Saturday, June 24, 2006

4th Oracle Grid Index Results

With the results of the fourth Oracle Grid Index showing yet another overall rise in Grid adoption, the idea of an IT infrastructure that drives innovation, flexibility and dynamism, while reducing costs and complexity, is clearly fast becoming a reality for many of the world’s most successful organisations.

Grid Computing, combined with a Service Oriented Architecture, creates an optimized infrastructure across the entire enterprise. It delivers reliable, flexible, always available computing, with applications delivered as services dynamically tailored to support the needs of the business.

To assess where your organisation is on the Grid Index journey we have devised ten questions that will enable you to benchmark your company's readiness and highlight where you sit compared to other businesses in your region.

Take the survey today and see how your company measures up on the journey that leads to responsive, business focused IT, that can meet current and as yet unforeseeable business demands.

Click here to start


http://www.oracle-gridindex.com/home.html

Thursday, June 22, 2006

Oracle Debuts EDA

Oracle has announced the general availability of its EDA (Event-Driven Architecture) suite, which consists of business activity monitoring (BAM), an enterprise service bus (BUS), an event management server, Oracle Business Rules, and Oracle Enterprise Messaging.

Most of the components are native Oracle technology but Ashish Mohindroo, Senior Product Director of Oracle Fusion Middleware, notes that the BAM product was originally PeopleSoft code. Click here to find out more!

Mohindroo offered Line56 plenty of examples of EDA in action from a business perspective. "If there's a stock transaction delay, instead of waiting for an hourly batch report, the event capture system tells you instantaneously that the system is down, or that the credit report didn't meet the requirements."

EDA thus senses and diagnoses a business event (typically an operational exception like a transaction failure or a failed shipment), but that's only half the story. EDA can only automatically initiate a business process keyed to the event. If a shipment fails, for example, EDA can send instant alerts to all process owners.

EDA's relevance to your business is in direct proportion to the volume of events with which you're faced, and how important it is for you to automate responses to particular events (like exceptions). Mohindroo singles out financial services, telecommunications, retail (think of the vast volume of data created by radio frequency identification), consumer packaged goods, and the public sector as high event-volume environments.

Analyst Ian Charlesworth of Ovum identifies what he considers Oracle EDA's chief strength: "The EDA Suite, like the larger SOA [service-oriented architecture] Suite of which it is part, enjoys extremely good levels of technical integration. It gives organizations the key building blocks they need to 'event-enable' their infrastructure as part of a move towards SOA."

Mohindroo concludes by situating the value of SOA and EDA alike at the heart of business efficiency. "Business is moving towards who can define new business models faster, who can respond faster. EDA allows you to respond faster."

http://www.line56.com/articles/default.asp?ArticleID=7715

Tuesday, June 20, 2006

Oracle Expands Its Contact Center Solution With Telephony@Work Buy

From Gartner:

On 13 June 2006, Oracle announced that it had acquired privately owned Telephony@Work, a provider of premise- and host-based multichannel contact center infrastructure solutions. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

For 18 months, Oracle has been offering Telephony@Work's contact center service through an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) agreement, as part of its Oracle On Demand (formerly "Siebel On Demand") customer relationship management (CRM) solution. Oracle will now sell the Telephony@Work offering as a hosted service (as a stand-alone offering or bundled with Oracle On Demand), a managed service, a customer-premises-based solution, or a hybrid solution including more than one of these options.

Analysis

Gartner's studies of end-users have consistently shown that contact center decision makers place a low value on procuring their contact center infrastructure and CRM software from the same vendor. Oracle will need to aggressively market the advantages of a combined solution to overcome the lack of demand for a synergized solution. In enterprise accounts, Gartner expects that Oracle will focus its contact center infrastructure sales efforts on those accounts that also require Oracle CRM software. In service provider accounts, we expect Oracle to sell contact center infrastructure as a stand-alone solution for hosted services, but to use this footprint to later sell CRM software. Gartner also expects that Oracle will continue to partner with other contact center infrastructure vendors, as failure to do so would upset large and influential mutual accounts.

Gartner's recommendations:

Current Users:

  • If you use Oracle CRM software solutions integrated with contact center solutions from other vendors (such as Avaya, Nortel or Cisco Systems), ask for a commitment from both vendors that integration will be maintained and will receive continued development investment.
  • If you use Oracle On Demand with or without contact center services from Oracle or Telephony@Work, you should ask Oracle for its development road map for contact center services, in light of Oracle's new ownership of the entire product set.
  • If you are using or considering Telephony@Work solutions you should ask for a commitment from Oracle that the Telephony@Work product will continue to be supported and developed as a stand-alone solution separate from Oracle CRM software.

Prospects:

  • If you are seeking a multisite contact center solution and need CRM software integration, but wish to avoid smaller, independent vendors, consider adding Oracle/Telephony@Work to your contact center request-for-information or request-for-proposal distribution list. The offering is available through On Demand or in an on-premises solution. Either way, ask for references.
Analytical Sources: Drew Kraus, Gartner Dataquest and Bern Elliot, Gartner

http://www.gartner.com/DisplayDocument?doc_cd=141468&ref=g_homelink

Oracle Launches Tools For Event-Driven Architectures

June 19, 2006
Oracle Launches Tools For Event-Driven Architectures
Oracles EDA Suite is based on its Fusion Middleware products that allow components to register the events they publish and see and subscribe to events published by other components.
Oracle Corp. on Monday launched a suite of applications for building event-driven architectures.

An EDA is a form of distributed computing in which applications respond to messages sent from other applications. An EDA often leverages service-oriented architectures, which companies use to link internal applications and connect them to computer systems of suppliers and partners.

Oracles EDA Suite is based on its Fusion Middleware products that allow components to register the events they publish and see and subscribe to events published by other components. The middleware also provides event handling.

The suite includes a design time environment, a messaging environment that handles data transmission and routing, a rules engine for defining business policies on events, and tools for analyzing and monitoring events. Oracle, based in Redwood Shores, Calif., also offers pre-built software for radio-frequency identification systems.

Among the industries Oracle is targeting with its EDA Suite are financial services, commercial banking, securities trading, telecommunications, pharmaceuticals, retail, government and manufacturing.

http://www.ddj.com/dept/webservices/189500577