Melbourne IT to be bursting with Oracle

Domain name and hosting specialist Melbourne IT has for the first time revealed the full extent of its implementation of Oracle software as part of its $18 million systems revamp.

The company's ongoing internal integrated web services project will see it build a single view of each of its customers, allowing it to sell its full suite of services across business units and geographies, improving its billing processes and reducing the number of back office systems in the process.

In February, the company revealed it had chosen Oracle software as the heart of the initiative. But in a statement issued by Oracle this morning, the software vendor stated Melbourne IT was using more than the financial management software it had named.

Melbourne IT will use Oracle's Siebel CRM platform, Business Intelligence suite, Identity Management, Fusion Middleware 11g, Database 11g and Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management products, according to Oracle. The project was commenced in March 2010 in Melbourne IT's New Zealand operations and is slated to eventually hit Australia, the US and Europe.

The news comes as Melbourne IT late last week released its annual review and annual report to shareholders, saying 2009 had been a "challenging" year, but most of the challenges — the effects of the global economic crisis, service outages and integration issues — were now behind it.

The company is planning to invest more than $25 million combined in the IWS revamp (the Oracle integration) and its operational support systems project, which has seen it switch storage vendors from IBM to EMC.