Oracle teams with Yahoo to bring personalised news to enterprise portals

Customers will have access to more than 100 pre-built news applications, called portlets, featuring content from more than 2,000 web and premium news and trade sources. These Yahoo! portlets can be aggregated, personalized, and delivered directly to users of enterprise portals running on Oracle9i Application Server.

As enterprise portals become the interface for business applications to employees, it is critical to increase end user adoption and drive repeat usage of corporate portals and extranets. Personalized content and information is key to portal adoption and user retention over time. Oracle9i Application Server, which is already used by more than 16,000 organizations worldwide, coupled with Yahoo!'s proven ability to aggregate and integrate high-value, personalized content delivers a compelling user experience that helps assure a corporate portal is used to its full potential.

"We are especially pleased to be offering high-quality, personalized Yahoo! content for Oracle9i Application Server customers," said Ayman Abouseif, Oracle Senior Marketing Director for Middle East, Africa, Eastern and Central Europe. "This combined solution brings top-tier industry content into our innovative portal product and enables customers to reduce the cost of acquiring and managing external content."

"Yahoo! is committed to delivering value-added services and applications that improve the effectiveness of the enterprise portal platform as a highly personalized business communications medium," said Steve Boom, senior vice president, Yahoo! Enterprise Solutions. "The relationship with Oracle provides our joint customers the access and control needed to integrate My Yahoo! Enterprise Edition's aggregated content and tools together with a powerful platform for building the enterprise portal environment."

Over 2,000 Emerson Motor Company employees rely on their My.EMC corporate portal to collaborate and communicate with each other, using it to increase productivity and meet the changing information needs of the company.

"For Emerson Motor Company's portal, built on Oracle9i Application Server, delivering high-quality content provides constant value to our users," said Paul Deal, director of eBusiness, Emerson Motor Co. "We're very enthusiastic about the possibility of integrating My Yahoo! Enterprise Edition's portlets and personalized content into the My EMC corporate portal. We expect that having this high-value external content blended with our corporate information will help drive user adoption and boost corporate productivity."

Consumer Meets Enterprise
The combination of My Yahoo! Enterprise Edition and Oracle9i Application Server combines the best elements of the consumer version of My Yahoo! with enhanced portal features that meet the content, network and integration needs of business users and administrators. Features include:
• Enhanced Content and Portlets: Premium content and enhanced, business-focused portlets such as Industry News, Industry Performance, Company News, News Tracker and more, from leading sources such as Reuters, AFP, CBS and Business Week.
• Content Delivered Directly to Portal Page: Users can simply and easily add Headlines, Stock Quotes, Weather, Maps, to their personal portal page. When seeking deeper information, users simply click text links to services such as Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Finance, or Yahoo! Weather. Full-text content resides on Yahoo!'s network servers, not on the corporate portal infrastructure allowing customers to forego the expense and hassle of content hosting.
• Linked Accounts: The portal technology in Oracle9i Application Server allows users to access their personalized preferences for My Yahoo!. Blending external content into the corporate portal means end users have a single view to all their personalized business information.
• Administrative Control: Portal administrators can utilize tools to centrally manage the Oracle9i Application Server Portal framework and control which Yahoo! portlets are exposed, and through the use of model accounts, can "lock" selections for functional role or geography.
• Aggregated Content Feed: The Oracle9i Application Server is pre-integrated to receive content feeds via direct connection to Yahoo!. This provides optimized performance to minimize the amount of network traffic required to retrieve all the external portal content.

Availability
The Oracle9i Application Server Content Provider for My Yahoo! Enterprise Edition is available now from the Oracle9iAS Portal Center on the Oracle Technology Network (OTN) for free download. For Oracle9i Application Server customers, Yahoo! Inc. is providing a free trial subscription to My Yahoo! Enterprise Edition content.

About Oracle9i Application Server
Oracle solves the IT challenge of integrating fragmented middleware products to run an e-business by providing one product that can replace more than 12 separate point products from other vendors. Oracle9i Application Server features full J2EE 1.3 support, built-in enterprise portal software, high-speed caching, business intelligence, rapid application development, application and business integration, Web services and more, all in one package.

About My Yahoo! Enterprise Edition
My Yahoo! EE is a suite of more than 100 web-based portlets and tools that allow your employees to manage, customize and monitor the dynamic content that's essential to their industry, company, geography or functional role.