Dinesh Knowledge Planet :
Thoughts on CRM,MDM,Analytics,Mobility,Cloud & Digital Customer Experience (DCX)
Welcome Message
***Hearty Welcome to Customer Champions & Master Minds ***
I believe " Successful CRM/CXM " is about competing in the relationship dimension. Not as an alternative to having a competitive product or reasonable price- but as a differentiator. If your competitors are doing the same thing you are (as they generally are), product and price won't give you a long-term, sustainable competitive advantage. But if you can get an edge based on how customers feel about your company, it's a much stickier--sustainable--relationship over the long haul. Thank You for visiting my Blog , Hope you will find the articles useful.
Wishing you Most and More of Life, Dinesh Chandrasekar DC*
Re-Blogging this from one of my Friend's site with her Permission.All Credits to http://anokhajewellery.wordpress.com/2013/01/01/about-customer-experiences-and-the-notion-of-the-remembering-self/
A friend came back from a 3-week vacation on the Maldives. Lucky guy!
“How was your vacation?”, I asked.
“Great”, he said.” The place is just marvelous and the diving experience was phenomenal. However, the flight on the way back was horrendous, which ruined the whole vacation.”
“Really?” I raised brows. “How could possibly an 9-hour flight ruin 3 weeks of great vacation? You had this vacation, you experienced every moment of it….”
“You made the choice that the 9-hour flight is all you will remember about this vacation?”, I continued.” So, you chose a selected piece of memory to drive how you feel about this experience now.”
There is nothing wrong with what my friend said. This is where we seriously need to understand the differences between the Experiencing self and the Remembering self, as Daniel Kahneman, Nobel laureate and founder of behavioral economics, brilliantly highlights in his enlightening (at least for me) TEDtalk:
The reason we need to differentiate between the notion of the Experiencing self and the Remembering self is because the Experiencing self has the present, which is a chain of moments. As Daniel Kahneman mentions, the psychological presence is set to 3 seconds long…most of the experiences we make leave no trace and are completely ignored by the Remembering self.
For the Remembering self the chains of moments are lost forever, but what stays are the memories. And memories are defined by:
- changes
- significant moments
- endings. As Daniel Kahneman mentions “…endings are very, very important.”
Why does this matter in the context of Customer Experience for businesses? Because the Remembering self is the story-teller and the decision maker. Our memory tells us what to keep from our experiences to create a story. This means, if you have a business and you address your customers via multiple channels, you’d better make sure you consistently deliver positive cross-channel experience. You need to address the Remembering self in your customers, because this is the story your customers will tell about you, the story they will publish on Facebook, will tell their friends, will tweet about. And this matters because this will either create business value for your company or negatively impact it.
Check out an example for getting an insurance policy.
A customer might have had a very positive interaction on your website, visiting your branch, but imagine at the last point of that interaction, checking out in an online-shop, there is an error, the customer might report that “the whole experience has been ruined”. You might argue “Wait a second, the customer has had a lot of positive experiences, only the last interaction was a bumpy one, but, hey, not a big deal…..” Oh, YES, it is a BIG DEAL, it is what the customer’s Remembering self decided to keep from the chain of interactions. Remember, endings matter!
That’s why you need to keep in mind that consistent positive cross-channel customer experience is the only sustainable advantage you might have. In fact, this is the only key differentiator left for companies in today’s economy. One single bad experience might ruin your reputation, affect your net promoter score and keep a customer away from you or prevent a customer from recommending your product/service- all effects detrimental to your business…
Take away thoughts
1. Experienceshappen anytime, anywhere, every day, all day- some are human, some involve interaction with technology, but they all add up!
2. Pamper the Remembering self of your customers with positive interactions, surprise them, wow them, show empathy to your customers! Last week I received an e-mail fromAirbnb with proposed Christmas greetings cards for me to send to my hosts during 2012, ready-to-go, all I had to do is select the design of the greeting card and hit the send button. Was I surprised? Hell yes! Was I positively surprised? Hell yes!!! Did I remember this? Yes, I did? Did I tell this to my friends? Sure, i did…it is a minor thing, but it matters.
3. Be there when your customers don’t expect you, because changes and significant moments of the customer journey matter!
4. Design the story you will hear your customer tell about your brand and/or company.
6. Don’t fail the Remembering self of your customers! What customers will expect from you largely depends on what they remember doing business with you, which is very different from what they have experienced doing business with you.
Thanks to Krassi http://anokhajewellery.wordpress.com/about/
Every
customer interaction offers the opportunity to improve the customer
relationship, or invite a customer to shop their next purchase elsewhere. Customer
Experience Management is a return to the focus on serving and retaining
customers—while better integrating that mission with culture, processes and technology.
The CX technology movement is in rapid transition and may provide the conduit
between strategy and delivery. While obvious, it bears repeating that
implementing technology without accompanying strategy is a recipe for a
troubled implementation (at best) or an implementation failure. But with that
caveat, several CRM software vendors are stepping up to deliver the missing
link—that ability to make customer data actionable and deliver it at the time
and location of customer interaction with the goal of meeting customer
expectations and achieving a sustainable competitive advantage. But sometimes
it's helpful to take a step back and be reminded of the reason for business.
And in the simple but powerful words of Peter F. Drucker, "the purpose of
business is to create and keep a customer." Everything else is secondary
(at best), and designed to support mission #1.And it's this mission to acquire
and retain customers that is putting new found focus on the business strategy
of Customer Experience Management (CXM).
To better accommodate the
multiple challenges that make business complex, CXM is evolving to make serving
customers less of a standalone objective and more of a mission tightly integrated
with corporate culture, business processes and supporting technology.
The
Business Problem Is Accelerating
Products are becoming more
quickly copied making product superiority a diminishing advantage. Technology
innovation is depreciating at a faster pace. Brand recognition and value may be
suddenly compromised by a single angry customer whose voice is dramatically
magnified online. New and constantly expanding social channels give start-ups
and small competitors messaging and marketing reach previously only available
to large companies.
Further, customers are more
informed, connected and demanding. Customers now have on-demand access to a
supplier's customers and can quickly interpret how those customers view their
supplier's support and services. This information becomes part of a new
prospect's purchase criterion, determining which supplier to purchase from and
even whether to pay a premium for exceptional support.
Delivering superior products and
services remains paramount, but businesses must recognize that this objective
will be increasingly challenged and therefore the importance of retaining
existing customers will grow ever more important. Consistently meeting or
exceeding customer expectations may be the last sustainable competitive
advantage not easily and quickly replicated by competitors.
A
Shift toward CX Technology
At a time when business is
becoming considerably more complex and competitive, existing customer
acquisition and retention strategies supported by current systems are too often
not working.
CRM software systems have
responded well to capturing customer profile data (such as company demographics
and individual contacts) and transaction history. New social CRM tools are
complimenting CRM systems to include unstructured and social data that reside
in externally managed sources.
There remains an open challenge
though in interpreting and staging the data so that it may be immediately
actionable and injected at the point of customer interaction. Delivering
customer intelligence and content at the exact point in time of customer
engagement in order to benefit the customer experience is a difficult process
that remains elusive for most businesses.
Think about the business
scenarios. While the list of customer interaction points is unbounded, here are
some common Point of Customer (PoC) engagement examples:
·For the
customer looking to make a purchase on an e-commerce site,
does the website apply purchase history and known customer preferences to make
a smart suggestion, next-best-offer, or cross-sell or up-sell promotion that is
both relevant and personalized?
·For the
customer placing an order on the telephone, is the agent or
order entry clerk able to answer product questions or otherwise respond within
seconds with the right information to result in a transaction?
·For the
customer seeking help on a social network—perhaps even the
vendors own Facebook page—does the supplier hear the request and do they
retrieve, route, respond and resolve the customer's request in a reasonable
timeframe?
·For the
customer who incurs a product defect, is the call center agent able
to immediately validate the product purchase, determine if the product is under
warranty, issue a Return Merchandize Authorization (RMA) and initiate a
replacement order – in less than a few minutes and without multiple transfers?
·For a
customer support incident not immediately resolved, is the
customer permitted to continue the dialogue with cross-channel support options?
Not to be confused with multi-channel support. For reference, multi-channel
delivers a consistent experience on each channel, where cross-channel support
permits customers to begin their engagement on one channel and then use
different channels to continue or conclude their issue.
·For the mobile customer
seeking sales or support access, does the supplier's online system support
their mobile device form factor, permit the customer to use video from their
smartphone and allow the customer to schedule a call back time?
·Does the self-service portal
dynamically deliver content that is most relevant to the customer's business
and support problem, and permit the customer to instantly switch from self-service
to chat or a live agent call?
·For the
customer receiving a marketing promotion from his supplier, is
that offer highly targeted to his company's explicit (demographics) profile and
implicit (behaviours) history with the supplier?
·For the
customer engaged in a sales cycle with a supplier, is the
information given by the customer regarding his situation, buy criteria and
purchase process shared among the supplier side sales team and does that sales
team apply the buyer's objectives and buy cycle process to their sales side
process (or do they ignore the buyer's purchase process and simply inject their
traditional sales pattern)?
Each of these customer
interaction points can benefit from technology. In fact, for organizations of
even mild scale technology is a requirement. However, to satisfy this need most
customers are turning to specialized, often best of breed technologies
positioned between their customer systems of record (generally CRM software)
and point of customer engagement. It's a workable scenario, but comes with the
complexities of managing even more systems and further contributes to disparate
data silos.
A new technology approach is now
on the horizon. Forward looking CRM
software vendors such as Oracle, SAP,
Microsoft and Pega are introducing or expanding CRM
systems to achieve CXM objectives. Oracle is clearly leading the CX technology
push with its Oracle CX software
and other vendors are advancing their core applications beyond data capture and
information reporting to actually deliver knowledge and content at the point of
customer interaction and in a way that meets customer expectations. CXM is
positioned to be the next break-out sector in the CRM industry.
What
Makes Oracle CX Different?
While several CRM software
vendors are praising the virtues of Customer Experience and by association
suggesting that their CRM software products are delivering CX value for their
customers, the reality is that most are riding a new wave with an unchanged
product. Oracle's play is different. Since January 2011, the company has been
developing and acquiring a suite of focused applications that collectively
deliver something new to directly impact the customer experience at various
touch points.
Consider the origins and results
of the newly formed Oracle CX software portfolio:
·The
January 2011 acquisition of ATG now serves as Oracle's e-commerce-selling based
experiences, to deliver interaction such as predictive offers.
·The June
2011 acquisition of Fatwire Software (now WebCenter Sites) compliments
e-commerce experiences but more so stands as Oracle's tool for delivering
dynamic website content and marketing-based experiences.
·The
December 2011 acquisition of Endeca provides Oracle the other half of its
complete commerce solution. And by bundling ATG's product catalog functionality
with Endecas search capabilities, merchandisers have more tools to make
products more accessible more easily.
·The July
2011 acquisition of the InQuira contact center and knowledge management
solution provides Oracle with a strong knowledge management suite, integrated
with natural language processing, self-service support, online customer forums
and agent-assisted CRM, to deliver content and knowledge at customer interactions
through various channels.
·The
January 2012 acquisition of RightNow Technologies delivers Oracle's service
based experiences. The RightNow acquisition was key in acquiring strong
functionality to collaborate with customers, with tools such as the Cloud
Monitor and online communities (Support Community and Innovation Community). In
fact, RightNow Technologies was the first large CRM software vendor to eschew
the virtues of CXM—years before competitors and their acquisition by Oracle.
·The
announcement to acquire Vitrue in May 2012 followed by the announcement to
acquire Collective Intellect two weeks later, collectively delivers Oracle's
social based experiences.
·The
latest Acquisition of Eloqua, The marketing campaign excellence tool is another
milestone of Oracle CXM commitment.
These best of breed acquisitions,
along with organic development to Oracle Siebel CRM, Oracle Fusion CRM, Oracle
WebCenter, Oracle Knowledge Management and the Oracle Social Network have
resulted in a portfolio that empowers new opportunities and is unmatched in the
competitive landscape. This is clearly not a case where oracle is wrapping a
new banner on an old or existing solution.
Oracle
CX Product Positioning
What we hear from Anthony Lye, Senior VP Oracle CXM he
advised that customers were buying apps and putting them between their CRM
software and their customer interactions—in effect using these apps to extract
and deliver CRM data at the exact time and location where it can be used to
influence a customer interaction.Anthony noted that companies are
struggling with making CRM data actionable at the many customer experience
touch points and thinking beyond CRM in order to achieve the last mile of
customer interaction delivery. And rather than continue to use a collection of
3rd party products and bespoke development, Oracle aims to offer a portfolio of
integrated, best of breed solutions to help customers achieve what may be the
only sustainable differentiation they have left.
Oracle CX is less about being the
successor to CRM and more about addressing a business opportunity using
technology that supplements CRM. In fact where CRM ends and CXM starts is that
intersection between company and customer—that point of engagement where
suppliers actually leverage the data from their CRM system to personalize
interactions, reward customers for their loyalty and advocacy, and deliver a
customer experience that delights customers.The CX software tools will
compliment and extend existing IT investments (in both Oracle and non-Oracle
environments) with best of breed products that provide incremental automation
and value. Oracle CX looks to be the banner for a collection of tools that may
be acquired individually or in small suites.
·Oracle
Cloud CxM video briefing
Oracle Fusion Tap Mobility Solution
Next
Steps for Oracle CX
Oracle is leading the market in
this category. While the upside of leading a burgeoning market is obvious, the
downside is that many other CRM and enterprise software vendors will clearly
harness the CXM spotlight to create self-serving CX definitions that align
perfectly to their existing CRM software suites.
Competitors who hijack the CX
messaging and redefine this customer strategy (that has yet to cross the chasm)
along their parochial interests will challenge Oracle and frustrate technology
buyers—to the point where it is incumbent upon Oracle to clearly articulate
their solution, its alignment with business strategy and its measurable value. There
is a great opportunity for Oracle to lead this race with the Cloud/Hybrid based
CxM solution.
Wishing everyone a great and
harmonious Year Ahead, Happy New Year 2013
Dinesh
Chandrasekarhas
over 14 + years of rich IT experience inCRM, MDM & BI implementations,
Management Consulting and Strategic Advisory services to CXOs.
Heading GDC & New Markets (Middle East &
APAC) CRM & MDM Practice.
GDC Sponsor for Oracle
Diamond Partner Initiative
Alliance Manager and Sponsor for Oracle Diamond Partner
Initiative of Hitachi Ltd
Responsible for Emerging Markets Alliance relationship with Top 5 Product
Vendors
Proven Delivery & Solution expertise in CRM and MDM
project executions.
Actively Involved in Presales, Practice
building, Delivery, Alliance Relationship Management, Account
Mining, and Business Development.
Representative
Client Engagement List : Citibank Global, GE Group, Life Technologies US,
Toyota Financial Services US, Symantec UK
, Honeywell US, Juniper Networks US, Hypercom US, Dell US, NetApp US, Oracle Corporation US,
Microsoft US, Informatica US,UMB US,Riyad Bank Saudi, Saudi Telecom-Saudi,
Almunajem Saudi, SAPTCO Saudi,ALJ Toyota Saudi, Dubai World UAE, Emaar UAE i, Abu
Dhabi Chamber of Commerce UAE, Dunai Bank UAE, Fullerton Securities India, Bank
of China, Alliance Bank-Malaysia, Care Hospitals, Select Comfort,F5 Networks,
Hafil Transport , Aljeri KSA, PIB Bank Ukraine, MDB Bank Vietnam, Gulf Drugs
UAE, ATS Saudi, Nintendo US, Darling International US, Overhead Doors US, AB
Sciex US, Jomaih Pepsi Saudi .Etc.
Practice Director and
Delivery Head - CRM & MDM, GDC
Hitachi
Consulting :Public Company; 5001-10,000 employees;
Management Consulting industry
April
2010 – Present (2 years 8 months) Hyderabad Area, India
-
Part of Hitachi Consulting's GDC Enterprise Capability Organisation (ECO)
- Practice Enrichment - CRM & MDM expertise
- Global Presales and Solution Orchestration expertise to all Oracle Siebel CRM,
MDM & Cloud CRM Applications.
- Delivery Support to all large scale CRM
and MDM programs
- Collaborate with Inter Competency teams to provide unique value propositions
to our prospects and existing customer.
- Develop Incubation centers for new technologies ( Fusion )
- Manage Oracle Alliance Relationship
- Thought Leadership (Whitepapers, Presentations, Knowledge Mgt)
- Incubation support to all Other Technology CRMs
Privately
Held; 1001-5000 employees; Information Technology and Services industry
January
2005 – March 2007 (2 years 3 months)
Actively
Involved in Competency building, Project Delivery, Oracle Alliance relationship
management,Presales, Account Mining, Business Development and Fusion CRM
incubation development.
Practice head of Siebel CoE and Lead member of Enterprise Application group of
Sierra Atlantic
Public
Company; 10,001+ employees; GE; Financial Services industry
January
2004 – December 2005 (2 years)
Part
of GE Capital Siebel ITSMM Team which managed some of the prestigious GE Siebel
Projects for the clients such as
- GE Commercial Finance, US
- GE Vendor Finance Services, US
- GE Aircraft, US
- GE European Equipment Finance, Europe
-Very Challenging and Fulfilling Experience during those period.
Public
Company; 10,001+ employees; C; Financial Services industry
June
2000 – May 2003 (3 years)
Worked
as a Business for the Following Citibank Implementations
Citibank Siebel Barcelona Call Center Implementation covering the following
Countries: Multi Currency & Country Rollouts
- Citibank UK Siebel Implementation
- Citibank Spain Siebel Implementation
- Citibank Portugal Siebel Implementation
- Citibank Greece Siebel Implementation
Worked closely with Multiple Vendor in the Integration Projects including
Nucleus Software, Kale Consultants, Polaris Software Labs, Byson Systems &
Citibank India Technologies.
* Excellent Exposure to the world of CRM
and Banking Technologies. Turning points in my career.
Marketing
Analyst
Marketing
Research Firm
April
1997 – May 1999 (2 years 2 months)
Market
Research and CRM Analyst
- Worked in Multiple Market Research Project for prestigious Consumer Goods
Clients
- Product Launch research & incubation of new promotions to support the
launch
- Competitor Analysis and USP evaluation
MBA (IT & Finance), ICFAI Business School Hyderabad
BBA (Marketing & GM) – University of Madras
Certifications
• Oracle Automotive Industry Specialist
• Oracle Consumer Goods Industry
Specialist
• Oracle Public Sector Industry Specialist
• Oracle Healthcare Industry Specialist
• Oracle Aerospace and Defense Industry Specialist
• Oracle Professional Services Industry specialist
• Siebel CRM 8.1X Specialist
• Oracle SOA Implementation Champion
• Oracle Siebel Professional Implementation Champion
• Oracle SOA Champion
• Oracle Business Intelligence Champion.
• Oracle Fusion Middleware Champion
• Oracle Fusion Middleware Champion
Independent
Coursework
·Advance Diploma
in Entrepreneurship Development (ILM)
·Diploma in
Industrial Psychology (ILM)
·Advance Diploma
in Integrated Management (CDFI)
·Six Sigma Green
Belt Training (GE Capital)
·Sierra Atlantic
Leadership Program (Sierra Atlantic)
·Hitachi
Consulting Top Gun Executive Leadership Program
( Hitachi )
Accolades
and Awards
• GE Gold Award Winner for the CRM
Knowledge Management Implementation
• GE special appreciation Award (2005)
• Best Implementation Team Awards (multiple)
• Excellence in Process Award – Sierra Atlantic 2006
• Best Individual Performance Award – Sierra Atlantic 2006
• Team awards ( Multiple projects ) -2008 & 2009
• CEO Award for Delivery and Presales Excellence 2009-10
• Best Individual Performance Award – Hitachi Consulting 2009
• Hitachi Consulting Service Excellence Award
• Hitachi's Inspiration of the year Global Americas 2012 Award.
This
year Oracle Open World is bigger than ever with some exciting events,
announcements and of course with Hitachi becoming 11th Oracle
Diamond Partner is an absolute landmark to our Oracle practice. Dinesh
Chandrasekar and Phani Tamarapalli from our HCC GDC office had the opportunity
to be part of this big oracle event and also attended Hitachi’s Oracle Diamond
Partner Celebration @ SFO, United States.
The
process of digesting the announcements, roadmaps and doubts – confirmed or not
– can proceed in full swing. What has become of last year’s plans, what this
year’s plans are (for next year and beyond) and what has materialized in terms
of Oracle’s product portfolio? For everyone, the answers to these questions and
the conclusions will be somewhat different – depending on focus, expectations
and requirements. However, some conclusions will be shared by most who attended
Oracle Open World 2012. Without a doubt, some of the important themes were and
will be: cloud – and at respectable distance – the next generation of database
technology (12c) and of engineered systems (Exadata… X3-v2), mobile
availability of both standard applications (Fusion Applications and other
Oracle Applications products) and custom Portals and applications (through
ADF Mobile on iOS and Android).
Facts and Opinions
The
biggest thing by far for Oracle this year (past, present and future) is
the Cloud. For several reasons, including competition
(defensive) and opportunity (offensive), Oracle wants to be in the cloud as
quickly as possible – with a full stack offering. Its USPs will be the
completeness of the stack (IaaS, PaaS and SaaS including the Social Platform
for the Enterprise) and the ability to move from on premise (Oracle software
running locally) to the cloud and back. Where Oracle’s software is involved
(PaaS on Database, WebLogic and Fusion Middleware) Oracle may be able to
compete on price as well – as the price one charges for software can be quite
flexible. Through the SaaS offering, Oracle makes the difference on
functionality as well as price – since no one else can offers that same
software – Fusion Applications – from their cloud.
One
other innovative offering from Oracle: if you want all the benefits of the
cloud – pay per use model, no upfront investment, fully managed infrastructure
and platform – but you cannot have the data leave your premise, for example
because of regulatory reasons – you can have Oracle bring the cloud to you. The
exact same offering of the Oracle Cloud, managed by Oracle, running within your
firewall on your premise. Given that Oracle has the hardware, the software and
the service organization to manage it all, they can easily extend their Cloud
offering with this service – but that would not be easy for anyone else who
does not have the full stack. Here is a real differentiator for Oracle.
Fusion
Applications have 400 customers. 100 will be
live by end of October. Of these, a substantial percentage (over 65%) run on
the cloud. Note: recent SaaS acquisitions Taleo and RightNow are included in
these numbers. Only a small percentage runs through Oracle on Demand (managed
services with bring your own license) and another small but slightly larger
segment runs Fusion Applications on premise. Fusion Applications R5 will be made available sometime in
October 2012. Integration into Fusion Applications of the Oracle Social Network
is one of the main focus areas right now – as is making parts of the data and
functionality from Fusion Applications available on tablets and mobile devices.
To that end, a REST style API is exposed for the Fusion Applications. Another
major innovation for Fusion Applications is the next generation of User
Experience – the improved, simplified look and feel that runs well on both
tablet and browser-on-desktop.
ADF: Over the last years, Oracle has
adopted ADF – Application Development Framework – as
the technology for virtually all of its products – turning ADF into Advanced
Dog Food as it were. From Fusion Applications to Enterprise Manager and run
time tools such as the SOA Composer and the Golden Gate monitor as well as end
user frontends including WebCenter Portal – everything is built using ADF. One
of the advantages of this approach is that because ADF is embracing HTML 5 and
support for tablets (including multi touch and gestures) – as a result all products
based on ADF are automatically enabled for tablet usage. Furthermore,
application extensions that need to run on mobile devices using native device
capabilities and/or in off-line mode can now be developed using ADF Mobile. An
extension of ADF, developer skills and many existing application artefacts can
be reused for the creation of ADF Mobile applications. With the release of ADF
Mobile imminent, we will quickly see many Oracle products – already based on
ADF – with (partly native) mobile extensions running on Android and iOS.
The
recent release of ADF Essentials allows organizations
to use ADF for design and deployment without license charge – for example on
open source stacks such as Linux, Apache Tomcat, MySQL and ADF Essentials (LAMA
as opposed to the well-known LAMP stack). This may well bring more developers
with an all Java/JEE background (I/O an Oracle history) to the ADF framework
(if only for the somewhat higher rates that ADF developers can charge because
of the higher productivity the framework allows them to achieve).
ADF
applications can be deployed on premise as well as on the Oracle Cloud Java Service that runs WebLogic with the ADF
libraries pre-installed. This Cloud environment allows JDBC connection to the
Oracle Database Cloud. Apart from the support for Tablet and Mobile devices,
the every evolving set of Data Visualizations continues to amaze.
Fast Data – in addition to Big
Data (first brought into the lime light by Oracle at OOW 2011) now
Oracle also coins the term Fast Data. Both Big and Fast Data deal
with large volumes of data. However, Fast Data is meant to describe cases where
near real time conclusions need to be derived from the data – sub seconds to a
few seconds ‘latency’. Fast Data typically deals with events – small,
structured and time stamped packets of data. Complex Event Processing (better
indicated as complex processing of simple events) is the technology that does
Fast Data (analysis). BigData handles equally large or usually even larger
volumes of data that may be quite unstructured – like Tweets – and from which
the urgency of deriving results is not as high – minutes or even longer. For signalling
trends during a presidential debate, Fast Data and CEP are required. For the post-debate
after the commercial type of analysis, BigData is more what we would be looking
for. To surf the wave of Fast Data – Oracle is rebranding the CEP product it
has been shipping as part of the EDA Suite (Event Driven Architecture) and as
component of the SOA Suite under a new name and as a separate SKU (standalone unit
on the price list; it is to be called OEP – Oracle Event Processor).
Fusion
Middleware 12c has not been announced – nor has its intended
release schedule been unveiled. The closest I got to an indication is sometime
in 2013, apparently not very long before OOW 2013. The current 11gR1 line is the
one used by Fusion Applications – for quite some time to come. There will be additional
functionality – perhaps some things that were intended for 12c that now are
back ported to the 11gR1 line in order to make them earlier available to both
external customers as well as to Fusion Applications. Especially for ADF,
WebCenter and BPM there are substantial improvements in PS6 and PS7. Note:
WebLogic Server is at its final release in the 11g line – release 10.3.6 is the
last of its kind, to be supported until 2017. No new development takes place on
this EE5 based container. The 12c release – initially published in December
2011 with support for JEE 6 – is where the action is. WLS 12c is the foundation
for all FMW 12c components.
Already a star a few years back
during JavaOne, REST has finally made it center stage
during Oracle Open World. RESTful services – simple, URL and HTTP based
services, usually with JSON for the payload rather than XML or a binary format
– are important in two main areas. One is the management of the cloud:
(almost?) any API published for accessing and manipulating the Oracle Cloud
environment from outside the cloud is published as a REST-style service. The
second area is Mobile: mobile devices are much better equipped at dealing with
JSON based services for data retrieval and the execution of operations than
with XML services (verbose, expensive processing). ADF Mobile thrives on such
services for example. In addition to the REST ful APIs in Fusion Applications,
WebCenter and many other products, support for both publication and consumption
of RESTful services is added to APEX and ADF as well as Oracle Service Bus and
SOA Suite (in the 12c time frame).
Exadata X3 (X3-2 and X3-8) is
the new generation Exadata machine. The main focus for
this generation is on memory. Up to 26 Tb of memory (largely Flash) can be
supported in the machine – allowing for much faster IO operations. It looks
like after a few years where the I/O speeds could not keep up with the
processor power, we will now see the CPU once again becoming the bottleneck for
queries and other serious operations. F40 flash cards are used, with 1.6TB of
flash per cell. The version of the Exadata storage server software
shipping with the X3 systems will be 11.2.3.2.0, which contains the “flash for
all writes” cache. The X3-2 should now also support Oracle Unbreakable
Enterprise Linux Kernel. The Exadata machine will be available in a 1/8 rack
configuration at $200k. This should bring it well in reach for many smaller
businesses.
Database
12c is around the corner, obviously. Many
sessions during Oracle Open World – from keynotes and general sessions to technical
deep dives and Hands on Labs – described 12c features and themes in detail.
However, the availability of the software itself is not expected before the end
of the calendar year. The key feature of 12c – touted by Larry Ellison himself
– is the notion of the pluggable database: one (root or container) database
with all the generic elements of an Oracle Database that encompasses between 1
and 200 pluggable databases. Shared between all databases are the data
dictionary, the UNDO area and the administration effort. Private to each
pluggable database is the definition of application’s database objects and
obviously the data itself. Through the concept of Pluggable Database,
operations to for example create, clone or upgrade a database have become a lot
easier and very much faster (since these operations only involve the
non-generic parts of an Oracle Database). Because the Pluggable Databases are
really independent database one the one hand that shares a lot of resources on
the other, the number of databases that can run on a single piece of hardware
is much larger than until now. Clearly through this mechanism Oracle will be
able to offer its database cloud service in a much more resource efficient way
(multi-tenant at the platform level rather than the application level) than
otherwise would have been the case. The same thing applies of course to
on-premise infrastructure – i.e. the private cloud.
These
product advancements clearly sets the stage for the partners to move on beyond
the conventional oracle solutions and look forward to do something innovative
and also breeds the need to adopt the new technology inventions. The change is
the only thing that doesn't change; the same is true for Oracle Solutions.
