Environnemental Responsability - Oracle Giving up ISO14001 Certification

Too bad, EMEA HR confirmed today that they will NOT go on the official ISO14001 certification process.
Although the official statement is still quite politically correct "Oracle will continue to act in accordance with environmental standard ISO 14001 but will no longer seek the get ISO 14001 certification due to the excessive cost of external certification".

We regret very deeply the lack of external control on our process, considering the major issues facing our World in the very near future. We all know, especially in this financial turnmoil, how important external control is.

We must reeckon we fail to have the company monitor its CO2 emissions. Lots of traveling in certain areas severly impacts the environnement... The only answer for now is to add hybrid cars to the Oracle Policy and also watch for coffee cups !
Giving up the certification is one more step, in contradiction with the marketing still published internally regarding the ISO14001 certification.

If Cost is an issue, our labor union volunteers to pass auditing training and pre-certification review control.
Let's not give up our future !

Read More :

• Oracle Insider Training Environnemental Teaser : Getting Certified (to be obsoleted ?)
• Oracle GEM : Green Employee Manifesto Wiki
  

US Court Ruling Oracle on Extra Hours

An appeal court of justice ruled against Oracle regarding extra hours compensations. Those extra hours need to be payed considering the working state and not their home states, and compensating with a ratio of 1.5 every hours above the 8 hours daily limit.
This sounds quite interesting as out-of-hours compensations are among the most difficult things to have compensated. Situation in France is quite a painfull as extra hours are hardly payed.

Know more : Press Article
This judgment is following an other one from Siebel times

UK Employee Consultation Forum

For internal viewers, prepared by UK Management & Marketing, please consider viewing this very interesting 7 minutes video presenting all the key interest points about having a country Employee Consultation Forum, enabling the company "to be more effective and a better place to work".

Why don't we have such an interesting representative body worlwide to have a better place to work worlwide and a world wide employee consultation forum ?

Shareholders getting nervous about Larry's compensation

The 38% increase on the 72 Millions USD salary package is making some shareholders nervous.
They are pressing for a say on compensation at Oracle, the second-largest computer software maker, whose 29 percent profit growth last fiscal year trailed Ellison's pay increase. The proposal, by the religious group Marianist Province of the U.S., is winning support from activist holders such as the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees and the California Public Employees' Retirement System.
Read More
The ``say on pay'' plan, which goes before investors at an Oct. 10 meeting, may get significant votes to draw attention...

Oracle Class Action News

When top executives claim everything is under control despite the turmoil in the economy,
When our top email system, despite beeing rdbms based with running logfiles cannot bring old emails back to live, even when those emails are Larry Ellison's.

You reach this interesting judge decision : " BOSTON, Sept 3 (Reuters) - A federal judge has ruled that Oracle Corp (ORCL.O: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) destroyed or failed to preserve Chief Executive Larry Ellison's e-mail files sought as evidence in a class-action lawsuit filed in 2001 against the software maker"
More analysis here

Oracle 11g is Green

Have you seen this advertisement regarding Oracle 11G, nearly self labelled as 11 G Green, producing energy savings thanks to the "Green" compression technology, as less storage would be needed ?

This is so much in Oracle best expertise traditions, deploying a huge intelligence effort in marketing instead of doing the real hard work.

Despite significant savings efforts in Redwood Shores, Let's reckon much of the hard work is still to be done outside California, not the least internally, where no-one can say how much CO2 is generated from the internal travels.

Oracle Annoucement "Go Green with Fewer Disk Drives and Less Energy As seen in the Wall Street Journal and other major publications, Oracle is proud of the energy and space savings that Oracle Advanced Compression delivers. It helps Oracle Database 11g use much less the disk space and power, while it runs faster than ever before. With Oracle Advanced Data Compression, Oracle customers are making the planet a little greener"

See the interesting threads developpements "Green is not in Oracle vocabulary" , "Sorry Oracle : Green IT is for you too" from a Charles Philips interview, 11 G - "G" stands for Green or Greenbacks, Green is the new black,

Your comments are welcome.

For the records : Oracle Position - Beeing Green - Oracle High Tech Green Giant

BEA Oracle Acquisition - Change In Control

Let's wish a big welcome to our new collegues of BEA, joining us as EU just released its approval regarding the merge.

Your comments are welcomed below.

BEA Acquisition closing

Latest news from Reg Developper :
"Oracle's checks come as the company today cleared the latest hurdle in its proposed acquisition process. BEA shareholders on Friday voted to approve the deal, leaving just European Commission regulators to give the go ahead. The deal is expected close on April 30."

Sun / MySQL Acquisition : "Oracle is the only winner in this deal"

An interesting opinion from JOHN DVORAK'S @ Marketwatch, with many comments.

"I'm close to being convinced that Oracle wanted to buy MySQL to kill the product, but knew that it couldn't pull off the stunt itself. It would be too obvious, especially to European Union regulators. So it sent in a stooge to do the job."