To take the guesswork out of budgeting for applications and information technology, Oracle Corporation, the world's largest enterprise software company, announced the launch of Oracle(r) All-In-One, a new program that provides customers Oracle applications software, implementation and ongoing management.

The product announcement, which is an applications industry first, was made at the ongoing Appsworld in San Diego on Wednesday. Available now, Oracle All-In-One will help customers achieve more predictable, lower applications and information technology costs via an outsourced model, said an Oracle release.

"Customers can spend up to four times the cost of their software license per year to own and manage their applications," said Brian Zrimsek, research director at Gartner, Inc. "Over five years, that totals to as much as 20 times their license cost to operate and manage their applications. Ownership costs are often underestimated, in some cases, by as much as 70 per cent, in many IT budgets."

"In calculating the cost of a software project, companies tend to focus on the purchase price and initial implementation," said Timothy Chou, president, Oracle Outsourcing. "Yet even when fully operational, software is never 'free'. It must be supported, maintained and upgraded - often across geographies and in multiple languages, currencies and regulatory climates.

"At Oracle, we believe companies should understand where their software dollars are going before committing to an enterprise solution. Oracle All-In-One provides the tools to help make that decision."

Oracle All-In-One addresses the challenge of containing the total cost of deploying applications by offering a complete price that includes applications purchase (or upgrade to the latest version), implementation and ongoing applications management via Oracle Outsourcing.

"Oracle Outsourcing will assume overall responsibility of ongoing system management because we are looking for a way to better manage the total cost of our IT investment. Not only will we have a more predictable IT spend with Oracle Outsourcing, we now are able to make more accurate budget forecasts," said Earl Christensen, president at Propeller Inc.

As part of Oracle All-In-One, Oracle will offer customers a free assessment, starting on the show floor at Oracle AppsWorld, to determine their known cost for software, implementation and management via Oracle Outsourcing. Customers not attending Oracle AppsWorld can start their assessments on Oracle.com.

One of the goals of Oracle All-In-One is to meet increasing customer demand to migrate quickly to the latest version of Oracle E-Business Suite 11i and Oracle E-Business Suite Outsourcing.

As part of this new offering, the company also introduced several programs for both new and existing customers - all designed to make it quick, easy and affordable for customers to move to the latest version of Oracle applications and begin receiving the benefits of Oracle Outsourcing.

The new offerings, as part of Oracle All-In-One, include Oracle Outsourcing Accelerators, Oracle Business Flow Accelerators and Oracle Upgrade Accelerators.

Oracle Outsourcing Accelerators are designed to help existing Oracle customers migrate to the latest version of Oracle E-Business Suite Outsourcing in four weeks or less.

Oracle Outsourcing Accelerators include an automated assessment tool to determine the level of IT complexity for migrating, a technical upgrade to the latest version of Oracle E-Business Suite and migration to an Oracle E-Business Suite Outsourcing certified configuration. The price for migration to outsourcing will vary depending on the level of customisations for each customer.