Oracle’s Engineered Systems - Features (Part 2)

In the earlier post, we looked at two of the most important features or motivation to move to Oracle's Engineered Systems and the value proposition offered. We saw how Lowered TCO and Manageability actually enhance the product offering and also help our customers in lowering their costs and reduce the overall administrative pain.

Oracle Engineered Systems, as we will see is not only about Extreme Performance. Though the pitch is "Extreme Performance at Best Cost", there are numerous other features which make it a compelling business solution.

Simplifying IT
By offering the Software in tune with the Hardware, and making it all manageable with an integrated Enterprise Management software, things become substantially easier for the IT teams. Installation, upgrades , patching and maintenance become extremely easily. A side effect of this simplification is also the fact that there is no new skill to be acquired and hence no training costs are involved in moving onto the Exa series. The existing solutions work as-is without any changes to the code, as we saw earlier - the only difference being the blazing fast performance. This is significantly better when compared to some other products which require you to learn a complete new framework and develop solutions for that range of products *alone*.

 

Easier Patching, Support and Maintenance

Exalogic supports Single File patches -  i.e, a single file which will take care of patching right from firmware to the operating system. The philosophy of 'Apply-and-Go' suits perfectly and reduces the downtime and the risks involved. Patching becomes extremely simplified and can be done during critical times of the year - i.e, MEC / QEC / YEC (month / quarter / year end closure) refresh schedules. Also, Platinum Support is offered to Engineered Systems which makes it even easier to work with Oracle and get the problem rectified.

Open Standards and Interfaces 

Oracle's Applications, Middleware, Operating System are all based on established Open Standards and Interfaces. Why is this important? Well, this is what Don Deutsch, Vice President for Standards, Strategy, and Architecture at Oracle had to say on this topic:  

“Open standards protect customer investments by reducing vendor lock-in. Building enterprise software around standard interfaces enables customers to easily extend those systems as their businesses evolve—without major retooling.”

For example, consider Fusion Applications : Using the latest technology and incorporating the best practices gathered from Oracle's customers, Oracle Fusion Applications is a suite of 100% open standards-based business applications that provide a new standard for the way businesses innovate, work and adopt technology. Delivered as a complete suite of modular, service-enabled enterprise applications, Oracle Fusion Applications works with Oracle's Applications Unlimited portfolio to evolve business to a new level of performance. Whether it is one module, a product family, or the entire suite, Oracle provides businesses with their choice of all advancements pioneered by Oracle Fusion Applications, at a pace that matches individual business demands. 

  

Private Clouds:

For customers who want to start off the cloud initiative by starting with in-premise clouds, the Exa series offers the perfect starting point. The best of the breed software coupled with hardware offers the resilence that cloud systems need. Also, it becomes extremely easy to setup in-premise private clouds by chaining a few of the Exalogic boxes, and if database is needed, Exadata machines can be connected via the high speed Infiniband technology which is certified.

Consolidation
The Exa series allows customers to consolidate their disparate systems onto one(or few) machines. Development, Testing, Stage, UAT, and Production systems no longer need to run on different set of hardware; all can benefit the extreme performance of the engineered systems. Also, since the systems would be identical, there will be no significant change between the different environments (would be almost nil infact).

Capacity Planning 

For customers who want to start off with a minimal configuration(i.e, not all the cores) and want to pay-as-they-grow, Trusted Partitions/Sub-Processor Licensing offers the flexibility in licensing the cores.  Though for products like Exalytics, wherein it makes more sense to use entire hardware for making the maximum out of the hardware, Oracle still presents this is an option.

Fast Balanced Hardware Configuration

The Exa line of products has been extensively tested and includes the state of the art hardware. Infiniband technology offers blazing fast data transfer rates that are extremely crucial for enterprise applications that often require minimum latency.  The components are chosen specifically for every business challenge and hence the different products in the Exa series. This shows Oracle's commitment in offering extremely specific solutions and not a generic pill which would solve 'all-ailments'.

Complete Stack
Oracle's Engineered Systems are a complete package, which means that the customers do not have to depend on multiple vendors for getting system up and running. Minimal Zero Configuration or Tweaking is needed as Oracle certifies the entire stack - from hardware, firmware to the applications on it.

Value Proposition

Having expatiated on numerous(but not limited to these alone) factors, i think the 'package' is one of the best, offering the customer the full freedom to choose from the different solutions in the Exa line which would help the customer fit his business needs and concentrate more on expanding his business.

If you have read through this post and Part-1 of this 2-part series, then the following video is a quick summary of  what Oracle's Engineered Systems truly are. It explains the value proposition of Oracle's Engineered Systems with a nice analogy which is quite easy to comprehend and appreciate; and underscores the importance of how Software Engineered for Hardware is beneficial to customers helping them get-on-board quickly and also maintain them easily during the usage of the product.

As we have seen, Engineered Systems are something more than the sum of the parts, or as the Exalogic PM Michael Palmeter states in this post, it is the

result of the productization of the integration and development work that our customers have been forced to do for years. Customers shouldn't ideally be developing the infrastructure or the platform from Disk to Applications, rather they should be concentrating on their core business.

Oracle’s Engineered Systems - TCO And Manageability (Part 1)

In 2009, something revolutionary happened : Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle Corp, after having just acquired  Sun Microsystems, coined a new term which was to create a new era in the Enterprise Hardware/Software industry. The new term was to be a harbinger of a new world of innovation that the industry had to see and experience, and also adapt and keep pace with. This was not just a term to be used in marketing jargon, but Larry ‘actually’ presented the first ‘Engineered System’ – Exadata V2– Sun hardware running Oracle Database(V1 was on HP Hardware), thereby confirming Oracle’s dedication to new arenas of innovation and continuous delivery. Exadata V1 was mainly concentrated at Data Warehousing, whereas Exadata V2 became World's Fastest Machine for OLTP with an Extreme Performance for random I/O and was Fault tolerant.

Exadata was soon followed up with ExaLogic, Exalytics, Big Data Appliance and ZFS Storage to tackle various performance and business challenges and offer customers a seamless engineered system wherein all layers , right from the Operating System to the Application running on it was developed and provided by ONE VENDOR - i.e, Oracle – this is important – offering the complete stack by ONE vendor was something unprecedented. 

There are some very important strategic reasons for a customer to choose an Engineered System(and that too choosing a vendor who offers the whole stack) and in this blog I would like to highlight two such factors, which I think are extremely important and often go unnoticed while underscoring the other equally great features.

Total Cost of Ownership

While budgeting for the IT spends - mainly for new product or technology solutions, CIOs might look at software license costs, maintenance & support costs, install and upgrade costs and numerous other variables. The so called "hidden costs" of technology acquisition generally over-weigh the initial acquisition costs. Also, the importance of Return-On-Investment(ROI) cannot be stated less, as the investment should cause lucrative results for the organization.

Each of the costs mentioned in the below schematic represents substantial amount of time or money incurred by any organization. By looking at TCO as a whole, and hence factoring in all possible expenditures during the useable and depreciable life of the product is important while evaluating a product against the competing products.

Acquisition Costs	Operating Costs	Infrastructure Costs	Change Costs	Miscellaneous Costs
Planning and Research Costs	Design & Implementation Costs	Space Utilization	Decommissioning or Disposition costs	Compute loss/productivity loss while in training or downtime
Procurement Costs	Training Costs	Power or Energy Consumed	Depreciation Costs	Downtime, failures and outages
Licenses	Administrative Costs	Administrative Costs	Replacement Costs	Quality or User Acceptance
Installation/Deployment	Annual Subscription, Support & Maintenance	Insurance	Scalability(scaling up or down or out) expenses	Depreciation expense tax savings
Inspection Costs	Compliance Costs	Security		Open Standards and Interfaces
		Logistics Costs		Time value of money
		'Green' costs		Ownership costs
		Storage Costs
		Disaster Recovery

And this where Oracle's Engineered Systems offer one of the best solutions in the market. By offering the complete stack, right from the Hardware to Operating System and then up the stack till the Applications, Oracle is the *only* technology company which presents Lowest TCO for Engineered Systems. Lets look at an actual example of what Oracle provides and what is being provided by a Company which claims to be Oracle's competitor.

	From Oracle	A company which claims to be Oracle's Competitor
Applications	Fusion	X
Middleware	Fusion Middleware Weblogic	X
Database	Oracle / MySQL / BerkeleyDB / TimesTen	X
Management	Enterprise Manager
Operating system	Oracle Enterprise Linux / Solaris
Virtualization	Oracle VM
Server	X86/SPARC
Storage	ZFS/Exadata
Development	Java et al	X

Though there might be suspicions of vendor lock-in by looking at the above schematic, it should be noted that the actual 'value' of Engineered Systems lie in the fact that the TCO is reduced and also the customer need not run from vendor-to-vendor for any product issues, support or escalations. Also, there is a higher risk of running multiple vendors in the engineered system stack, as compliance and certification issues need to be suitably addressed. If one Vendor goes out of business in the 'diverse' stack, the customer may be in a soup. Oracle addresses all these concerns by offering a simple solution for different business challenges and hides the complexity of these systems from being exposed to the customers. Since, the stack is based on Open Standards and Interfaces, it becomes even more easier for the Customer not to fall into any trap.

Also, one of the most important things to note here is, there is not much training involved or skills to be learnt to get onto the Engineered Systems arena. Lets take the example of Exalytics - Oracle's In-Memory Analytics Machine. This takes the usual OBIEE suite and runs it on a much better hardware and utilizes the in-memory capabilities of TimesTen and makes the software run like a sprinter. Customers who are running OBIEE on component hardware can easily get on-board in a matter few days(or hours!). In the case of Exalogic, the processing powers of the compute nodes can be harnessed by moving your existing applications *as-is* onto Exalogic. Private clouds can easily be implemented with these Exa machine for solving various business problems.

Manageability

Monitoring the hardware  and the software installed is one of the biggest tasks of any IT/Admin team. With hundreds or thousands of servers running different versions of software in an enterprise, the administrators face many challenges like:

• health of the software and hardware, 
• patching, 
• performance of the applications, 
• changes in the configurations files,
• provisioning , 
• role based access to the applications,
• installing and upgrading software , 
• auditing, 
• managing incidents, 
• log diagnostics etc 

Many Enterprises use different tools for monitoring different components of the stack.Operating System, Middleware and Applications generally have their own class of monitoring tools and the administrators of respective departments are responsible for these disparate tools. User's role and responsibility again have to be taken care of on these dissimilar systems and also the same needs to be propagated to the applications. These only increase the headache of the administrators. There is a need for a 'single' monitoring solution which takes care of not only these but many other administrative challenges.

Oracle Enterprise Manager is the *only* comprehensive and integrated solution which can take care of the entire software and hardware stack. All the lifecycle aspects of the software installed are taken care of pretty easily with extremely helpful navigation and workflows. The incident management and the alert system notifies the administrator suitably when there is any hiccup in the system. Patching numerous servers in one-go or provisioning new systems becomes extremely easy with Enterprise Manager. The extremely rich feature set offered by Enterprise Manager coupled with equally great customization abilities offers one of of the best integrated management solution in the market now (personally, i do not know of any competitor's product which can even claim to be on par with the features offered by Oracle's Enterprise Manager).

The special and intuitive interfaces in EM for the Exa line of products, helps one to quickly identify the bottlenecks in the engineered systems and lets the administrator to suitably allocate resources based on the demand and also report to Oracle for any service-requests or assistance.

With the recent 12c release, Oracle Enterprise Manager provides extremely diverse set of tools for easier cloud management. Though, i can go on and on about the feature set(trust me, EM is an extremely powerful and BIG product with truck loads of useful features), i would restrict myself for now and let you explore more by looking at the various screen-casts and the whitepapers that are published in here. Since this blog is about Business Intelligence, we will look at some of the OBIEE specific features supported by EM in the later posts, especially, the OBIEE Management Pack and the TimesTen In-Memory Database plugin which offer some very interesting features for monitoring the Analytics stack. 

And if you thought Oracle Enterprise Manager was a place for monitoring only Oracle's product line alone, then you might want to change that perception by checking out the Extensibility Exchange site wherein different plugins are listed for managing different software components. This extremely useful community platform appreciates innovation and provides a means by which third party vendors can publish their plugins which can be included in Enterprise Manager.

In the next post, we will look at the other features offered by Engineered Systems which makes it a compelling choice for our customers.

Analytics for Business

The increasing quantum of data in the enterprises and the willingness to turn this data into actionable content has led companies to turn towards business analytics. The form based applications which used to fill the database and the data which became the target for simple queries has now proved to be the source of all the excitement surrounding the interesting field of analytics and data sciences. Data management on one hand is an interesting science or a problem in its entirety, but is different from how this mountain of data can be used to extract insights about the business and how it can lead to customer acquisition and retention.

We do see tonnes of free or open data on the Web, and the increasing numbers of infographers and designers who create interesting visualizations using these has only increased in the last few years. Part of it is due to the Social boom which has made the mobile the biggest source of data generation. Twitter updates, Facebook , Flickr and Instagram photos etc have contributed immensely to this spurt in the ‘data-generation’ ; note that textual data along with other forms – namely photos, videos etc also have lot of ‘information’ embedded in them which needs to be suitably tapped. Coordination of multi-channel data(i.e from mobiles, chats, social, surveys, call-centers, in-person, in-house etc) is also an important topic in here where data from different sources are suitably assimilated and cleansed for further analysis and reporting.

Enterprises are mainly interested in the following facets when it comes to Business Intelligence:

• Knowing what you know 

This includes understanding any causal relationships, tracking progress, KPIs  etc. Basically, it means that you knew something was happening, but you want to better understand what made it happen or you want to make sure that a step taken by you has actually made something else happen – a.k.a causal relationships. The famous example of a Retail store moving the Dairy products section close to the Vegetables/Fruits section in a supermarket(and similarly rearranging different sections in the store)  and thereby increasing the sales is often cited example in this case (and there are many more).

• Knowing what you don’t know

This is where business intelligence tools offer immense value and is the focal point for any sales pitch. Can your tool find out what is happening in(or outside of ) your organization, which is not otherwise easily perceivable/reportable. Also, Data Discovery software/tools have lent a new paradigm in this sphere, where, as an analyst/executive, you simply start browsing the charts/data and with the drill downs you essentially figure out something which was previously unknown – i.e, you start from somewhere without an objective but during the due course of browsing(aka discovery) you stumble upon some very interesting facts or relationships.

Social is increasingly seeping into the enterprises too, and there is this complete new realm of Social Business Engineering and Social Relationship Management which has lent a unique perspective to the way customer relations can be handled. This has in-turn led to more data-spurt. But what seems to be lacking in this sphere is the ability to decipher this immense knowledge that is hidden in the data and turn it into 'actionable content'.

Analytics should be implemented in an enterprise in such a way that people in different stratums of the organization can extract value out of the deciphered content and make useful decisions. Though the data is the source of truth here, every stratum in the organization looks at the same data in a different way.

Let’s take an example : The mobile phone industry is growing exponentially, and you will find a basic mobile phone even with the kid next door. People prefer and choose the mobile models based on different criteria - usually their work/eductation/sex/age etc comes into play and also they have different uses and expectations out of it. And once they buy it, it is pretty common for them to post a review of the phone in any of the review sites or on twitter or blogs. Also, the sales data is captured in the company’s order management tools. So, if you see we have one form of unstructured data(namely reviews etc) and also the structured data which is captured in the order management tools.

Now, let’s role-play:

As a Product Manager,

I would be interested in knowing what the customers are talking about it – mainly with respect to the features, issues etc. And this can be obtained from Social platforms, surveys, etc.

As a VP of Sales,

I would be interested in knowing the sales numbers, sales by geographies etc etc. This is captured in the Order Management tools  - i.e, structured or relational data.

As Head of Product Marketing,

I would be interested in knowing the issues and also have to manage the reputation of the brand etc. Need to suitably channelize the opinions generated from social media in my new marketing campaigns. Also, my market research team needs to be suitably engaged in understanding my competitors’ strategy and also listen to what the customers are speaking about them. The data comes from Social platforms – i.e, unstructured data mostly; and also from call-centers and surveys etc.

As you see, it’s the combination of structured and unstructured data analytics that will give the different executives in an organization into what they want to see with respect to their job roles. Integrated Analytics is no longer a fancy word, but a requirement for a holistic approach towards gaining insights from data.

The so called ‘data explosion’ did not happen overnight; the data was just piling up day after day for months in enterprises. The business motivation to actually use this data for better decision making and gather actionable insights coupled with the development of interesting business intelligence software and data sciences tool, made the case for investing in BI in Enterprises a valid case. And once the CIOs started investing in BI tools, they could see the actual RoI(Return-on-Investment). The ‘software’ factor was soon forgotten, and the business leaders and the other segments in an organization were actually keen on the intelligence that could be gathered from historical and real time data. There is/was a direct positive impact on the revenues for those companies which leveraged Business Intelligence tools – not to mention the extremely interesting insights that they could get by diving deep into their datawarehouses/datamarts.

Oracle is positioned nicely in the analytics industry with its extremely powerful Business Analytics Solutions which tackles almost the challenges listed above. The solutions offer analyzing both structured and unstructured data and the tag line of 'See More, Act Faster' fits in perfectly and carries the philosophy of the various products offerings.

The main Business Analytics Solutions offered by Oracle include:

• Enterprise Performance Management

1. Oracle Strategy Management
2. Oracle Planning, Budgeting and Forecasting
3. Oracle Profitability and Cost Management
4. Oracle Financial Close and Reporting
5. ...and many more..

• Business Intelligence
1. Oracle Business Intelligence Tools and Technology
2. Oracle Business Intelligence for Analyzing Big Data
3. Oracle Real Time Decisions
4. Oracle Endeca Information Discovery
5. ...and many more...

• Engineered Systems
•  Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine

You can  check the entire portfolio of Oracle's BI products along with other details in Oracle Business Analytics Page. Oracle Essbase and TimesTen are related products which are often used in the BI/EPM software stack - we will cover these in later posts.

In the future posts, we will dive into the specifics of various Oracle Business Intelligence offerings and also look at some interesting features, often faced challenges/issues, technical tid-bits etc. Keep tuned in :)