NZ Post Looks To Business Growth With Oracle

New Zealand Post Looks To Business Growth With Oracle Data Warehouse

*** Oracle's Ease Of Integration and Open Standards Win Out Over Other Vendors

AUCKLAND, New Zealand -- Oracle New Zealand, a wholly owned subsidiary of Oracle Corp. (NASDAQ: ORCL), the world's largest enterprise software company, today announced that New Zealand Post has selected Oracle9i Database, Oracle9i Application Server and Oracle® Warehouse Builder to build a data warehouse that will enable a consolidated view of New Zealand Post's customer activity across its entire enterprise.

Marketing databases from the New Zealand Post's "Letters" business unit will be the first to be consolidated into the data warehouse, which is expected to be up and running in May 2003. The company's courier and retail businesses will be involved in future phases of the project.

New Zealand Post National Marketing Manager Graham Smith says that the company's commitment to stay relevant to customers by better understanding their needs and behaviors fueled the decision to build a data warehouse.

"In our increasingly multi-channel communications world, our customers' needs centre around choice," said Mr. Smith. "The databases that record these choices must be linked together if you want to understand the rationale underlying a customer's decision to do business with you."

Mr. Smith says that a company needs to fully understand customer behaviour if it wants to expand into emerging markets and offer new products. He says that valuable intelligence gained by consolidating marketing, sales and billing information will be used to generate highly targeted marketing campaigns that reflect the customer's true value to the entire company, and not just to a particular business unit.

Business efficiencies are cited as another key driver of the data warehouse project. For example, extracting information from one source is far more efficient and cost-effective than generating individual reports from multiple systems operating within different business units.

"It's all about reconciling answers," said Mr. Smith. "With a data warehouse, if everybody asks the same question, then they'll get the same answer."

New Zealand Post Chief Information Officer Nigel Prince says that the Oracle technology will be used to build a robust and scaleable infrastructure for the future. He cited ease of integration, open standards, total cost of ownership, and the accessibility of Oracle's professional services staff as key reasons for choosing the company over other vendors.

"We are building a foundation for the future that will expand our business capability," said Mr. Prince. "To do this we need a scaleable data warehouse solution that can be easily integrated with our current systems as well as accommodate business growth. Oracle offered a compelling proposition that combined secure, reliable technology with sound professional know-how."

Oracle Consulting is working with New Zealand Post to build customised business intelligence solutions on top of the data warehouse.

Carol Lee Davidson, Oracle New Zealand's technology manager, says that more businesses are looking for infrastructure solutions that are based on open standard technology and that can be fully integrated with other enterprise applications.

"Unlike other vendors, Oracle technology uses open source standards that does not require propriety tools or specialist knowledge to build enterprise applications on top of the data warehouse."

New Zealand Post is New Zealand's fifth largest employer, with nearly 9,300 employees and an annual turnover fast approaching $NZ1 billion.

When completed, the New Zealand Post Oracle Data Warehouse is expected to be one of the largest of its kind in New Zealand.

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