Carlson Selects Oracle On Demand to Improve Performance and Reliability of Financial and Business Systems

Oracle today announced that Carlson, a privately held, global hospitality and travel company, is using Oracle On Demand (www.oracle.com/us/products/ondemand/index.html) to support the performance and reliability of its critical financial and business systems.

With more than 5,200 users accessing its core financial systems and functions, including order-to-cash and purchase-to-pay, Carlson needed a flexible platform that could reduce risk and improve the performance and availability of its IT infrastructure.

After evaluating different On Demand solutions, Carlson, which encompasses more than 1,075 hotels, including Radisson®, Country Inns & Suites By CarlsonSM, Park Inn® and Park Plaza®; and more than 1,000 restaurants, including T.G.I. Friday’s® and Pick Up Stix®, selected Oracle On Demand to replace its existing hosted environment.

With Oracle On Demand, Carlson was able to successfully transition its comprehensive portfolio of Oracle technologies, including the Oracle E-Business Suite Financials (www.oracle.com/us/products/applications/ebusiness/financials/053262.html) , Oracle Hyperion Planning (www.oracle.com/us/solutions/ent-performance-bi/hyperion-planning-066537.html?origref=www.oracle.com/us/solutions/ent-performance-bi/performance-management/038419.htm) , Oracle Hyperion Financial Management (www.oracle.com/us/solutions/ent-performance-bi/hyperion-financial-management-066534.html?origref=www.oracle.com/us/solutions/ent-performance-bi/performance-management/038419.htm) and Oracle Hyperion Data Relationship Management (www.oracle.com/us/solutions/ent-performance-bi/data-relationship-management-066553.html) to its new hosted environment one month ahead of schedule.

Relying on the combination of Oracle Database 11g (www.oracle.com/us/products/database/index.html) and Oracle Real Application Clusters (www.oracle.com/us/products/database/options/real-application-clusters/index.html) , Carlson improved system availability and reliability, while increasing the performance of some runtime transactions by up to 50 percent.

With Oracle On Demand, Carlson has also been able to maximize the value of its Oracle technologies through instant access to Oracle experts that manage its entire Oracle technology stack based on proven configurations.

As the global leader in On Demand solutions, Oracle On Demand manages the infrastructure, software, security, service levels, and IT governance needs of more than 5.5 million end users, enabling them to increase productivity and gain a competitive advantage.

“After carefully evaluating our options, we selected Oracle On Demand and have been very impressed with its flexibility and performance,” said Steve Brown, Chief Information Officer, Carlson. “Not only were we able to transition to the new environment one month ahead of a very aggressive schedule, but it has significantly improved the reliability of our core applications and increased performance by over 50 percent in some cases. By leveraging Oracle’s standard processes for maintenance, patches and upgrades, we are also able to stay current without burdening our business users with prohibitively long system outages. Based on their effectiveness, Carlson decided to expand its contracted services through Oracle On Demand.”

“By enabling our customers to align their software deployment choices with specific business needs, Oracle On Demand provides the flexibility and support required to accelerate business value,” said Marc Schwarz, senior vice president, Oracle On Demand. “As a highly successful global organization, Carlson demands operational excellence. With our team of experts supporting its critical financial and business systems, we have been able support its business goals by increasing the performance of its technology stack, while also reducing the burden on its internal IT resources.”