Oracle Applications in the Cloud - Fusion

One of the news worthy item today was Oracle plans new cloud-based products, first Ellison tweet
Larry Ellison will do his first Tweet in early June to mark the announcement of the new Cloud based offerings from Oracle. Today web based software accounts for $1 billion or so in revenues for Oracle. I noted Tom Kyte (@OracleAskTom) recently started tweeting as well!

There was an article recently in Computerworld Why Oracle Fusion Apps customers overwhelmingly prefer cloud deployment  where Oracle Fusion Applications customers have shown interest in the hosted applications by Oracle. Apparently, Oracle will only allow Fusion Application on the "Cloud: for next two years. I understand, Oracle's rationale is to free the customer from the worries of infrastructure for this new technology and worry on the business adoption of the Fusion Applications as it gradually replaces Oracle E-Business Suite, JD Edwards, Peoplesoft and Siebel Applications. This is the SaaS or the Sofware as a Service model for delivery of business applications. One of the advantages of SaaS model is to let the vendor worry about the high availability of the application. Personally, however, I have seen issues with the performance when the infrastructure is remote or with Oracle on Demand (OoD) which is being re-branded as Oracle Cloud. My understanding is customers will get a license credit for the application they own today as they move to the Fusion version. So for instance if you have core HR today say in EBS and you move to Fusion apps, then you get the core HR license credit but pay for anything additional you use say Talent Management.

Interestingly, though Larry Ellison said that Oracle aims to dethrone IBM in business hardware  so  I am wondering how the the two things re-concile?  If SaaS (Software as a Service), is the future direction for the delivery of the business applications (like SalesForce.com), then sales of business hardware will be targeted not at the end user companies, rather to the data center providers. In case of Oracle Cloud, it would be a large consumer of hardware itself for the Cloud based user base. Amazon EC2 and IBM SMARTCloud would be other such examples where the business application is not primarily provided by the Cloud provider.

While, it sounds good in principle, we need to see how fast the real world adopts Fusion Applications to replace the EBS/JDE/PSFT/Siebel types of applications and if they do, will customers still prefer Fusion apps running on the premise?

Collaborate 2012 - April 22-26

The week of Collaborate conference 2012 is over! It turned out to be a action packed week. It started on Saturday with a full day IOUG board meeting. I have been nominated to the IOUG Board for 2012-213 and will be taking care of Product Integration Portfolio with focus on Exa-systems. On Sunday, we conducted the Deep Dive on Oracle BI Applications (OBIA) along with a friend JV and Oracle Product Management folks. This was intense 5 hr class between 9 am and 3 pm on Sunday and had 20+ attendees. The day ended with IOUG SIG reception were Mark Townsend was recognized for his contributions to IOUG community, posthumously. It was nice meeting Dr DBA or Ken Jacobs in the event, even though he has retied from Oracle. The BIWA SIG board had dinner the same night and discussed possibilities of BIWA SIG and the Quest BI SIG working closer in future.

Monday morning was no rocket science! It was key note with Mark Kelly... I was lucky to obtain his autographed book and here is the picture with him!

Getting Ready for IOUG Collaborate 2012

It is that time of year!   Collaborate 2012 is less than two weeks away. This time it is in Las Vegas, April 22-26. It has been alternating between Orlando, FL and Las Vega, NV, tow cities that are very conference friendly.

The event will be full of exciting content in the BI, DW & EPM (BIWA) Track, starting with the Deep Dive on Oracle Business Intelligence Applications on Sunday. The Mon-Wed will be filled with several sessions from customers, implementer and Oracle Product Managers. Apart from regular sessions and Panel discussions, take advantage of the Hands on Labs, at no extra cost on a variety of topics from OBIEE, Spatial/MapViewer to Advanced Analytics such as Oracle Data Mining, Oracle Enterprise R and OLAP.  In the Hands on Labs (HoL) you actually work on a computer, on a virtual machine and get to carry out the exercises in 1-2 hr session.  Add these to your schedule if you want to join these sessions and come in early.

I have to jump on an IOUG call, so more later...

Oracle Business Intelligence Applications - Manufacturing and Enterprise Asset Management Analytics (OBIEE based)

The coverage of Oracle Business Intelligence Applications for Oracle and SAP  ERP continues to extend. The most recent addition from April 4, 2012 is the the new Oracle Manufacturing Analytics and Oracle Enterprise Asset Management Analytics Applications including the connectors for IBM Maximo. This was released through the Extension Pack for 7.9.6.3 branch.  At the same time Oracle extended the coverage for the SAP customers from Finance to Sales & Distribution and Materials Management with the support for Procurement and Supply Chain Performance Applications on the 7.9.7.1 branch.  I have come across companies that are a mix of Oracle and SAP either by choice such as PeopleSoft for HCM and SAP for Finance and Manufacturing or due to acquisitions. With the availability of coverage for back-office applications (ERP) for both Oracle and SAP, now customers have increased choice for packaged applications.

The new applications such as the Manufacturing and Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) Analytics currently comes with the support for Oracle E-Business Suite. The support for J D Edwards is not available right away, which is little interesting as a lot of manufacturing shops use JDE. So how do these applications differ from the prior release of new functionality?  These applications will come with a new OBIEE repository (rpd) that can be merged with the current release at the customer site such as 7962 or 7963. This is the same concept as the Spend Classification that has its own rpd. The three way merge for RPD comes in handy here. The new applications were developed for companies in the manufacturing, energy production, utilities and other asset-intensive industries. Also the first time IBM Maximo connectors are made available as it very popular for managing fixed assets specially in the public sector.

What does it mean for current 7.9.6.1, 7.9.6.2 and 7.9.6.3 customers of Oracle EBS?   The good news is the new functionality is available for all these customers. For instance a 7.9.6.1 customer can take the newly released rpd for 7.9.6.1 based on OBIEE 10g and merge it with their current 7.9.6.1 (and  retain any configuration and customization) easily. The same option applies for 7.9.6.2 or 7.9.6.3 (OBIEE 11g based) customers. In the way the Informatica and DAC metadata has to be merged with the existing code.  Please note the new SAP analytics functionality is on its own branch 7.9.7.1 and the above (7.9.6.3 extension pack) does not apply to it.


These 7.9.6.3 Extension pack is certified to run on Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine, as long as you use 11.1.1.6 version of OBIEE. Native support for tablet and mobile devices, such as the Apple iPad and iPhone is provided as well on the OBIEE 11g path. I personally thing the RIM/blackberry support is a gap, but I think most other Mobile Computing enthusiasts will differ from me and say the Blackberry OS has no role in tablet space and hence in enterprise mobility! Well time will tell.


The new Manufacturing Analytics will allow the customers to gain visibility into manufacturing schedules, cost, quality and service levels and correlate work order information with production plans. This can lead to possible reduction in work order cycle time and aging of open work orders. Customers can now perform non-conformance and disposition analysis and improve insight into raw materials and finished goods. To make best use of this Analytics Application, you must be using E-Business Suite Manufacturing Applications, including Discrete Manufacturing, Process Manufacturing, Flow Manufacturing, Hi-Tech Manufacturing Quality and Inventory modules.  Current SCM Analytic Applications had support for Discrete inventory and it lacked OPM support, so this is a good enhancement release. You can see the piece of the Manufacturing Analytics in the visual below.

The new EAM Analytics will help to provide information to improve the quality of decisions and ultimately optimize asset utilization. Companies can manage plant, machinery, and equipment by asking these questions:
• What does it cost to maintain & operate my assets?
• What is the expected life of our assets?
• How can we get timely asset information and respond more quickly to change?
• Which asset strategies work to our advantage to drive uptime?

These questions can be answered with the help of the following areas of EAM Analytics:

• Maintenance Cost Analytics
• Work order Analytics
• Inventory and Costing Analytics
• Quality Analytics
• Resource Analytics
• Asset Genealogy Analytics

Oracle BIWA SIG (http://oracleBIWA.org) will organize a Techcast on this topic on april 18, 2012, you can pre-register here:
https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/192500121 


Thanks

Review of Gartner Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms - Feb 2012

Gartner spends a lot of time reviewing the major Business Intelligence platform vendors and talking to the users of BI to come up with the updates in the Magic Quadrant. Here is the latest one released in Feb 2012. As you can see the notables in the Leaders Quadrant are Oracle taking the top stop in ability to execute with OBIEE and BI Applications (OBIA)  and IBM establishing itself as the visionary with Cognos and related offerings.

Look at my similar posting from Jan 2010 here ( http://oraclebiwasig.blogspot.com/2010/01/gartner-2010-magic-quadrant-for.html )  The BI Platform leaders in Jan 2010 were Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, SAS, Microstrategy, SAP (Business Objects) and Information Builders. Compared to 2010, now QlikTech has entered the leaders quadrant. Gartner quotes "QlikTech is a marketing juggernaut; it has brand recognition many times more prominent than a firm with its current market share would expect." I have heard of QlikView when Oracle talks of visualization at the speed of thought. QlikView product has created a lot of industry expectations in that space by using in-memory data store for enhanced graphic capabilities.

Oracle of OBIEE and BI Applications (OBIA) are closet to my day job, so I cannot help critiquing the positing of Oracle. Gartner notes that OBIEE is popular in Oracle shops i.e those who mainly use Oracle Database and Oracle Applications. It has truly global deployment footprint. Gartner noted that a lower percentage of customers use diverse data with OBIEE - I am interpreting that as mainly relational or multidimensional (like OLAP or Essbase) as source of data rather than unstructured and semi-structured data. Oracle has acquired Endeca for building up capabilities in this space and also Oracle Big Data Appliance will compete in that space. Oracle Exalytics announced in Oracle Openworld 2011, is a major addition to the Oracle OBIEE and Essbase family from the visualization at speed of thought perspective. It is the marriage of BI with hardware. Historically, BI platforms were Hardware Vendor agnostic but it changed with SAP HANA and now with Exalytics. While Oracle provided feedback from a few early Exalytics providers, it is yet to hit the field as a generally available product and it is expected to come with OBIEE 11.1.1.6 version. Anyways as SAP HANA and Exalytics become mainstream, it will interesting to see how industry adopts the BI software + H/W paradigm.

Gartner commented on the Oracle's pre-built BI applications (OBIA) that provides data warehouse, ETL connectors and the BI metadata for Oracle Applications like e-business Suite, JD Edwards, PeopleSoft, Siebel and going forward for Oracle Fusion Applications. In addition, some of the SAP applications (like Financials) are supported as well. Gartner mentioned about the industry data models that are available as additional options to Oracle Database Enterprise Edition and provide data model, 3rd normal data warehouse for specific industry (like retail, communication, travel etc) along with data marts and starter set of OBIEE metadata. Currently, the Oracle BI Applications are not integrated with the industry models that are more "vertical" in nature and applies more to a specific industry.

So what are the limitations of Oracle BI platform according to Gartner?  The complexity of OBIEE platform - OBIEE 11g is relatively new (less than 2 yrs) and remains a skill gap for those using OBIEE 10g.  It is interesting to note that 25% of the surveyed customers are using the current release. The Oracle BI Applications since May 2011, support/certify the OBIEE 11g release, making the adoption easier. However, those customers having OBIEE 10g based applications, still need to invest time and effort to move to OBIEE 11g.

What surprised me most that unlike in-spite of the growing interest around Mobile BI, there was not much comment on the Mobile BI capabilities of OBIEE. I remember in 2011, Gartner had commented on the lack of innovation for Oracle Mobile BI as most of the mobile related features started emerging in mid 2011 time frame.

Let me next look at IBM. It scored top points for the completeness of vision with Cognos, SPSS and Netezza under its arsenal. Besides, being a strong service provider via its Global Business Services - GBS, it has skills to implement any BI needs of the customers. On the lines of OBIEE 10g to 11g upgrade, customers had to deal with Cognos 8 to Cognos 10 migration in the last year or so. SPSS and the Watson platform has given IBM a big boost in the advanced analytics side. The latest addition on Cognos family is Cognos Insight a Desktop BI product.  It seems higher percentage of users are complaining about the performance of Cognos products. Interesting missing is the explicit mention of the Cognos Adaptive Analytics Framework (AAI) which is the pre-built applications for use against ERP sources like Oracle EBS, SAP or other custom OLTP applications.

General Comments:   Gartner uses a few dimensions to compare the BI platforms such as Integration, Information Delivery and Analysis.  It is very interesting to note that Information Delivery includes Microsoft Office Integration. In others words, display of information with Excel as the front end is here to stay. I think the important difference between the dreaded word "spreadmart" and the use of Excel as the front end is that authentic information and metadata should reside in an Enterprise grade system whether it is relational database with metadata such as in OBIEE (repository) or in Essbase. Also happy to see the importance of location awareness in Mobile BI platform. My first exposure to real location awareness was via FourSquare application, which is more like a Social Media tool.

It's a lot of HADOOPapla these Days!

Hadoop is a fault-tolerant distributed system for data storage. It is highly scalable and useful for data (often unstructured data) beyond that are best stored in RDBMS . The scalability is the result of a Self-Healing High Bandwith Clustered Storage , known by the acronym of HDFS (Hadoop Distributed File System) and a specific fault-tolerant Distributed Processing, known as MapReduce.

Recently, Director of IT at JP Morgan Chase (JPMC) said, Hadoop allows them to store data that they never stored before. It can include Web logs, TX data  and social media related data. While enterprise wide security concerns still prevail for Hadoop, it is slowly growing its footprint.  As in case of JPMC, it is being used for fraud detection and IT risk management. Aggregated forms of such data also feeds data mining and other advanced analytics tools. eBay uses Hbase database for Hadoop. 


HBase is an open source, non-relational, distributed database modeled after Google's BigTable. It is written using Java. It runs on top of HDFS and provides BigTable-like capabilities for Hadoop. Hence, it provides a fault-tolerant way of storing large quantities of sparse data. For eBay, it helps to build a new search engine for its auction use. They have code named this Cassini.  eBay handles 2 billion site views amongst its 97 million active buyers and sellers. EBay has dedicated over 100 engineers to this project. 


In light of these developments, it was no surprise that Oracle stepped in a big way in to this space with the Oracle Big Data Appliance. 

It's time to do more statistical analysis with less

Oracle R is an open source statistical analysis tool that is open source and runs off of Oracle DBs, you do need to have Oracle 11g.

Statistical analysis is something that all places need to do more of, and having something free to use can be a great boon. It's an easy sell, hey, we need to install this for free, and then see if it will help us manage our business better.

An example, a company that makes a great product but cannot ship product because it is so backlogged is not managing inventory correctly. They will lose customers because they haven't planned out their demand properly.

Great uses for Statistical analysis:
--Investigate and Minimize Fraud
--Inventory planning based on prior trends
--Sales and Cash flow planning

Learn about Oracle "R" Enterprise via a BIWASIG Techcast on Nov 30, 2011, noon EST by Mark Hornick. http://oraclebiwasig.blogspot.com/2011/11/biwa-sig-techcast-oracle-enterprise-r.html