Managing the Army's Enterprise Real Property Planning with Oracle® APEX

Herndon, Virginia (August 19, 2008) --VISTA has re-engineered, and is rebuilding, the US Army's Real Property Planning System (RPLANS) in record time using Oracle® APEX. The application is a critical component of the Army's mission in managing its buildings, utilities and land resources. Thousands of users around the world access it everyday to support planning, budgetary and spending decisions involving a real property portfolio with a replacement value of over $263 billion.

According to VISTA's President, David Baxa "We've been building robust enterprise-class solutions in government for over twenty years; part of our stock in trade lies in using the best technologies. VISTA evaluated different technologies and selected APEX based on its out-of-the-box capabilities, a solid UI code, complete support for all of Oracle's performance capabilities, security, scalability, and hooks into maintainable table-driven business logic."

The VISTA technology team was particularly impressed with the speed that an interface could be assembled with APEX, it's flexibility to integrate technologies and its rapid response ability to support functional design changes. VISTA's lead developer, Bharat Pappu commented, specifically, "Equally impressive are the range of plug-ins available for APEX to handle common tasks-saving significant programming effort and creating a richer environment for the user. The speed at which VISTA's new interface was created and populated with data was many times faster and more robust than other development environments could have achieved."

To showcase the capability of Oracle's development technology and the project's growing success, Oracle Corporation has invited VISTA to present their methodology, solution design and results with APEX at the OpenWorld Conference on September 21st, 2008 in San Francisco.

Framing the showcase presentation Mr. Pappu will deliver at OpenWorld is the message, "VISTA's success is clear in the results." The APEX-based solution is becoming the Army's official decision support system that determines how resources are applied to one of the largest real property portfolios in the world. What the Army thought would take years and millions of dollars was delivered by VISTA in just months, and at far greater value. And because the solution is 100% Oracle®, it was immediately accepted by the government's information assurance team for deployment.

As VISTA's David Baxa notes, "We have been able to capture and implement new functionality because the technology no longer limits VISTA's ability to customize and extend features with APEX's feature-rich library. We are extremely pleased with this new development platform from Oracle® and look forward to sharing our success with our colleagues in San Francisco this September.

The Army is using the new RPLANS system prototype today, worldwide. Full deployment will be completed by December 2008.