ORLANDO, Florida--At the recently concluded Oracle Applications User Conference, Oracle Corp. announced Oracle Applications Release 11i, the industry's first global Internet enterprise applications suite.

This new global suite allows companies to run their entire worldwide operations from a central site, significantly lowering costs and providing unified enterprise information. This represents a significant advantage over competing offerings, which are based upon multiple local or regional systems.

Additionally, as a 100-percent Internet applications suite, Oracle Applications Release 11i leverages new Internet business practices that allow customers to put their entire supply and demand chains online. These new business practices have emerged as the key to e-business success, allowing customers to leverage the Internet to expand their markets, retain customers and increase business efficiency.

Oracle Applications Release 11i also encompasses both Oracle's leading enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) applications. Unlike competing offerings, only Oracle Applications provides out-of-the-box integration between these application families. This integration allows companies to manage the entire cycle from customer interactions, through order management, transaction and supply chain management, to fulfillment, billing and customer support. Typically, users of other ERP and CRM systems must engage in extremely costly and lengthy implementation projects to achieve even a minimal degree of integration. Projects such as these can often run into the millions and tens of millions of dollars.

Oracle Applications Release 11i meets all the requirements of global operations and access. Unlike competitive offerings that have been positioned as global, Oracle Applications Release 11i is the only applications suite that runs form a single code base, including localizations, currencies, languages (whether single or double byte) and other specialized enhancements.