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• A New Home for E-Business Suite Customer Adoption Information

  - by linda.fishman.hoyle

  Phew! I made it! A new home with my name. Let's talk about E-Business Suite. So much is going on and more and more customers are upgrading and implementing the latest release. I think I will highlight in this blog entry the most recent press release we issued 2 weeks ago about our Applications Unlimited success but in the release, we name several customers who are live on E-Business Suite Release 12.1 and then have a fabulous quote from a customer who is doing great things with our product.   Here is a link to the press release To make it easy for you, I am pulling out just the E-Business Suite information Oracle E-Business Suite: Oracle® E-Business Suite Release 12.1 provides organizations of all sizes, across all industries and regions, with a global business foundation that helps them reduce costs and increase productivity through a portfolio of rapid value solutions, integrated business processes and industry-focused solutions. The latest version of the Oracle E-Business Suite was designed to help organizations make better decisions and be more competitive by providing a global or holistic view of their operations. Abu Dhabi Media Company, Agilysis, C3 Business Solutions, Chicago Public Schools, Datacard Group, Guidance Software, Leviton Manufacturing, McDonald's, MINOR International, Usana Health Sciences, Zamil Plastic Industries Ltd. and Zebra Technologies are just a few of the organizations that have deployed the latest release of the Oracle E-Business Suite to help them make better decisions and be more competitive, while lowering costs and increasing performance. Customer Speaks "Leviton Manufacturing makes a very diverse line of products including electrical devices and data center products that we sell globally. We upgraded to the latest version of the Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.1 to support our service business with change management, purchasing, accounts payable, and our internal IT help desk," said Bob MacTaggart, CIO of Leviton Manufacturing. "We consolidated seven Web sites that we used to host individually onto iStore. In addition, we run a site, using the Oracle E-Business Suite configurator, pricing and quoting for our sales agents to do configuration work. This site can now generate a complete sales proposal using Oracle functionality; we actually generate CAD drawings - the actual drawings themselves - based on configuration results. It used to take six to eight weeks to generate these drawings and now it's all done online in an hour to two hours by our sales agents themselves, totally self-service. It does everything they need. From our point of view that is a major business success. Not only is it a very cool, innovative application, but it also puts us about two years ahead of our competition."

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• Computer Visionaries 2014 Kinect Hackathon

  - by T

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/tburger/archive/2014/08/08/computer-visionaries-2014-kinect-hackathon.aspxA big thank you to Computer Vision Dallas and Microsoft for putting together the Computer Visionaries 2014 Kinect Hackathon that took place July 18th and 19th 2014.  Our team had a great time and learned a lot from the Kinect MVP's and Microsoft team.  The Dallas Entrepreneur Center was a fantastic venue. In total, 114 people showed up to form 15 teams. Burger ITS & Friends team members with Ben Lower:  Shawn Weisfeld, Teresa Burger, Robert Burger, Harold Pulcher, Taylor Woolley, Cori Drew (not pictured), and Katlyn Drew (not pictured) We arrived Friday after a long day of work/driving.  Originally, our idea was to make a learning game for kids.  It was intended to be multi-simultaneous players dragging and dropping tiles into a canvas area for kids around 5 years old. We quickly learned that we were limited to two simultaneous players. After working on the game for the rest of the evening and into the next morning we decided that a fast multi-player game with hand gestures was not going to happen without going beyond what was provided with the API. If we were going to have something to show, it was time to switch gears. The next idea on the table was the Photo Anywhere Kiosk. The user can use voice and hand gestures to pick a place they would like to be.  After the user says a place (or anything they want) and then the word "search", the app uses Bing to display a bunch of images for him/her to choose from. With the use of hand gesture (grab and slide to move back and forth and push/pull to select an image) the user can get the perfect image to pose with. I couldn't get a snippet with the hand but when a the app is in use, a hand shows up to cue the user to use their hand to control it's movement. Once they chose an image, we use the Kinect background removal feature to super impose the user on that image. When they are in the perfect position, they say "save" to save the image. Currently, the image is saved in the images folder on the users account but there are many possibilities such as emailing it, posting to social media, etc.. The competition was great and we were honored to be recognized for third place. Other related posts: http://jasongfox.com/computer-visionaries-2014-incredible-success/ A couple of us are continuing to work on the kid's game and are going to make it a Windows 8 multi-player game without Kinect functionality. Stay tuned for more updates.

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• Hadoop growing pains

  - by Piotr Rodak

  This post is not going to be about SQL Server. I have been reading recently more and more about “Big Data” – very catchy term that describes untamed increase of the data that mankind is producing each day and the struggle to capture the meaning of these data. Ten years ago, and perhaps even three years ago this need was not so recognized. Increasing number of smartphones and discernable trend of mainstream Internet traffic moving to the smartphone generated one means that there is bigger and bigger stream of information that has to be stored, transformed, analysed and perhaps monetized. The nature of this traffic makes if very difficult to wrap it into boundaries of relational database engines. The amount of data makes it near to impossible to process them in relational databases within reasonable time. This is where ‘cloud’ technologies come to play. I just read a good article about the growing pains of Hadoop, which became one of the leading players on distributed processing arena within last year or two. Toby Baer concludes in it that lack of enterprise ready toolsets hinders Hadoop’s apprehension in the enterprise world. While this is true, something else drew my attention. According to the article there are already about half of a dozen of commercially supported distributions of Hadoop. For me, who has not been involved into intricacies of open-source world, this is quite interesting observation. On one hand, it is good that there is competition as it is beneficial in the end to the customer. On the other hand, the customer is faced with difficulty of choosing the right distribution. In future, when Hadoop distributions fork even more, this choice will be even harder. The distributions will have overlapping sets of features, yet will be quite incompatible with each other. I suppose it will take a few years until leaders emerge and the market will begin to resemble what we see in Linux world. There are myriads of distributions, but only few are acknowledged by the industry as enterprise standard. Others are honed by bearded individuals with too much time to spend. In any way, the third fact I can’t help but notice about the proliferation of distributions of Hadoop is that IT professionals will have jobs.   BuzzNet Tags: Hadoop,Big Data,Enterprise IT

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• Silverlight Cream for May 22, 2010 -- #867

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Michael Washington, Xianzhong Zhu, Jim Lynn, Laurent Bugnion, and Kyle McClellan. A ton of Shoutouts this time: Cigdem Patlak (CrocusGirl) is interviewed about Silverlight 4 on Channel 9: Silverlight discussion with Cigdem Patlak Timmy Kokke has material up from a presentation he did, and check out the SilverAmp project he's got going: Code & Slides – SDE – What’s new in Silverlight 4 Graham Odds at ScottLogic has an interesting post up: Contextual cues in user interface design Einar Ingebrigtsen is discussing Balder licensing and is asking for input: Balder - Licensing SilverLaw has updated two of his stylings at the Expression Gallery to Silverlight 4: ChildWindow and Accordion Styling Silverlight 4 Keep this page bookmarked -- it's the only page you'll need for Silverlight and Expression links.. well, that and my blog :) .. from Adam Kinney: Silverlight and Expression Blend Jeremy Boyd and John-Daniel Trask have some sweet-looking controls in their new release: Introducing Silverlight Elements 1.1 Matthias Shapiro entered the Design for America competition with his Recovery Review: A Silverlight Sunlight Foundation Visualization Project be sure to check out his blog post about it -- there's a link at the bottom. Koen Zwikstra announed a new release: Document Toolkit 2 Beta 1 available ... built for SL4 and lots of features -- check out the blog post. From SilverlightCream.com: Simple Example To Secure WCF Data Service OData Methods Michael Washington has a follow-on tutorial up on WCF Data Security with OData -- essentially this is the 'securing the data' part ... the Silverlight part was in the previous post... all code is available. Developing Freecell Game Using Silverlight 3 Part 1 Xianzhong Zhu has the first of a two-part tutorial up on building Freecell in Silverlight 3 ... yeah... SL3 -- oh, can you say WP7?? :) Silverlight Top Tip: Startup page for Navigation Apps Jim Lynn has detailed how to go straight to a specific page you're working on in a complex Silverlight app say for debug purposes rather than page/page/page ... I was just thinking yesterday about putting a shortcut on my taskbar for something similar in .NET :) Handling DataGrid.SelectedItems in an MVVM-friendly manner Laurent Bugnion responded with code to a question about getting a DataGrid's SelectedItems into the ViewModel in MVVMLight. Demo code available too. RIA Services and Windows Live ID Kyle McClellan has a post up discussing using LiveID and RIA Services and Silverlight. Lots of external links sprinkled around. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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• Oracle’s Sun Server X4-8 with Built-in Elastic Computing

  - by kgee

  We are excited to announce the release of Oracle's new 8-socket server, Sun Server X4-8. It’s the most flexible 8-socket x86 server Oracle has ever designed, and also the most powerful. Not only does it use the fastest Intel® Xeon® E7 v2 processors, but also its memory, I/O and storage subsystems are all designed for maximum performance and throughput. Like its predecessor, the Sun Server X4-8 uses a “glueless” design that allows for maximum performance for Oracle Database, while also reducing power consumption and improving reliability. The specs are pretty impressive. Sun Server X4-8 supports 120 cores (or 240 threads), 6 TB memory, 9.6 TB HDD capacity or 3.2 TB SSD capacity, contains 16 PCIe Gen 3 I/O expansion slots, and allows for up to 6.4 TB Sun Flash Accelerator F80 PCIe Cards. The Sun Server X4-8 is also the most dense x86 server with its 5U chassis, allowing 60% higher rack-level core and DIMM slot density than the competition.  There has been a lot of innovation in Oracle’s x86 product line, but the latest and most significant is a capability called elastic computing. This new capability is built into each Sun Server X4-8.   Elastic computing starts with the Intel processor. While Intel provides a wide range of processors each with a fixed combination of core count, operational frequency, and power consumption, customers have been forced to make tradeoffs when they select a particular processor. They have had to make educated guesses on which particular processor (core count/frequency/cache size) will be best suited for the workload they intend to execute on the server.Oracle and Intel worked jointly to define a new processor, the Intel Xeon E7-8895 v2 for the Sun Server X4-8, that has unique characteristics and effectively combines the capabilities of three different Xeon processors into a single processor. Oracle system design engineers worked closely with Oracle’s operating system development teams to achieve the ability to vary the core count and operating frequency of the Xeon E7-8895 v2 processor with time without the need for a system level reboot.  Along with the new processor, enhancements have been made to the system BIOS, Oracle Solaris, and Oracle Linux, which allow the processors in the system to dynamically clock up to faster speeds as cores are disabled and to reach higher maximum turbo frequencies for the remaining active cores. One customer, a stock market trading company, will take advantage of the elastic computing capability of Sun Server X4-8 by repurposing servers between daytime stock trading activity and nighttime stock portfolio processing, daily, to achieve maximum performance of each workload.To learn more about Sun Server X4-8, you can find more details including the data sheet and white papers here.Josh Rosen is a Principal Product Manager for Oracle’s x86 servers, focusing on Oracle’s operating systems and software. He previously spent more than a decade as a developer and architect of system management software. Josh has worked on system management for many of Oracle's hardware products ranging from the earliest blade systems to the latest Oracle x86 servers.

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• Hadoop growing pains

  - by Piotr Rodak

  This post is not going to be about SQL Server. I have been reading recently more and more about “Big Data” – very catchy term that describes untamed increase of the data that mankind is producing each day and the struggle to capture the meaning of these data. Ten years ago, and perhaps even three years ago this need was not so recognized. Increasing number of smartphones and discernable trend of mainstream Internet traffic moving to the smartphone generated one means that there is bigger and bigger stream of information that has to be stored, transformed, analysed and perhaps monetized. The nature of this traffic makes if very difficult to wrap it into boundaries of relational database engines. The amount of data makes it near to impossible to process them in relational databases within reasonable time. This is where ‘cloud’ technologies come to play. I just read a good article about the growing pains of Hadoop, which became one of the leading players on distributed processing arena within last year or two. Toby Baer concludes in it that lack of enterprise ready toolsets hinders Hadoop’s apprehension in the enterprise world. While this is true, something else drew my attention. According to the article there are already about half of a dozen of commercially supported distributions of Hadoop. For me, who has not been involved into intricacies of open-source world, this is quite interesting observation. On one hand, it is good that there is competition as it is beneficial in the end to the customer. On the other hand, the customer is faced with difficulty of choosing the right distribution. In future, when Hadoop distributions fork even more, this choice will be even harder. The distributions will have overlapping sets of features, yet will be quite incompatible with each other. I suppose it will take a few years until leaders emerge and the market will begin to resemble what we see in Linux world. There are myriads of distributions, but only few are acknowledged by the industry as enterprise standard. Others are honed by bearded individuals with too much time to spend. In any way, the third fact I can’t help but notice about the proliferation of distributions of Hadoop is that IT professionals will have jobs.   BuzzNet Tags: Hadoop,Big Data,Enterprise IT

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• The Politics of Junk Filtering

  - by mikef

  If the national postal service, such as the Royal Mail in the UK, were to go through your letters and throw away all the stuff it considered to be junk instead of delivering it to you, you might be rather pleased until you discovered that it took a too liberal decision about what was junk. Catalogs you'd asked for? Junk! Requests from charities? Who needs them! Parcels from competing carriers? Toss them away! The possibility for abuse for an agency that was in a monopolistic position is just too scary to tolerate. After all, the postal service could charge 'consultancy fees' to any sender who wanted to guarantee that his stuff got delivered, or they could even farm this out to other companies. Because Microsoft Outlook is just about the only email client used by the international business community in the west, its' SPAM filter is the final arbiter as to what gets read. My Outlook 2007, set to the default settings, junks all the perfectly innocent email newsletters that I subscribe to. Whereas Google Mail, Yahoo, and LIVE are all pretty accurate in detecting spam, Outlook makes all sorts of silly mistakes. The documentation speaks techno-babble about 'advanced heuristics', but the result boils down to an inaccurate mess. The more that Microsoft fiddles with it, the stickier the mess. To make matters worse, it still lets through obvious spam. The filter is occasionally updated along with other automatic 'security' updates you opt for automatic updates. As an editor for a popular online publication that provides a newsletter service, this is an obvious source of frustration. We follow all the best-practices we know about. We ensure that it is a trivial task to opt out of receiving it. We format the newsletter to the requirements of the Service Providers. We follow up, and resolve, every complaint. As a result, it gets delivered. It is galling to discover that, after all that effort, Outlook then often judges the contents to be junk on a whim, so you don't get to see it. A few days ago, Microsoft published the PST file format specification, under pressure from a European Union interoperability investigation by ECIS (the European Committee for Interoperable Systems). The objective was that other applications could then access existing PST files so as to migrate from existing Outlook installations to other solutions. Joaquín Almunia, the current competition commissioner, should now turn his attention to the more subtle problems of Microsoft Outlook. The Junk problem seems to have come from clumsy implementation of client-side spam filtering rather than from deliberate exploitation of a monopoly on the desktop email client for businesses, but it is a growing problem nonetheless. Cheers, Michael Francis

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• Equal Gifts Algorithm Problem

  - by 7Aces

  Problem Link - http://opc.iarcs.org.in/index.php/problems/EQGIFTS It is Lavanya's birthday and several families have been invited for the birthday party. As is customary, all of them have brought gifts for Lavanya as well as her brother Nikhil. Since their friends are all of the erudite kind, everyone has brought a pair of books. Unfortunately, the gift givers did not clearly indicate which book in the pair is for Lavanya and which one is for Nikhil. Now it is up to their father to divide up these books between them. He has decided that from each of these pairs, one book will go to Lavanya and one to Nikhil. Moreover, since Nikhil is quite a keen observer of the value of gifts, the books have to be divided in such a manner that the total value of the books for Lavanya is as close as possible to total value of the books for Nikhil. Since Lavanya and Nikhil are kids, no book that has been gifted will have a value higher than 300 Rupees... For the problem, I couldn't think of anything except recursion. The code I wrote is given below. But the problem is that the code is time-inefficient and gives TLE (Time Limit Exceeded) for 9 out of 10 test cases! What would be a better approach to the problem? Code - #include<cstdio> #include<climits> #include<algorithm> using namespace std; int n,g[150][2]; int diff(int a,int b,int f) { ++f; if(f==n) { if(a>b) { return a-b; } else { return b-a; } } return min(diff(a+g[f][0],b+g[f][1],f),diff(a+g[f][1],b+g[f][0],f)); } int main() { int i; scanf("%d",&n); for(i=0;i<n;++i) { scanf("%d%d",&g[i][0],&g[i][1]); } printf("%d",diff(g[0][0],g[0][1],0)); } Note - It is just a practice question, & is not part of a competition.

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• SOA &amp; Application Grid Specialization step 2 of 6 &ndash; References &amp; Marketing Kits

  - by Jürgen Kress

  In our fist step to become SOA Specialized & Application Grid Specialized we highlighted our OMM to register your opportunities. We continue our path to specialization with our marketing offerings to create your reference cases and run joint marketing campaigns. References: Be Recognized Through Partner Success Stories Oracle delivers a wide variety of services and solutions through our partners and we believe that those successes should be recognized and promoted. References are also required to become specialized. We showcase our partners’ capabilities in Oracle products and industries through partner success stories that are published on Oracle.com. For significant implementations, we may invite partners to participate in a press release or be interviewed in a podcast. To participate and take a further step to become specialized, please take a minute to complete the form and tell us about the successful project you have implemented. If your story is selected, we will contact you for an interview. Create your references The partner reference program Enables partners to be recognized by both Oracle and our customers Provides an opportunity for partners to showcase successes with their customers on Oracle solutions Helps raise awareness of our partners’ capabilities, elevating them above their competition Time to submit a SOA and Application Grid reference request today To learn more about partner references, check out the following resources: Judson Althoff’s YouTube Video: Be Recognized with OPN Specialized Reference Program OPN PartnerCast: Be Recognized…Your Reference Matters!!! (MP3) Partner/Customer Reference Brochure (PDF) Marketing Kits We have created OFM 11g marketing kit http://tinyurl.com/soamarketing (OPN account required) The marketing kit includes all the ppts and demos from our launch event. Oracle package includes: • Event templates like invitation, agenda ,confirmation follow up templates • OFM 11g presentations • Free usage of the Oracle Customer Visit Center • Condition: mandatory lead registration in the Oracle Open Market Model (OMM) To download the material, please make sure that you select the campaign “Enterprise: Fusion Middleware 11g”: OFM 11g Oracle Marketing 4 Partners Package http://tinyurl.com/soamarketing (OPN account required)   For more information on Specialization please visit our OPN Specialized Webcast Series And become a member in our SOA Partner Community for registration please visit www.oracle.com/goto/ema/soa Jürgen Kress, SOA Partner Adoption EMEA SOA Specialized Application Grid Specialized Proof 2 transactions with OMM Proof 2 transactions with OMM Create your 2 references Create your 2 references SOA Sales assessment 3, Oracle Application Grid Sales Specialist  SOA Pre-Sales assessment 3 Oracle Application Grid PreSales Specialist Support assessment 1 Support assessment 2 SOA Implementation assessment 4 Application Gridplementation assessment 4

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• Enterprise MDM: Rationalizing Reference Data in a Fast Changing Environment

  - by Mala Narasimharajan

  By Rahul Kamath Enterprises must move at a rapid pace to establish and retain global market leadership by continuously focusing on operational efficiency, customer intimacy and relentless execution. Reference Data Management    As multi-national companies with a presence in multiple industry categories, market segments, and geographies, their ability to proactively manage changes and harness them to align their front office with back-office operations and performance management initiatives is critical to make the proverbial elephant dance. Managing reference data including types and codes, business taxonomies, complex relationships as well as mappings represent a key component of the broader agenda for enabling flexibility and agility, without sacrificing enterprise-level consistency, regulatory compliance and control. Financial Transformation  Periodically, companies find that processes implemented a decade or more ago no longer mirror the way of doing business and seek to proactively transform how they operate their business and underlying processes. Financial transformation often begins with the redesign of one’s chart of accounts. The ability to model and redesign one’s chart of accounts collaboratively, quickly validate against historical transaction bases and secure business buy-in across multiple line of business stakeholders, while continuing to manage changes within the legacy general ledger systems and downstream analytical applications while piloting the in-flight transformation can mean the difference between controlled success and project failure. Attend the session titled CON8275 - Oracle Hyperion Data Relationship Management: Enabling Enterprise Transformation at Oracle Openworld on Monday, October 1, 2012 at 4:45pm in Ballroom A of the InterContinental Hotel to learn how Oracle’s Data Relationship Management solution can help you stay ahead of the competition and proactively harness master (and reference) data changes to transform your enterprise. Hear in-depth customer testimonials from GE Healthcare and Old Mutual South Africa to learn how others have harnessed this technology effectively to build enduring competitive advantage through business process innovation and investments in master data governance. Hear GE Healthcare discuss how DRM has enabled financial transformation, ERP consolidation, mergers and acquisitions, and the alignment reference data across financial and management reporting applications. Also, learn how Old Mutual SA has upgraded to EBS R12 Financials and is transforming the management of chart of accounts for corporate reporting. Separately, an esteemed panel of DRM customers including Cisco Systems, Nationwide Insurance, Ralcorp Holdings and Mentor Graphics will discuss their perspectives on how DRM has helped them address business challenges associated with enterprise MDM including major change management initiatives including financial transformations, corporate restructuring, mergers & acquisitions, and the rationalization of financial and analytical master reference data to support alternate business perspectives for the alignment of EPM/BI initiatives. Attend the session titled CON9377 - Customer Showcase: Success with Oracle Hyperion Data Relationship Management at Openworld on Thursday, October 4, 2012 at 12:45pm in Ballroom of the InterContinental Hotel to interact with our esteemed speakers first hand.

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• Book review: Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams

  - by DigiMortal

     Peopleware by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister is golden classic book that can be considered as mandatory reading for software project managers, team leads, higher level management and board members of software companies. If you make decisions about people then you cannot miss this book. If you are already good on managing developers then this book can make you even better – you will learn new stuff about successful development teams for sure. Why peopleware? Peopleware gives you very good hints about how to build up working environment for project teams where people can really do their work. Book also covers team building topics that are also important reading. As software developer I found practically all points in this book to be accurate and valid. Many times I have found my self thinking about same things and Peopleware made me more confident about my opinions. Peopleware covers also time management and planning topics that help you do way better job on using developers time effectively by minimizing the amount of interruptions by phone calls, pointless meetings and i-want-to-know-what-are-you-doing-right-now questions by managers who doesn’t write code anyway. I think if you follow suggestions given by Peopleware your developers are very happy. I suggest you to also read another great book – Death March by Edward Yourdon. Death March describes you effectively what happens when good advices given by Peopleware are totally ignored or worse yet – people are treated exactly opposite way. I consider also Death March as golden classics and I strongly recommend you to read this book too. Table of Contents Acknowledgments Preface to the Second Edition Preface to the First Edition Part 1: Managing the Human Resource Chapter 1: Somewhere Today, a Project Is Failing Chapter 2: Make a Cheeseburger, Sell a Cheeseburger Chapter 3: Vienna Waits for You Chapter 4: Quality-If Time Permits Chapter 5: Parkinson's Law Revisited Chapter 6: Laetrile Part II: The Office Environment Chapter 7: The Furniture Police Chapter 8: "You Never Get Anything Done Around Here Between 9 and 5" Chapter 9: Saving Money on Space Intermezzo: Productivity Measurement and Unidentified Flying Objects Chapter 10: Brain Time Versus Body Time Chapter 11: The Telephone Chapter 12: Bring Back the Door Chapter 13: Taking Umbrella Steps Part III: The Right People Chapter 14: The Hornblower Factor Chapter 15: Hiring a Juggler Chapter 16: Happy to Be Here Chapter 17: The Self-Healing System Part IV: Growing Productive Teams Chapter 18: The Whole Is Greater Than the Sum of the Parts Chapter 19: The Black Team Chapter 20: Teamicide Chapter 21: A Spaghetti Dinner Chapter 22: Open Kimono Chapter 23: Chemistry for Team Formation Part V: It't Supposed to Be Fun to Work Here Chapter 24: Chaos and Order Chapter 25: Free Electrons Chapter 26: Holgar Dansk Part VI: Son of Peopleware Chapter 27: Teamicide, Revisited Chapter 28: Competition Chapter 29: Process Improvement Programs Chapter 30: Making Change Possible Chapter 31: Human Capital Chapter 32:Organizational Learning Chapter 33: The Ultimate Management Sin Is Chapter 34: The Making of Community Notes Bibliography Index About the Authors

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• Microsoft Virtual Academy

  Carpe Diem It's been since a while that I could write an article for this blog but alas, I was (and still am) very busy with customer's work. Which is actually good. So, what is this article going to tell you? Well, in general, just what I already tweeted, that life is constant process of learning - especially as software craftsman. Due to an upcoming new customer project in ASP.NET I had to seize the opportunity to get my head deeper into latest available technologies, like Windows Azure and SQL Azure. I know... cloud computing and so on is not a recent development and already available since quite a while but I never any means to get myself into this since roughly two weeks ago. Microsoft Virtual Academy I can't remember exactly what guided me towards the Microsoft Virtual Academy (MVA), oh wait... Yes, it was a posting on Facebook from an old CLIP community friend. He posted a shortened URL with #MVA tag that caught my attention. Thanks for that Thomas Kuberek. After the usual sign in or registration via Live ID I was a little bit surprised that Mauritius is not an available country option... Quick mail exchange with the MVA Decan, and yeah, apologies for the missing entry. So, currently I'm learning about Microsoft products and services, and collecting points under "Not Listed Country" until Mauritius is going to be added. Hopefully soon, as MVA honors your effort with different knowledge ranks that are compared to other students with public profiles. I think it's a nice move to add some game and competition factor into the learning game. The tracks and their different modules are mainly references to publicly available material online, namely on either MSDN, TechNet, Channel9, or other Microsoft based sites. The course material therefore also varies in different media and formats, ranging from simple online articles over downloadable documents (.docx or .pdf) to Silverlight / Windows Media streams with download options. Self-assessment and students ranking Each module in a track can be finished by taking part in a self-assessment. Up to now, the assessment I did (and passed) were limited to 10 minutes available time, and consisted of six to seven questions on the module training material. Nothing too serious but it gives you a glimpse idea how Microsoft certification exams are structured. Conclusion Nothing really new but nicely gathered, assembled and presented to the MVA students. At the moment, I wouldn't dare to compare the richness and quality of those courses with professional training offers, like Pluralsight .NET Training, LearnDevNow, VTC, etc. at all, but I think that MVA has potential. Give it a try, and let me know about your opinions.

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• How to get tens of millions of pages indexed by Google bot?

  - by Chris Adragna

  We are currently developing a site that currently has 8 million unique pages that will grow to about 20 million right away, and eventually to about 50 million or more. Before you criticize... Yes, it provides unique, useful content. We continually process raw data from public records and by doing some data scrubbing, entity rollups, and relationship mapping, we've been able to generate quality content, developing a site that's quite useful and also unique, in part due to the breadth of the data. It's PR is 0 (new domain, no links), and we're getting spidered at a rate of about 500 pages per day, putting us at about 30,000 pages indexed thus far. At this rate, it would take over 400 years to index all of our data. I have two questions: Is the rate of the indexing directly correlated to PR, and by that I mean is it correlated enough that by purchasing an old domain with good PR will get us to a workable indexing rate (in the neighborhood of 100,000 pages per day). Are there any SEO consultants who specialize in aiding the indexing process itself. We're otherwise doing very well with SEO, on-page especially, besides, the competition for our "long-tail" keyword phrases is pretty low, so our success hinges mostly on the number of pages indexed. Our main competitor has achieved approx 20MM pages indexed in just over one year's time, along with an Alexa 2000-ish ranking. Noteworthy qualities we have in place: page download speed is pretty good (250-500 ms) no errors (no 404 or 500 errors when getting spidered) we use Google webmaster tools and login daily friendly URLs in place I'm afraid to submit sitemaps. Some SEO community postings suggest a new site with millions of pages and no PR is suspicious. There is a Google video of Matt Cutts speaking of a staged on-boarding of large sites, too, in order to avoid increased scrutiny (at approx 2:30 in the video). Clickable site links deliver all pages, no more than four pages deep and typically no more than 250(-ish) internal links on a page. Anchor text for internal links is logical and adds relevance hierarchically to the data on the detail pages. We had previously set the crawl rate to the highest on webmaster tools (only about a page every two seconds, max). I recently turned it back to "let Google decide" which is what is advised.

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• Tell me a Story

  - by Geoff N. Hiten

  I recently had a friend ask me to review his resume.  He is a very experienced DBA with excellent skills.  If I had an opening I would have hired him myself.  But not because of the resume.  I know his skill set and skill levels, but there is no way his standard resume can convey that.  A bare bones list of job titles and skills does not set you apart from your competition, nor does it convey whether you have junior or senior level skills and experience.  The solution is to not use the standard format. Tell me a story.  I want to know what you were responsible for.  Describe a tough project and how you saved time/money/personnel on that project.  Link your work activity to business value.  Drop some technical bits in there since we do work in a technical field, but show me what you can do to add value to my business well above what I would pay you.  That will get my attention. The resume exists for one primary and one secondary reason.  The primary reason is to get the interview.  A Resume won’t get you a job, so don’t expect it to.  The secondary reason is to give you and the interviewer a starting point for conversations.  If I can say “Tell me more about when….” and reference an item from your resume, then that is great for both of us.  Of course, you better be able to tell me more, both from the technical and the business side, at least if I am hiring a senior or higher level position.  As for the junior DBAs, go ahead and tell your story too.  Don’t worry about how simple or basic your projects or solutions seem.  It is how you solved the problem and what you learned that I am looking for.  If you learn rapidly and think like a DBA, I can work with that, regardless of you current skill level.

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• Retail in New York - a walk down 5th Avenue

  - by sarah.taylor(at)oracle.com

  It's the week of the NRF Big Show and all eyes in the retail industry are on New York. The Big Apple is famous for Big Retail -with a proliferation of incredibly iconic stores. The environment is exciting and familiar even to people visiting this small island for the first time. Most of us have travelled down Fifth Avenue watching movies and TV even if we have never set foot on American soil. I find it one of the most exciting retail cities in the world and I am thrilled this year to be here with so many of Oracle's International retail customers who are joining us for the Retail Exchange. The Oracle program brings retailers from all over the planet together to share ideas and be inspired by New York retail and the NRF event. The show celebrates its 100th year in 2011 and New York itself has been recognized globally as the capital of innovative retail for just as long.  Fifth Avenue is where many global brands have placed their flagship stores, and businesses are in constant competition to set themselves apart from their competitors - both in the store and from the street.  These flag ship retail destinations present what today's customers are finding most exciting and delightful about retail. For the tourist market, they may only visit these stores once, but the impression that a trip to a flagship store leaves with a customer can last a lifetime.  One of the stores that is currently turning heads on Fifth Avenue is Hollister, sister brand to Abercrombie and Fitch, which has filled its shop front with a massive live video (and audio) feed of surfers on the beach in California.  To complete the effect, they also have troughs of water in front of the video screens to bring the sea to the street.  And this isn't the only kind of surfing that retailers are considering today and multi-channel retail is a hot topic that all of the retailers joining the Retail Exchange are considering.   The rest of the world looks to the brands along Fifth Avenue for inspiration - how they take advantage of new opportunities, how they set themselves apart from their competitors and how they keep their products fresh and desirable. With these inspiring pioneers in New York, it's little wonder that NRF's Big Show is so popular, and that New York is viewed as one of the retail capitals of the world. It is a pleasure to be here with so many of the world's greatest international retailers.

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• Mobile Apps: An Ongoing Revolution

  - by Steve Walker

  a guest post from Suhas Uliyar, VP Mobile Strategy, Product Management, Oracle The rise of smartphone apps have proved transformational for businesses, increasing the productivity of employees while simultaneously creating some seriously cool end user experiences. But this is a revolution that is only just beginning. Over the next few years, apps will change everything about the way enterprises work as well as overhauling the experiences of customers. The spark for this revolution is simplicity. Simplicity has already proved important for the front-end of apps, which are now often as compelling and intuitive as consumer apps. Businesses will encourage this trend, both to further increase employee productivity and to attract ‘digital natives’ (as employees and customers). With the variety of front-end development tools available already, this should be a simple mission for developers to accomplish – but front-end simplicity alone is not enough for the enterprise mobile revolution. Without the right content even the most user-friendly app is useless. Yet when it comes to integrating apps with ‘back-end’ systems to enable this content, developers often face a complex, costly and time-consuming task. Then there is security: how can developers strike a balance between complying with enterprise security policies and keeping the user experience simple? Complexity has acted as a brake on innovation, with integration and security compliance swallowing enterprise resources. This is why the simplification of integration, security and scalability is so important: it frees time and money for revolutionary innovation. The key is to put in place a complete and unified SOA integration platform that runs across the entire enterprise and enables organizations to easily integrate and connect applications across IT environments. The platform must also be capable of abstracting apps from the underlying OS and enabling a ‘write-once, run- anywhere’ capability for mobile devices - essential for BYOD environments and integrating third-party apps. Mobile Back-end-as-a-Service can also be very important in streamlining back-end integration. Mobile services offered through the cloud can simplify mobile application development with a standard approach to dealing with complex server-side programming and integration issues. This allows the business to innovate at its own pace while providing developers with a choice of tools to speed development and integration. Finally, there is security, which must be done in a way that encourages users to make the most of their mobile devices and applications. As mobile users, we want convenience and that is why we generally approve of businesses that adopt BYOD policies. Enterprises can safely encourage BYOD as they can separate, protect, and wipe corporate applications by installing a secure ‘container’ around corporate applications on any mobile device. BYOD management also means users’ personal applications and data can be kept separate from the enterprise information – giving them the confidence they need to embrace the use of their devices for corporate apps. Enterprises that place mobility at the heart of what they do will fundamentally transform their businesses and leap ahead of the competition. As businesses take to mobile platforms that simplify integration, security and scalability we will see a blossoming of innovation that will drive new levels of user convenience and create new ways of working that we are only beginning to imagine.

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• Games at Work Part 1: Introduction to Gamification and Applications

  - by ultan o'broin

  Games Are Everywhere How many of you (will admit to) remember playing Pong? OK then, do you play Angry Birds on your phone during work hours? Thought about why we keep playing online, video, and mobile games and what this "gamification" business we're hearing about means for the enterprise applications user experience? In Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World, Jane McGonigal says that playing computer and online games now provides more rewards for people than their real lives do. Games offer intrinsic rewards and happiness to the players as they pursue more satisfying work and the success, social connection, and meaning that goes with it. Yep, Gran Turismo, Dungeons & Dragons, Guitar Hero, Mario Kart, Wii Boxing, and the rest are all forms of work it seems. Games are, in fact, work taken so seriously that governments now move to limit the impact of virtual gaming currencies on the real financial system. Anyone who spends hours harvesting crops on FarmVille realizes it’s hard work too. Yet games evoke a positive emotion in players who voluntarily stay engaged with games for hours, day after day. Some 183 million active gamers in the United States play on average 13 hours per week. Weekly, 5 million of those gamers play for longer than a working week (45 hours). So why not harness the work put into games to solve real-world problems? Or, in the case of our applications users, real-world work problems? What’s a Game? Jane explains that all games have four defining traits: a goal, rules, a feedback system, and voluntary participation. We need to look at what motivational ideas behind the dynamics of the game—what we call gamification—are appropriate for our users. Typically, these motivators are achievement, altruism, competition, reward, self-expression, and status). Common game techniques for leveraging these motivations include: Badging and avatars Points and awards Leader boards Progress charts Virtual currencies or goods Gifting and giving Challenges and quests Some technology commentators argue for a game layer on top of everything, but this layer is already part of our daily lives in many instances. We see gamification working around us already: the badging and kudos offered on My Oracle Support or other Oracle community forums, becoming a Dragon Slayer implementor of Atlassian applications, being made duke of your favorite coffee shop on Yelp, sharing your workout details with Nike+, or donating to Japanese earthquake relief through FarmVille, for example. And what does all this mean for the applications that you use in your work? Read on in part two...

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• Gauging Maturity of your BPM Strategy - part 1 / 2

  - by Sanjeev Sharma

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman","serif";} In this post I will discuss the essence of maturity assessment and the business imperative for doing the same in the context of BPM. Social psychology purports that an individual progresses from being a beginner to an expert in a given activity or task along four stages of self-awareness: Unconscious Incompetence where the individual does not understand or know how to do something and does not necessarily recognize the deficit and may even deny the usefulness of the skill. Conscious Incompetence where the individual recognizes the deficit, as well as the value of a new skill in addressing the deficit. Conscious Competence where the individual understands or knows how to do something but demonstrating the skill requires explicit concentration. Unconscious Competence where the individual has had so much practice with a skill that it has become "second nature" and serves as a basis of developing other complementary skills. We can extend the above thinking to an organization as a whole by measuring an organization’s level of competence in a specific area or capability, as an aggregate of the competence levels of individuals it is comprised of. After all organizations too like individuals, evolve through experience, develop “memory” and capabilities that are shaped through a constant cycle of learning, un-learning and re-learning. Hence the key to organizational success lies in developing these capabilities to enable execution of its strategy in-line with the external environment i.e. demand, competition, economy etc. However developing a capability merits establishing a base line in order to Assess the magnitude of improvement from past investments Identify gaps and short-comings Prioritize future investments in the right areas A maturity assessment is essentially an organizational self-awareness check that is aimed at depicting the “as-is” snapshot of an existing capability in-order to guide future investments to develop that capability in-line with business goals. This effectively is the essence of a maturity Organizational capabilities stem through its architecture, routines, culture and intellectual resources that are implicitly and explicitly embedded in its business processes. Given that business processes underpin realization of organizational capabilities, is what has prompted business transformation and process management efforts. Thus, the BPM capability of an organization needs to be measured on an on-going basis to ensure delivery of its planned benefits. In my next post I will describe Oracle’s BPM Maturity assessment methodology.

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• MS in Computer Science after BE in electronics

  - by Abhinav

  I am doing my 3rd year Bachelors in Electronics and Electrical Communication but from the first year I have been interested in Computer Science. But at that time it was just my hobby. But in second year when I joined robotics my love for computer science rose. I with my team came in top three in 2 National Competition (Technical fests of different IITs) where we used Image Processing, Hardware interfacing etc. But then I realised that Computer Science is not just about coding. I took many lectures from online free schools like Udacity, Coursera in subjects related to Artificial Intelligence, Building a Search Engine, Design and Analysis of Algorithm, Programming a Robotic Car, Programming Languages, Machine Learning, Software Engineering as a Service, WebApps Engineering, Compilers, Applied Crypotography etc. I also did some courses in Core and Advanced Java in my second year from training institute. I will also be taking course in Statistics, Databases, Discrete Mathematics from 25th June. Now I realized how vast is the field of Computer Science and how efficient you become on deciding algorithms and classifying problems into different subfields which have been thoroughly researched so you don't always do brute force thing or naive programming. Now this field has become kind of passion for me. Adding to the fact I am also doing my 6 months internship in software field in Texas Instruments where I am working on Automation and Algorithms. I also have some 5-6 good college level projects in Softwares and Robotics. I also like Electronics but only some fields like Operating System(this subject was there in Electronics also), Micro Processor, Digital, Computer Architecture, DSPs etc. I really want to pursue MS in some field of Computer Science. I am giving GRE in October/November. Till now I have good CG of around 9.4/10 and my 1 year in college is still left. Do I have any chance that some good University in US will consider me for MS in field related to computer science or Robotics. Also Can you suggest somethings that I can do during this 1 year to increase my chances for MS or should I apply for EECS(Electrical Engineering and Computer Science) and then I can shift more towards Computer Science as my major option. My main aim is to do Phd after Ms in CS if I am able to do that somehow. I know that I have to put much extra effort to understand things in MS than CS undergraduates but I will do that with my full dedication, also when I communicate with my college CS students or during my internship period I didn't feel that I am missing very much stuff that they know and was very comfortable during my internship with software employees.

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• 3 Reasons You Need To Know Something About Every Technology

  - by Tim Murphy

  I make my living as a consultant and a general technologist.  I credit my success to the fact that I have never been afraid to pick up any product, language or platform needed to get the job done.  While Microsoft technologies I my mainstay, I have done work on mainframe and UNIX platforms and have worked with a wide variety of database engines.  Each one has it’s use and most times it is less expensive to find a way to communicate with an existing system than to replace it. So what are the main benefits of expending the effort to learn a new technology? New ways to solve problems Accelerate development Advise clients and get new business opportunities By new technology I mean ones that you haven’t had experience with before.  They don’t have to be the the one that just came out yesterday.  As they say, those who do not learn from history are bound to repeat it.  If you can learn something from an older technology it can be just as valuable as the shiny new one.  Either way, when you add another tool to your kit you get a new view on each problem you face.  This makes it easier to create a sound solution. The next thing you can learn from working with different products and techniques is how to more efficiently develop solve problems.  Many times if you are working with a new language you will find that there are specific design patterns that are used with it in normal use.  These can usually be applied with most languages.  You just needed to be exposed to them. The last point is about helping your clients and helping yourself.  If you can get in on technologies early you will have advantage over your competition in the market.  You will also be able to honestly advise you client on why they should or should not go with a new product.  Being able to compare products and their features is always an ability that stake holders appreciate. You don’t need to learn every detail of a product.  Learn enough to function and get an idea of how to use the technology.  Keep eating those technology Wheaties and you will be ready to go the distance in any project. del.icio.us Tags: Technology,technologists,technology generalist,Software Architecture

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• One Year Oracle SocialChat - The Movie

  - by mprove

  Tweet | Like | Watch on Vimeo You’ve just watched – hopefully – my first short movie. Thank you! Here is a bit of the back stage story. About 6 weeks ago colleagues from SNBC (Social Network and Business Collaboration) announced a Social Use Case Competition. It was expected to submit a video of 2 to 5 minutes duration on the Social Enterprise (our internal phrase for Enterprise 2.0). Hmm – I had a few vague ideas, but no script – no actors – no experience in film making. Really the best conditions to try something! I chose our weekly SocialChats as my main topic. But if you don’t do Danish Dogma cinema, you still need a script. Hence I played around with the SocialChat’s archive, and all of a sudden a script and even the actors appeared in front of me. The words that you have just seen are weekly topics. Slightly abridged and rearranged to form a story. Exciting, next phase. How to get it on digital celluloid? I have to confess I am still impressed by epic. (Keep in mind, epic was done in 2004.) And my actors – words – call for a typographic style already. The main part was done over a weekend with Apple Keynote. And I even found a wonderful matching soundtrack among my albums: Didge Goes World by Delago. I picked parts of Second Day and Seventh Day. Literally, the rhythm was set, and I "just" had to complete the movie. Tools used – apart from trial and error: Keynote, Pixelmator, GarageBand, iMovie. Finally I want to mention that I am extremely thankful to BSC Music for granting permissions to use the tracks for this short film! Without this sound it would have been just an ordinary slide show. – Internal note: The next SocialChat is on Death by PowerPoint vs. Presentation Zen. CU this Friday 3pm Greenwich / 7am Pacific.

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• Are we ready for the Cloud computing era?

  - by andrewkatumba

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} "Elite?" developer circles are abuzz with the notion of Cloud computing . The increasing bandwidth, the desire for faster and leaner operations and ofcourse the need for outsourcing non core it related business requirements e.g wordprocessing, spreadsheets, data backups. In strolls Chrome OS (am sure other similar OSes will join with their own wagons for us to jump on), offering just that, internet based services(more like a repository of), quick efficient and "reliable" and for the most part cheap and often time even free! And we all go rhapsodic!  It boils down to the age old dilemma, "if the cops are so busy protecting us then who will protect them" (even the folks back at Hollywood keep us reminded)! Who is going to ensure that these internet based services do not go down(either intentionally or by some malicious third party) leading to a multinational colossal disaster .At the risk of sounding pessimistic,  IT IS NOT AN ISSUE OF TRUST, this is but a mere case of Murphy's Law!  What then? Should the "cloud" be trusted to this extent at this time?  This is an era where challenges are rapidly solved with lightning promptness to "beat the competition", my hope is that our solutions are not just creating problems that we may not be able to solve!  Keeping my ear on the Ground.

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• SOA Summit - Oracle Session Replay

  - by Bruce Tierney

  If you think you missed the most recent Integration Developer News (IDN) "SOA Summit" 2013...good news, you didn't.  At least not the replay of the Oracle session titled: Three Solutionsfor Simplifying Cloud/On-Premises Integration As you will see in the reply below, this session introduces Three common reasons for integration complexity: Disparate Toolkits Lack of API Management Rigid, Brittle Infrastructure and then the Three solutions to these challenges: Unify Cloud On-premises Integration Enable Multi-channel Development with API Management Plan for the Unexpected - Future Readiness The last solution on future readiness describes how you can transition from being reactive to new trends, such as the Internet of Things (IoT), by modifying your integration strategy to enable business agility and how to recognize trends through Fast Data event processing ahead of your competition. Oracle SOA Suite customer SFpark's (San Francisco Metropolitan Transit Authority) implementation with API Management is covered as shown in the screenshot to the right This case study covers the core areas of API Management for partners to build their own applications by leveraging parking availability and real-time pricing as well as mobile enablement of data integrated by SOA Suite underneath.  Download the free SFpark app from the Apple and Android app stores to check it out. When looking into the future, the discussion starts with a historical look to better prepare for what comes next.   As shown in the image below, one of the next frontiers after mobile and cloud integration is a deeper level of direct "enterprise to customer" interaction.  Much of this relates to the Internet of Things.  Examples of IoT from the perspective of SOA and integration is also covered in the session. For example, early adopter Turkcell and their tracking of mobile phone users as they move from point A to B to C is shown in the image the right.   As you look into more "smart services" such as Location-Based Services, how "future ready" is your application infrastructure?  . . . Check out the replay by clicking the video image below to learn about these three challenges and solution including how to "future ready" your application infrastructure:

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• Showrooming: What's the big deal?

  - by David Dorf

  There's been lots of chatter recently on how retailers will combat showrooming this holiday season.  Best Buy and Target, for example, plan to price-match certain online sites.  But from my perspective, the whole showrooming concept is overblown.  Yes, mobile phones make is easier to comparison-shop, but consumers have been doing that all along.  Retailers have to work hard to merchandise their stores with the right products at the right price with the right promotions.  Its Retail 101. Yeah ok, many websites don't have to charge tax so they have an advantage, but they also have to cover shipping costs. Brick-and-mortar stores have the opportunity to provide expertise, fit, and instant gratification all of which are pretty big advantages. I see lots of studies that claim a large percentage of shoppers are showrooming.  Now I don't do much shopping, but when I do I rarely see anyone scanning UPC codes in the aisles.  If you dig into those studies, the question is usually something like, "have you used your mobile phone to price compare while shopping in the last year."  Well yeah, I did it once -- out of the 20 shopping trips.  And by the way, the in-store price was close enough to just buy the item.  Based on casual observation and informal surveys of friends, showrooming is not the modus-operandi for today's busy shoppers. I never see people showrooming in grocery stores, and most people don't bother for fashion.  For big purchases like appliances and furniture, I bet most people do their research online before entering the store.  The cases where I've done it was to see if a promotion was in fact a good deal.  Or even to make sure the in-store price is the same as the online price for the same brand. So, if you think you're a victim of showrooming, I suggest you look at the bigger picture.  Are you providing an engaging store experience?  Are you allowing customers to shop the way they want to shop, using various touchpoints?  Are you monitoring the competition to ensure prices are competitive?  Are your promotions attracting the right customers? Hubert Jolly, CEO of Best Buy, recently commented that showrooming might just get more people into his stores. "Once customers are in our stores, they're ours to lose."

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• Oracle Could Lead In Cloud Business Apps Within Year

  - by Richard Lefebvre

  Below is the reprint from an article, writen by By Pete Barlas, Investor's Business Daily, published on Investorscom: Oracle (ORCL) is all but destined to become the largest seller of cloud business-software applications, analysts say, and perhaps within a year. What that means in the long run is much debated, though, as analysts aren't sure whether pricing competition might cut into profit or what other issues might develop in the fast-emerging cloud software field. But the database leader, which is either No. 1 or 2 to SAP (SAP) in business apps overall, simply has the size and scope to overtake current cloud business-app leader, Salesforce.com (CRM), analysts say. Oracle rolled out its first full suite of cloud applications on June 6. Cloud computing lets companies store data and apps on the Internet "cloud" and access it quickly and easily. The applications run the gamut of customer relationship management software to social networking sites for employees, partners and customers. For longtime software giants like Oracle, the cloud is a big switch. They get the great bulk of revenue from companies and other enterprises buying or licensing software that the customers keep on their own computer systems. Vendors also get annual maintenance fees. Analysts estimate Oracle is taking in a mere $1 billion or so a year from cloud-based software sales and services now. But while that's just a sliver of the company's $37 billion in sales last year, it's already about a third of the total sales for Salesforce, which is expected to end this year with some $3 billion in revenue. Operates In 145 Countries Oracle operates in more than 145 countries vs. about 70 for Salesforce. And Oracle has far more apps than Salesforce. Revenue doesn't equate to profit, but it's inevitable that huge Oracle will become the largest seller of cloud applications, says Trip Chowdhry, an analyst for Global Equities Research. "What Oracle has is global presence," he said. "They have two things driving the revenue: breadth of the offering and breadth of the distribution. You put those applications in those sales reps' hands and you get deployments not in just one country but several countries." At the June 6 event, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison emphasized that his company could and would beat Salesforce.com in head-to-head battles for customers. Oracle makes software to help companies manage such tasks as customer relationships, recruiting, supply chains, projects, finances and more. That range gives it an edge over all rivals, says Michael Fauscette, an analyst for research firm IDC.

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