Oracle, Plumtree target Sarbanes-Oxley

Oracle will release a new application in the coming weeks designed to help companies comply with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, a set of corporate disclosure and financial reporting rules for companies that are traded publicly in the U.S., the company said Wednesday. Meanwhile, corporate portal vendor Plumtree Software on Wednesday teamed with HandySoft to roll out a portal/business process management offering aimed at simplifying Sarbanes-Oxley compliance.

Separately, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Tuesday said that most large U.S. companies will be required to show compliance with Section 404 of the act for fiscal years ending on or after June 15, 2004, extending by about eight months the original deadline. Smaller businesses and “foreign private issuers” have until April 15, 2005, the SEC said.

Sarbanes-Oxley was signed into law last year by President George W. Bush in a move to restore confidence in the U.S. financial markets after the publicized accounting scandals involving Enron, WorldCom, and others. The goal is to cut down on fraud by making corporate finances more transparent, and to make top executives more accountable for the financial reports issued by their companies.

Oracle’s new application, Internal Controls Manager, is designed to help with Section 404 of the act, which deals with the “certification of financial reporting processes and controls.” It requires companies to identify risks to internal business processes that could affect their financial results and to document the controls in place to mitigate those risks. Outside auditors must evaluate those controls and report any problems.

The types of risks can be many and varied. For a manufacturing company, for example, one risk might be receiving faulty components from a supplier that end up being shipped in finished goods, said Steve Miranda, an Oracle vice president for applications development. Internal Controls Manager can be used to create a library of such risks that can then be linked to each business process in an organization.

Other vendors including PeopleSoft, IBM, Documentum, Nth Orbit, and Hyperion Solutions have announced applications and tools to help with Sarbanes-Oxley compliance. In a report published earlier this month, AMR Research said the act has the potential to be “bigger than Y2K” in its effect on businesses of all sizes. The world’s largest 1,000 public companies have earmarked more than $2.5 billion in total to spend this year on investigation and initial compliance, the analyst company said.

Oracle consulted with Pricewaterhouse Coopers and other audit firms to develop its new application, which is due for release in June or July, Miranda said. The application will be sold separately from Oracle’s E-Business Suite; pricing was still being finalized this week, he said.

Internal Controls Manager works with E-Business Suite 11i, the latest version of Oracle’s suite of business applications. It links to other Oracle applications including Oracle Tutor and Oracle Workflow, the company said. Businesses can also outsource the application from Oracle, Miranda said.

The Plumtree Sarbanes-Oxley Solution combines the San Francisco-based company’s portal, collaboration, search, and personalization technologies with application logic and business process management capabilities from HandySoft. The offering is designed to help companies build the necessary internal controls and reporting procedures for collecting and reporting financial data.

In Tuesday’s statement the SEC said it had unanimously approved requirements in Section 404 of the act. Generally speaking, the SEC said, U.S. companies with a market capitalization of over $75 million will be required to comply with the rules for fiscal years ending on or after June 15, 2004. Smaller businesses and “foreign private issuers” have until April 15, 2005, to comply, the SEC said.

Cathleen Moore contributed to this article.