisation and iQuate, the leaders in automated Oracle discovery present an informal session on how to address some of these issues and ensure that your business achieves an optimised (lowest cost licensing) outcome.

In this session the  two companies will also touch on Oracle’s continued acquisition strategy and how that has resulted in its share of the software budget typically increasing to the point where it is by far the largest cost. They will cover how this impacts negotiations, pricing and how it increases your exposure to risks when audits occur.

This presentation will last approximately one hour with a drinks reception afterwards.  To register for this event, please go to our registration page to book your place or contact linda.anderson@rocela.com for more information.

Join us at the OUG Scotland

The Oracle User Group will be visiting Scotland next week, 8^th June. This FREE one day conference will be hosted at Oracle’s Linlithgow offices.

The event will be packed with a range of topics from Fusion Apps demos, R12 Upgrade case studies, specialist developer topics and the latest from the DBA and Server technology field.

At the event you can also:

• Network with others in the Scottish Oracle Community who are using or has an interest in deploying Oracle Technology and Application products
• Participate in conversations on a wide range of topics suited for Managers, Developers, DBA’s, System Administrators, Solution and Infrastructure architects

Rocela’s Andrew Archibald will be presenting at 11.30am on ‘APEX, Your Oracle E-Business APplication EXtender’ within the Development stream of the agenda.  Andrew’s presentation will look at how ApEx can be used, with real life examples, to easily extend your current Oracle E-Business system to provide additional functionality and enhanced reporting.

We will also exhibit at the event, and encourage you to register and visit our stand in the main exhibition area where you can talk to our Oracle experts about all things Oracle, including Oracle R12 Upgrades, Oracle Managed Services, Hosting, DBA Support Services and Healthchecks.

 

 

 

Rocela Walks away with Silver

By Linda Anderson

With awards season in full swing Rocela is pleased to announce that we’ve won Silver in the category of Managed Services Partner of the Year, at the UK Oracle User Group Awards 2010.

The UK Oracle User Group Awards recognise Oracle Partners for contributions made by offering services to Oracle users. The Managed Services Partner of the Year Award is judged by clients, partner and industry peers and acknowledges high levels of service delivery around Oracle Applications or Oracle Technology.

Winning Silver means that Rocela has been identified as a leader in its field, not only for quality of service delivery but also for value for money, compliance to service level agreements (SLAs) and the client management relationships with regards to ensuring excellent managed service.

We’re proud to have been awarded Silver; it substantiates Rocela’s leadership position within the UK market and shows that we’re setting the standard in the Oracle Managed Services industry. It also proves the benefits of Oracle license optimisation within the within the Software Asset Management (SAM) ISO 19770 framework.

Last, but definitely not least winning Silver is a credit to our Managed Services team who has proven that we can deliver what we say we can. As a team we’d also like to thank our clients for their continued support over the last few years and we look forward continuing these relationships.

Rocela’s explosive H1 results and the future of optimising Oracle

by Linda Anderson

Now we generally try and keep this blog focussed on industry issues and wider concerns that we see among our customers. But on this occasion, we’re simply so proud of our performance that we can’t resist posting a quick note about this year’s H1 results and a big thank you to all our clients and partners for their part in this.

With revenues up 66 per cent to £23m on like-for-like trading, we’re blowing away our previous levels of growth. This demonstrates that some of the biggest businesses out there are not only increasing their focus on optimising their Oracle installations but taking serious steps toward it.

New partners

In the first half of 2010, we’ve proudly started working with Heriot Watt University and also signed a multi-million pound, four-year deal to manage the Oracle license estate of a major UK based retailer which we look forward to speaking about in more detail soon.

Oracle’s continued push towards market domination is another factor which has contributed to these results. With its 66^th acquisition now complete, including Sun Microsystems, Oracle is a global powerhouse becoming increasingly important at the centre of the workplace.  And we’ll be with them and their clients every step of the way making sure businesses are using this vital resource in the most efficient and optimised manner.

What’s next?

Far from resting on our laurels, we’ll be focussing on investment in product development, performance management and innovative automated tools to deliver an even more exceptional service to our clients. In addition, the appointment of new board members like Paul Atkinson as Non-Executive Director and the promotion of Ian Smith to Executive Director only bolsters our ability to help our customers.

We look forward to the coming year and what it’ll bring for Rocela, Oracle and all our customers.