UnitedNetworks goes live with Oracle Treasury

UNITEDNETWORKS GOES LIVE WITH ORACLE TREASURY

**** System Up and Running in Six Weeks ****

AUCKLAND, 11 Dec., 2001 -- Oracle Corp. (NASDAQ: ORCL), the world's largest enterprise software company, today announced that UnitedNetworks, the largest electricity lines company and gas distributor in New Zealand, has gone live with Oracle Treasury, a component of the Oracle E-Business Suite. UnitedNetworks started generating financial reports with Oracle Treasury just six weeks after the first day of implementation, which was supported by a small consulting team from Oracle New Zealand.

"We wanted a treasury product that would provide us with a global view of our cash position," said Ian Hadwin, chief financial officer for UnitedNetworks. "We also wanted flexible reporting, so that we could view multiple financial instruments within one report and see different perspectives of this data. That's why we chose Oracle."

Oracle Treasury facilitates enterprise treasury management and accurate assessment of cash needs so that companies can optimize their global financial position and reduce exposures. A broad range of debt, investment, foreign exchange, and derivative instruments is supported, ensuring maximum flexibility for portfolio management. In addition, Oracle Treasury monitors liquidity, interest rate and currency exposures across the global enterprise, alerting users when financial position movements exceed their specified tolerances.

According to Richard Wood, treasurer for UnitedNetworks and an executive committee member of the New Zealand Society of Corporate Treasurers, "Many other treasury applications cannot readily display more than one financial instrument at a time, making it more difficult to get an enterprise-wide view of a company's overall treasury position."

"For example," added Mr. Wood, "Oracle Treasury allows us to easily view loans and interest rate swaps on the same report, which allows us to see the mix of fixed and floating debt within a certain timeframe. Our previous application could not do this without complicated reports being designed at significant cost and effort. If you wanted to create a new report with our previous treasury system, you effectively had to be a database programmer."

Prior to Oracle, UnitedNetworks used two separate systems to manage its finance operations. By consolidating information into a single Oracle financial system, UnitedNetworks will be able to reduce administrative costs. The Oracle financial system includes Oracle Treasury in addition to the company's previously installed Oracle Cash Management and General Ledger modules.

"We are taking a long-term view and realize that Oracle Treasury will help us minimize administrative costs because we'll only have to maintain one fully integrated system instead of two," added Mr. Hadwin.

"Oracle Treasury is a successful and well-established solution in Asia Pacific, with 16 other installations," said Peter Marriott, Director of Oracle Treasury for Asia Pacific. "UnitedNetworks is the first New Zealand site to go live. They have a very sophisticated treasury operation, so they need the depth of functionality that we offer."

ENDS

** About UnitedNetworks Limited UnitedNetworks is New Zealand's 10th largest company by market capitalization with assets of NZ$2.3 billion. The company is New Zealand's largest network infrastructure company, distributing electricity to about 30% of the country's electricity consumers, gas to over 50% of New Zealand's gas consumers, and owns and manages broadband communication networks in the Auckland and Wellington CBDs. For more information please visit www.unitednetworks.co.nz.

** About Oracle Oracle Corporation is the world's largest enterprise software company. For more information about Oracle, visit our Web site at http://www.oracle.com.

# # #

** Trademarks Oracle is a registered trademark and Oracle9i is a trademark or registered trademark of Oracle Corporation. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners.

Copyright(c) 2001 Oracle Corporation. All Rights Reserved.

Where to go for more info:

1. Where can I learn more about Oracle's Treasury Solution? http://www.oracle.com/applications/financials/index.html?treasury.html

2. Where can I learn more about how Oracle Financials can help transform my business to an e-business? http://www.oracle.com/applications/financials/

3. Where can I learn more about Oracle E-Business Suite? http://www.oracle.com/applications/index.html?content.html

4. Where can I see, try, buy Oracle products: http://oraclestore.oracle.com/

5. Where can I learn more about UnitedNetworks Limited? http://www.unitednetworks.co.nz/

© Scoop Media