Recap: Oracle Fusion Middleware Strategies Driving Business Innovation
- by Harish Gaur
Hasan Rizvi, Executive Vice President of Oracle Fusion Middleware & Java took the stage on Tuesday to discuss how Oracle Fusion Middleware helps enable business innovation. Through a series of product demos and customer showcases, Hassan demonstrated how Oracle Fusion Middleware is a complete platform to harness the latest technological innovations (cloud, mobile, social and Fast Data) throughout the application lifecycle.
Fig 1: Oracle Fusion Middleware is the foundation of business innovation
This Session included 4 demonstrations to illustrate these strategies:
1. Build and deploy native mobile applications using Oracle ADF Mobile
2. Empower business user to model processes, design user interface and have rich mobile experience for process interaction using Oracle BPM Suite PS6.
3. Create collaborative user experience and integrate social sign-on using Oracle WebCenter Portal, Oracle WebCenter Content, Oracle Social Network & Oracle Identity Management 11g R2
4. Deploy and manage business applications on Oracle Exalogic
Nike, LA Department of Water & Power and Nintendo joined Hasan on stage to share how their organizations are leveraging Oracle Fusion Middleware to enable business innovation.
Managing Performance in the Wrld of Social and Mobile
How do you provide predictable scalability and performance for an application that monitors active lifestyle of 8 million users on a daily basis? Nike’s answer is Oracle Coherence, a component of Oracle Fusion Middleware and Oracle Exadata.
Fig 2: Oracle Coherence enabled data grid improves performance of Nike+ Digital Sports Platform
Nicole Otto, Sr. Director of Consumer Digital Technology discussed the vision of the Nike+ platform, a platform which represents a shift for NIKE from a "product" to a "product +" experience. There are currently nearly 8 million users in the Nike+ system who are using digitally-enabled Nike+ devices. Once data from the Nike+ device is transmitted to Nike+ application, users access the Nike+ website or via the Nike mobile applicatoin, seeing metrics around their daily active lifestyle and even engage in socially compelling experiences to compare, compete or collaborate their data with their friends. Nike expects the number of users to grow significantly this year which will drive an explosion of data and potential new experiences.
To deal with this challenge, Nike envisioned building a shared platform that would drive a consumer-centric model for the company. Nike built this new platform using Oracle Coherence and Oracle Exadata. Using Coherence, Nike built a data grid tier as a distributed cache, thereby provide low-latency access to most recent and relevant data to consumers. Nicole discussed how Nike+ Digital Sports Platform is unique in the way that it utilizes the Coherence Grid. Nike takes advantage of Coherence as a traditional cache using both cache-aside and cache-through patterns. This new tier has enabled Nike to create a horizontally scalable distributed event-driven processing architecture. Current data grid volume is approximately 150,000 request per minute with about 40 million objects at any given time on the grid.
Improving Customer Experience Across Multiple Channels
Customer experience is on top of every CIO's mind. Customer Experience needs to be consistent and secure across multiple devices consumers may use. This is the challenge Matt Lampe, CIO of Los Angeles Department of Water & Power (LADWP) was faced with. Despite being the largest utilities company in the country, LADWP had been relying on a 38 year old customer information system for serving its customers. Their prior system had been unable to keep up with growing customer demands.
Last year, LADWP embarked on a journey to improve customer experience for 1.6million LA DWP customers using Oracle WebCenter platform.
Figure 3: Multi channel & Multi lingual LADWP.com built using Oracle WebCenter & Oracle Identity Management platform
Matt shed light on his efforts to drive customer self-service across 3 dimensions – new website, new IVR platform and new bill payment service. LADWP has built a new portal to increase customer self-service while reducing the transactions via IVR. LADWP's website is powered Oracle WebCenter Portal and is accessible by desktop and mobile devices. By leveraging Oracle WebCenter, LADWP eliminated the need to build, format, and maintain individual mobile applications or websites for different devices. Their entire content is managed using Oracle WebCenter Content and secured using Oracle Identity Management. This new portal automated their paper based processes to web based workflows for customers. This includes automation of Self Service implemented through My Account - like Bill Pay, Payment History, Bill History and Usage Analysis. LADWP's solution went live in April 2012.
Matt indicated that LADWP's Self-Service Portal has greatly improved customer satisfaction. In a JD Power Associates website satisfaction survey, results indicate rankings have climbed by 25+ points, marking a remarkable increase in user experience.
Bolstering Performance and Simplifying Manageability of Business Applications
Ingvar Petursson, Senior Vice Preisdent of IT at Nintendo America joined Hasan on-stage to discuss their choice of Exalogic. Nintendo had significant new requirements coming their way for business systems, both internal and external, in the years to come, especially with new products like the WiiU on the horizon this holiday season. Nintendo needed a platform that could give them performance, availability and ease of management as they deploy business systems.
Ingvar selected Engineered Systems for two reasons:
1. High performance
2. Ease of management
Figure 4: Nintendo relies on Oracle Exalogic to run ATG eCommerce, Oracle e-Business Suite and several business applications
Nintendo made a decision to run their business applications (ATG eCommerce, E-Business Suite) and several Fusion Middleware components on the Exalogic platform. What impressed Ingvar was the "stress” testing results during evaluation. Oracle Exalogic could handle their 3-year load estimates for many functions, which was better than Nintendo expected without any hardware expansion.
Faster Processing of Big Data
Middleware plays an increasingly important role in Big Data. Last year, we announced at OpenWorld the introduction of Oracle Data Integrator for Hadoop and Oracle Loader for Hadoop which helps in the ability to move, transform, load data to and from Big Data Appliance to Exadata. This year, we’ve added new capabilities to find, filter, and focus data using Oracle Event Processing. This product can natively integrate with Big Data Appliance or runs standalone.
Hasan briefly discussed how NTT Docomo, largest mobile operator in Japan, leverages Oracle Event Processing & Oracle Coherence to process mobile data (from 13 million smartphone users) at a speed of 700K events per second before feeding it Hadoop for distributed processing of big data.
Figure 5: Mobile traffic data processing at NTT Docomo with Oracle Event Processing & Oracle Coherence
