Oracle Senior Vice President of Applications Technology Cliff Godwin spoke to Oracle AppsWorld attendees about the company's standards-based leadership in the applications market, and outlined integration options for customers in heterogeneous environments who want a single source of customer truth. Historically, Godwin outlined, companies deployed systems in fragments, making it impossible to have a single source of truth about customers, products or employees. So, for companies to be able to answer basic questions such as "Who are my customers" or "What have they bought?" data warehouses were necessary in order to consolidate data from disparate systems. Oracle set out to streamline the process for bringing all data systems together by creating a single global instance. By developing a unified system that contains the data and business intelligence in one place, customers can now see, access and interpret their customer information without the trade-offs associated with data warehouses. "This gives you better information in a way that is more simple and costs you less," said Godwin. "This also improves governance and auditability because it gives you one standard way to do things, improving transparency and enabling best practices across your organization." For companies who can't get to a global single instance, Godwin outlined integration options, including the Oracle Customer Data Hub and the upcoming integration features of 11i10, the next release of the Oracle E-Business Suite. All of these capabilities, including a variety of applications-to-applications integration standards and industry standards(such as RosettaNet for the high technology sector) help customers integrate with other applications, while still achieving a single source of customer truth. "A global single instance is the ultimate goal but we understand that some companies can't get there right away," said Godwin. "The combination of integration capabilities in our applications and application server eliminate the barriers to bringing all your information together so that companies can leverage what matters most to the success of their business -- information." Godwin started and concluded his 45-minute address reiterating Oracle's recommendation to customers to consolidate their data, and spoke to the built-in benefits of Oracle applications running on the Oracle software infrastructure. "Why are we the only applications vendor advocating the alternative of keeping information together at half the cost? Because Oracle applications can take full advantage of the technology advances in the Oracle platform."