Oracle Magazine - July/August 2012

Purdue Pharma’s Sayee Natarajan, director of sales systems (left), and Larry Pickett, vice president and CIO, rely on the development speed and agility of Oracle Application Express for rapid iteration. “We’ve been able to make changes based on business needs very quickly and very effectively,” Pickett says.

“These days, application developers are creating rich, browser-based applications that need to work on everything from the corporate desktop to smartphones and tablets,” says Michael Hichwa, vice president of software development at Oracle. Hichwa is responsible for several Oracle developer products aimed at database application development, including Oracle SQL Developer (see “Database Development Choices” sidebar).

According to Hichwa, development tools for Oracle database products are leveraging HTML5/CSS3 technology at the same time that they’re becoming more declarative, to facilitate faster development. “We want to enable our customers to build out applications faster, and with all the features they need,” Hichwa says.

Faster application development enables organizations to see lower development costs and realize a faster return on investment. It also makes it possible to keep up with the latest I T drivers, such as cloud, social networking, and mobile computing.

tiple platforms, including the iPad.

Purdue is a privately held pharmaceutical company based in Stamford, Connecticut. The company—and independent associated companies—engage in the research, development, production, and marketing of prescription and over-the-counter medicines and healthcare products. Purdue is an industry leader in pain management and is introducing important products in other therapeutic areas such as insomnia.

Purdue Pharma L.P.
purduepharma.com
Location: Stamford, Connecticut
Employees: More than 1,500
Oracle products: Oracle Application Express,
Oracle Database
SNAPSHOTS

THE EXPRESS PATH

Pharmaceutical company Purdue Pharma is one company with an eye on trends as it deploys its state-of-the-art custom-built customer relationship management (CRM) database application, originally built for the desktop, to 1,000 field users on mul-

Lyris
lyris.com
Location: Emeryville, California
Employees: 150
Revenue: US$40 million in 2011
Oracle products: MySQL

Spatial Eye
spatial-eye.com
Location: Culemborg, the Netherlands
Oracle products: Oracle Data Provider for
. NET, Oracle Database 11g Release 2, Oracle
Spatial, Oracle Workspaces

Since a restructuring in 2005, the company has focused on bringing new, innovative medicines to the marketplace while simultaneously managing costs and creating an agile I T infrastructure that can rapidly adapt to meet changing business needs, all the while staying ahead of technology.

“The rapid pace of technology change is
something that we have to stay on top of,” says
Larry Pickett, vice president and CIO at Purdue.
“Over the past several years, we’ve focused on
using newer technologies and approaches, to
support the growth of the company.”
For example, after the restructuring, Pickett
and his team looked for creative ways to drive
down costs while still meeting Purdue’s busi-
ness needs. “That’s where Oracle Application
Express first came into play,” Pickett says.
Sayee Natarajan, Purdue’s director of sales
systems, used Oracle Application Express to