Infosys and Oracle help improve City Light…as survey claims Oracle's bad for Java, MySQL

Infosys Technologies Ltd and Oracle has announced the completion of a successful business transformation program incorporating the implementation of Oracle Utilities Network Management System at Seattle City Light, one of America’s largest municipal owned utilities. Tasked by the Seattle-based utility to help leverage its investment in new technology for better customer service, Infosys utilised its industry-leading systems integration capabilities and consulting solutions to implement the Oracle solution within an expedited timeframe of 16 months.

The newly implemented Oracle solution, selected in 2009, at Seattle City Light enhances the coordination of service restoration efforts by enabling real-time information sharing. For example, Seattle City Light can now inform customers of the causes of outages and give estimated times for service restoration, thereby improving communications with customers as well as interactions between dispatchers and repair crews. The network management system also predicts which customers are affected by outages, thus when customers contact the call center, customer representatives will be able to share the outage restoration information as well.

Infosys is a diamond level partner in Oracle Partner Network (OPN). The diamond level distinction, the highest membership level in OPN, recognises the expertise of Infosys with Oracle solutions and its ability to consult and deploy Oracle technologies for clients globally. Infosys also collaborated with UISOL Inc., an integration provider and domain expert, on the Outage Management System for the Seattle City Light implementation.

Bill Vellante, group vice president and general manager, Oracle Utilities: "With the implementation of Oracle Utilities Network Management System, Seattle City Light will be able to accelerate network restoration, improve operational efficiency, enhance system reliability and better manage distribution assets."

Meanwhile, more than 600 IT professionals has completed a survey, whose results seek to provide a bit of insight into community sentiment regarding Oracle's control of open-source projects Java and MySQL.

While opinion polls generally tend to be fairly unscientific--especially when sponsored by rival vendors--the results seem to indicate the IT community is wary of Oracle's plans.

According to the results, 46 percent of respondents believe that open-source projects such as MySQL will stagnate under Oracle ownership. At the same time, 42 percent of respondents believe Oracle will raise the price for MySQL come renewal time.

While not surprising, these two statistics may be at odds with each other. Oracle is always looking to optimize revenue streams and is unlikely to let MySQL falter too much. In fact, I'm confident Oracle is acutely aware of exactly what knobs and dials to tweak in order to extract the most revenue possible while providing as much value as it feels appropriate.

And yet despite a series of snubs toward the Java community, Oracle continues to engage and just this week offered up a new Java Specification Request (JSR) 342, intended to convert Java Enterprise Edition (Java EE) 7 into a building block of cloud services.