OraNA :: Oracle News Aggregator

These tough economic times have especially hit universities as states cut funding. Colleges are trying to find ways to avoid slashing core services that affect students' educations by eliminating as much waste and inefficiency as possible. Some ways they are doing this is by replacing ancient financial systems, consolidating systems and standardizing business practices. For example, Yeshiva University, a prominent research university, decided to replace their 43-year-old legacy system. They deployed Oracle Hyperion Financial Management in just six months, allowing them to centralize their finance and accounting and generate high-quality budget reports.

The University of Minnesota deployed Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE) with several PeopleSoft financial and human resource applications to help them consolidate data across their five campuses, reduce software costs and significantly reduce the burden on their IT Dept.

You can read more about how universities, such as California State University, Univ. of Massachusetts, and Georgia Institute of Technology, are seeing value in using Oracle's Hyperion Performance Management applications and Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE) alongside their PeopleSoft or E-Business Suite solutions.

To read more, see MarketWatch.

In a previous blog post, I mentioned that the SEC was voting on the topic to allow smaller companies with less than $75m market cap to ignore complying with Section 404 (b) of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.

This is now officially the law. Last week, on July 21, 2010, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act was signed into law. Smaller companies (non-accelerated filers with less than $75m in market cap) are permanently exempted from the provisions of Section 404(b). And in the future, accelerated filers with market caps between $75m-$250m may also benefit. This should come as great news for these smaller, mid-market companies who struggle with high compliance costs.

The act is jam-packed with many regulations. Here are some of the highlights:

• A new watchdog inside the Federal Reserve called the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau will enforce regulations in the Dodd-Frank Act.
• Every 3 years, shareholders will get a "say-on-pay" to control the purse strings on executive compensation. Shareholders can vote on the total compensation package for executives--everything from salary, bonus, stock or equity compensation, severance benefits, golden parachute payments, etc.
• Public companies will have to disclose more information in annual reports. For example, they need to disclose the total compensation of the CEO including the ratio of the CEO's pay against the median total employee compensation.