Oracles's announcement that it is to help publicly held companies facilitate the preparation, publishing and automatic exchange of financial statements in XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language) by embedding UBmatrix, Inc's XBRL technology into Oracle's Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) System has prompted SAP to claim it was first.
A SAP spokesman commented, “SAP announced the availability of its latest XBRL offering, SAP BusinessObjects XBRL Publishing application by UBmatrix, in the first quarter of this year. While Oracle's move to follow SAP's lead validates our strategy, approach and even our choice of partners, they still have nothing to deliver to customers in need of an immediate XBRL solution.”However, Frank Buytendijk, Vice President and Fellow, Enterprise Performance Management, Oracle Corporation, told FSN, "As the leading brand in Enterprise Performance Management, we’ve been contributing to XBRL since the beginning. Hyperion, now part of Oracle, was a founding member of XBRL International and we've had an XBRL solution available in the market for over five years. We’ve had integration with Ubmatrix for more than a year before the Ubmatrix/SAP announcement, look for instance at http://www.ubmatrix.com/products/report_builder.htm.”Oracle says that organisations relying on components of Oracle’s EPM System such as Oracle’s Hyperion Financial Management for financial and statutory reporting will benefit from UBmatrix’s Taxonomy Designer, XBRL Processing Engine and Report Builder technology through the automation of XBRL statement processing helping to ensure regulatory compliance and streamline the filing process.Oracle’s Hyperion performance management applications have long supported XBRL as a basic output format via Hyperion Financial Reporting. The UBmatrix technology will help to provide a much deeper level of XBRL functionality to organisations says the company.The reason for the spat between SAP and Oracle may have something to do with the likely rapid uptake of XBRL which is fast becoming the standard for financial information exchange and reporting driven by the XBRL standardisation programs being implemented by the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), FDIC and the European Central Banks. Over 500 organisations in 27 countries are now participating in XBRL efforts. Both companies compete aggressively in this space and the changes around XBRL could dislodge former loyalties to either company as companies review their systems to meet the new demands of digital reporting.Oracle’s Frank Buytendijk, added, “Oracle’s product strategy can be described best as being complete, open and integrated. This shows for instance in how many customers successfully use our software to unlock SAP. 45% of Hyperion customers use SAP as the underlying transaction processing system. Proven and validated." According to XBRL.us, the SEC has mandated the use of XBRL for three reporting applications:Public Company Reporting – all public companies must file in XBRL format; companies with worldwide public float greater than $5 billion to comply first starting with period ending June 2009; all other large accelerated filers to comply next starting with period ending June 2010; all other public companies comply with period ending June 2011;Risk Return Summary portion of Mutual Fund Prospectus – mutual funds must begin publishing the risk return summary portion of their prospectuses in XBRL format starting January 1, 2011; and,Credit rating agencies – must begin reporting all ratings actions (initial rating, upgrades, downgrades, etc.) in XBRL format starting in August 2009.Oracle also announced that it is working with UBmatrix to provide enterprise class storage and management for XBRL-based information in Oracle Database 11g. Using Oracle Database’s XML DB feature, Oracle says that organisations can easily and quickly store, access and query their XBRL data.
