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• WildPackets Monitors Diverse Networks

  WildPackets offers portable network analysis products which are designed for use on enterprise networks and in test and measurement labs, plus distributed network analysis solutions for enterprise-wide applications.

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• Parent-child hierarchies and unary operators in PowerPivot

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

  Alberto wrote an excellent post describing how to implement the Unary Operator feature (which is present in Analysis Services) in PowerPivot (there was a previous post about parent-child hierarchies, too). I have to say that the solution is not so easy to implement as in Analysis Services, but it just works and, from a practical point of view, it is not so difficult to implement if you understand how it works and accept its limitations (only sum and subtractions are supported). I think that many...(read more)

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• Right-Time Retail Part 1

  - by David Dorf

  This is the first in a three-part series. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* 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; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Right-Time Revolution Technology enables some amazing feats in retail. I can order flowers for my wife while flying 30,000 feet in the air. I can order my groceries in the subway and have them delivered later that day. I can even see how clothes look on me without setting foot in a store. Who knew that a TV, diamond necklace, or even a car would someday be as easy to purchase as a candy bar? Can technology make a mattress an impulse item? Wake-up and your back is hurting, so you rollover and grab your iPad, then a new mattress is delivered the next day. Behind the scenes the many processes are being choreographed to make the sale happen. This includes moving data between systems with the least amount for friction, which in some cases is near real-time. But real-time isn’t appropriate for all the integrations. Think about what a completely real-time retailer would look like. A consumer grabs toothpaste off the shelf, and all systems are immediately notified so that the backroom clerk comes running out and pushes the consumer aside so he can replace the toothpaste on the shelf. Such a system is not only cost prohibitive, but it’s also very inefficient and ineffectual. Retailers must balance the realities of people, processes, and systems to find the right speed of execution. That’ what “right-time retail” means. Retailers used to sell during the day and count the money and restock at night, but global expansion and the Web have complicated that simplistic viewpoint. Our 24hr society demands not only access but also speed, which constantly pushes the boundaries of our IT systems. In the last twenty years, there have been three major technology advancements that have moved us closer to real-time systems. Networking is the first technology that drove the real-time trend. As systems became connected, it became easier to move data between them. In retail we no longer had to mail the daily business report back to corporate each day as the dial-up modem could transfer the data. That was soon replaced with trickle-polling, when sale transactions were occasionally sent from stores to corporate throughout the day, often through VSAT. Then we got terrestrial networks like DSL and Ethernet that allowed the constant stream of data between stores and corporate. When corporate could see the sales transactions coming from stores, it could better plan for replenishment and promotions. That drove the need for speed into the supply chain and merchandising, but for many years those systems were stymied by the huge volumes of data. Nordstrom has 150 million SKU/Store combinations when planning (RPAS); The Gap generates 110 million price changes during end-of-season (RPM); Argos does 1.78 billion calculations executed each day for replenishment planning (AIP). These areas are now being alleviated by the second technology, storage. The typical laptop disk drive runs at 5,400rpm with PCs stepping up to 7,200rpm and servers hitting 15,000rpm. But the platters can only spin so fast, so to squeeze more performance we’ve had to rely on things like disk striping. Then solid state drives (SSDs) were introduced and prices continue to drop. (Augmenting your harddrive with a SSD is the single best PC upgrade these days.) RAM continues to be expensive, but compressing data in memory has allowed more efficient use. So a few years back, Oracle decided to build a box that incorporated all these advancements to move us closer to real-time. This family of products, often categorized as engineered systems, combines the hardware and software so that they work together to provide better performance. How much better? If Exadata powered a 747, you’d go from New York to Paris in 42 minutes, and it would carry 5,000 passengers. If Exadata powered baseball, games would last only 18 minutes and Boston’s Fenway would hold 370,000 fans. The Exa-family enables processing more data in less time. So with faster networks and storage, that brings us to the third and final ingredient. If we continue to process data in traditional ways, we won’t be able to take advantage of the faster networks and storage. Enter what Harvard calls “The Sexiest Job of the 21st Century” – the data scientist. New technologies like the Hadoop-powered Oracle Big Data Appliance, Oracle Advanced Analytics, and Oracle Endeca Information Discovery change the way in which we organize data. These technologies allow us to extract actionable information from raw data at incredible speeds, often ad-hoc. So the foundation to support the real-time enterprise exists, but how does a retailer begin to take advantage? The most visible way is through real-time marketing, but I’ll save that for part 3 and instead begin with improved integrations for the assets you already have in part 2.

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• Powerful Lessons in Data from the Presidential Election

  - by Christina McKeon

  Now that we’ve had a few days to recover from the U.S. presidential election, it’s a good time to take a step back from politics and look for the customer experience lessons that we can take away. The most powerful lesson is that when you know more about your base, you will have an advantage over your competition. That advantage will translate into you winning and your competition losing. Michael Scherer of TIME was given access to Obama’s data analysts two days before the election. His account is documented in Inside the Secret World of the Data Crunchers Who Helped Obama Win. What we learned from Scherer’s inside view is how well Obama’s team did in getting the right data, analyzing it, and acting on it. This data team recognized how critical it was to break down data silos within the campaign. As Scherer noted, they created “a single system that merged information from pollsters, fundraisers, field workers, consumer databases, and social-media and mobile contacts with the main Democratic voter files in the swing states.” The Obama analysis was so meticulous that they knew which celebrity and which type of celebrity event would help them maximize campaign contributions. With a single system, their data models became more precise. They determined which messages were more successful with specific demographic groups and that who made the calls mattered. Data analysis also led to many other changes in Obama’s campaign including a new ad buying strategy, using social media and applications to tap into supporters’ friends, and using new social news sites. While we did not have that same inside view into Romney’s campaign, much of the post-mortem coverage indicates that Romney’s team did not have the right analysis. As Peter Hamby of CNN wrote in Analysis: Why Romney Lost, “Romney officials had modeled an electorate that looked something like a mix of 2004 and 2008….” That historical data did not account for the changing demographics in the U.S. Does your organization approach data like the Obama or Romney team? Do you really know your base? How well can you predict what is going to happen in your business? If you haven’t already put together a strategy and plan to know more, this week’s civics lesson is a powerful reason to do it sooner rather than later. Your competitors are probably thinking the same thing that you are!

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• Search Engine Optimizing

  Search Engine Optimization is a process by which a web site is improved so that it can be more easily found by search engines, rank higher and be found by its target audience. The main components to SEO are: keyword analysis, content analysis, title and meta tags, relevant link building, search engine submission, and maintenance. Below are steps in the process.

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• Botnet Malware Sleeps Eight Months Activation, Child Concerns

  Daily Safety Check experts used a computer forensic analysis of a significant botnet that consisted of Carberp and SpyEye malware to come up with the details for their report. The analysis found that the botnet profiled the behavior of the slave computers it infected, similar to surveillance techniques used by law enforcement agencies, for an average of eight months. During the eight months, the botnet analyzed each computer's users and assigned ratings to certain activities to form a complete profile for each. Doing so allowed those behind the scheme to determine which were the most favora...

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• Tissue Specific Electrochemical Fingerprinting on the NetBeans Platform

  - by Geertjan

  Proteomics and metalloproteomics are rapidly developing interdisciplinary fields providing enormous amounts of data to be classified, evaluated, and interpreted. Approaches offered by bioinformatics and also by biostatistical data analysis and treatment are therefore becoming increasingly relevant. A bioinformatics tool has been developed at universities in Prague and Brno, in the Czech Republic, for analysis and visualization in this domain, on the NetBeans Platform: More info:  http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0049654

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• Feature: Lead with Intelligence

  Business efficiency depends on business decisions, and business decisions depend on current, accurate information and powerful analysis. See how Oracle data warehousing, business intelligence, and enterprise performance management solutions deliver the information, analysis, and efficiencies to propel your business ahead of the competition.

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• /usr/bin/sshd isn't linked against PAM on one of my systems. What is wrong and how can I fix it?

  - by marc.riera

  Hi, I'm using AD as my user account server with ldap. Most of the servers run with UsePam yes except this one, it has lack of pam support on sshd. root@linserv9:~# ldd /usr/sbin/sshd linux-vdso.so.1 => (0x00007fff621fe000) libutil.so.1 => /lib/libutil.so.1 (0x00007fd759d0b000) libz.so.1 => /usr/lib/libz.so.1 (0x00007fd759af4000) libnsl.so.1 => /lib/libnsl.so.1 (0x00007fd7598db000) libcrypto.so.0.9.8 => /usr/lib/libcrypto.so.0.9.8 (0x00007fd75955b000) libcrypt.so.1 => /lib/libcrypt.so.1 (0x00007fd759323000) libc.so.6 => /lib/libc.so.6 (0x00007fd758fc1000) libdl.so.2 => /lib/libdl.so.2 (0x00007fd758dbd000) /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 (0x00007fd759f0e000) I have this packages installed root@linserv9:~# dpkg -l|grep -E 'pam|ssh' ii denyhosts 2.6-2.1 an utility to help sys admins thwart ssh hac ii libpam-modules 0.99.7.1-5ubuntu6.1 Pluggable Authentication Modules for PAM ii libpam-runtime 0.99.7.1-5ubuntu6.1 Runtime support for the PAM library ii libpam-ssh 1.91.0-9.2 enable SSO behavior for ssh and pam ii libpam0g 0.99.7.1-5ubuntu6.1 Pluggable Authentication Modules library ii libpam0g-dev 0.99.7.1-5ubuntu6.1 Development files for PAM ii openssh-blacklist 0.1-1ubuntu0.8.04.1 list of blacklisted OpenSSH RSA and DSA keys ii openssh-client 1:4.7p1-8ubuntu1.2 secure shell client, an rlogin/rsh/rcp repla ii openssh-server 1:4.7p1-8ubuntu1.2 secure shell server, an rshd replacement ii quest-openssh 5.2p1_q13-1 Secure shell root@linserv9:~# What I'm doing wrong? thanks. Edit: root@linserv9:~# cat /etc/pam.d/sshd # PAM configuration for the Secure Shell service # Read environment variables from /etc/environment and # /etc/security/pam_env.conf. auth required pam_env.so # [1] # In Debian 4.0 (etch), locale-related environment variables were moved to # /etc/default/locale, so read that as well. auth required pam_env.so envfile=/etc/default/locale # Standard Un*x authentication. @include common-auth # Disallow non-root logins when /etc/nologin exists. account required pam_nologin.so # Uncomment and edit /etc/security/access.conf if you need to set complex # access limits that are hard to express in sshd_config. # account required pam_access.so # Standard Un*x authorization. @include common-account # Standard Un*x session setup and teardown. @include common-session # Print the message of the day upon successful login. session optional pam_motd.so # [1] # Print the status of the user's mailbox upon successful login. session optional pam_mail.so standard noenv # [1] # Set up user limits from /etc/security/limits.conf. session required pam_limits.so # Set up SELinux capabilities (need modified pam) # session required pam_selinux.so multiple # Standard Un*x password updating. @include common-password Edit2: UsePAM yes fails With this configuration ssh fails to start : root@linserv9:/home/admmarc# cat /etc/ssh/sshd_config |grep -vE "^[ \t]*$|^#" Port 22 Protocol 2 ListenAddress 0.0.0.0 RSAAuthentication yes PubkeyAuthentication yes AuthorizedKeysFile .ssh/authorized_keys ChallengeResponseAuthentication yes UsePAM yes Subsystem sftp /usr/lib/sftp-server root@linserv9:/home/admmarc# The error it gives is as follows root@linserv9:/home/admmarc# /etc/init.d/ssh start * Starting OpenBSD Secure Shell server sshd /etc/ssh/sshd_config: line 75: Bad configuration option: UsePAM /etc/ssh/sshd_config: terminating, 1 bad configuration options ...fail! root@linserv9:/home/admmarc#

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• ACORD LOMA Session Highlights Policy Administration Trends

  - by [email protected]

  Helen Pitts, senior product marketing manager for Oracle Insurance, attended and is blogging from the ACORD LOMA Insurance Forum this week. Above: Paul Vancheri, Chief Information Officer, Fidelity Investments Life Insurance Company. Vancheri gave a presentation during the ACORD LOMA Insurance Systems Forum about the key elements of modern policy administration systems and how insurers can mitigate risk during legacy system migrations to safely introduce new technologies. When I had a few particularly challenging honors courses in college my father, a long-time technology industry veteran, used to say, "If you don't know how to do something go ask the experts. Find someone who has been there and done that, don't be afraid to ask the tough questions, and apply and build upon what you learn." (Actually he still offers this same advice today.) That's probably why my favorite sessions at industry events, like the ACORD LOMA Insurance Forum this week, are those that include insight on industry trends and case studies from carriers who share their experiences and offer best practices based upon their own lessons learned. I had the opportunity to attend a particularly insightful session Wednesday as Craig Weber, senior vice president of Celent's Insurance practice, and Paul Vancheri, CIO of Fidelity Life Investments, presented, "Managing the Dynamic Insurance Landscape: Enabling Growth and Profitability with a Modern Policy Administration System." Policy Administration Trends Growing the business is the top issue when it comes to IT among both life and annuity and property and casualty carriers according to Weber. To drive growth and capture market share from competitors, carriers are looking to modernize their core insurance systems, with 65 percent of those CIOs participating in recent Celent research citing plans to replace their policy administration systems. Weber noted that there has been continued focus and investment, particularly in the last three years, by software and technology vendors to offer modern, rules-based, configurable policy administration solutions. He added that these solutions are continuing to evolve with the ongoing aim of helping carriers rapidly meet shifting business needs--whether it is to launch new products to market faster than the competition, adapt existing products to meet shifting consumer and /or regulatory demands, or to exit unprofitable markets. He closed by noting the top four trends for policy administration either in the process of being adopted today or on the not-so-distant horizon for the future: Underwriting and service desktops New business automation Convergence of ultra-configurable and domain content-rich systems Better usability and screen design Mitigating the Risk When Making the Decision to Modernize Third-party analyst research from advisory firms like Celent was a key part of the due diligence process for Fidelity as it sought a replacement for its legacy policy administration system back in 2005, according to Vancheri. The company's business opportunities were outrunning system capability. Its legacy system had not been upgraded in several years and was deficient from a functionality and currency standpoint. This was constraining the carrier's ability to rapidly configure and bring new and complex products to market. The company sought a new, modern policy administration system, one that would enable it to keep pace with rapid and often unexpected industry changes and ahead of the competition. A cross-functional team that included representatives from finance, actuarial, operations, client services and IT conducted an extensive selection process. This process included deep documentation review, pilot evaluations, demonstrations of required functionality and complex problem-solving, infrastructure integration capability, and the ability to meet the company's desired cost model. The company ultimately selected an adaptive policy administration system that met its requirements to: Deliver ease of use - eliminating paper and rework, while easing the burden on representatives to sell and service annuities Provide customer parity - offering Web-based capabilities in alignment with the company's focus on delivering a consistent customer experience across its business Deliver scalability, efficiency - enabling automation, while simplifying and standardizing systems across its technology stack Offer desired functionality - supporting Fidelity's product configuration / rules management philosophy, focus on customer service and technology upgrade requirements Meet cost requirements - including implementation, professional services and licenses fees and ongoing maintenance Deliver upon business requirements - enabling the ability to drive time to market for new products and flexibility to make changes Best Practices for Addressing Implementation Challenges Based upon lessons learned during the company's implementation, Vancheri advised carriers to evaluate staffing capabilities and cultural impacts, review business requirements to avoid rebuilding legacy processes, factor in dependent systems, and review policies and practices to secure customer data. His formula for success: upfront planning + clear requirements = precision execution. Achieving a Return on Investment Vancheri said the decision to replace their legacy policy administration system and deploy a modern, rules-based system--before the economic downturn occurred--has been integral in helping the company adapt to shifting market conditions, while enabling growth in its direct channel sales of variable annuities. Since deploying its new policy admin system, the company has reduced its average time to market for new products from 12-15 months to 4.5 months. The company has since migrated its other products to the new system and retired its legacy system, significantly decreasing its overall product development cycle. From a processing standpoint Vancheri noted the company has achieved gains in automation, information, and ease of use, resulting in improved real-time data edits, controls for better quality, and tax handling capability. Plus, with by having only one platform to manage, the company has simplified its IT environment and is well positioned to deliver system enhancements for greater efficiencies. Commitment to Continuing the Investment In the short and longer term future Vancheri said the company plans to enhance business functionality to support money movement, wire automation, divorce processing on payout contracts and cost-based tracking improvements. It also plans to continue system upgrades to remain current as well as focus on further reducing cycle time, driving down maintenance costs, and integrating with other products. Helen Pitts is senior product marketing manager for Oracle Insurance focused on life/annuities and enterprise document automation.

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• Cloud Computing Forces Better Design Practices

  - by Herve Roggero

  Is cloud computing simply different than on premise development, or is cloud computing actually forcing you to create better applications than you normally would? In other words, is cloud computing merely imposing different design principles, or forcing better design principles?  A little while back I got into a discussion with a developer in which I was arguing that cloud computing, and specifically Windows Azure in his case, was forcing developers to adopt better design principles. His opinion was that cloud computing was not yielding better systems; just different systems. In this blog, I will argue that cloud computing does force developers to use better design practices, and hence better applications. So the first thing to define, of course, is the word “better”, in the context of application development. Looking at a few definitions online, better means “superior quality”. As it relates to this discussion then, I stipulate that cloud computing can yield higher quality applications in terms of scalability, everything else being equal. Before going further I need to also outline the difference between performance and scalability. Performance and scalability are two related concepts, but they don’t mean the same thing. Scalability is the measure of system performance given various loads. So when developers design for performance, they usually give higher priority to a given load and tend to optimize for the given load. When developers design for scalability, the actual performance at a given load is not as important; the ability to ensure reasonable performance regardless of the load becomes the objective. This can lead to very different design choices. For example, if your objective is to obtains the fastest response time possible for a service you are building, you may choose the implement a TCP connection that never closes until the client chooses to close the connection (in other words, a tightly coupled service from a connectivity standpoint), and on which a connection session is established for faster processing on the next request (like SQL Server or other database systems for example). If you objective is to scale, you may implement a service that answers to requests without keeping session state, so that server resources are released as quickly as possible, like a REST service for example. This alternate design would likely have a slower response time than the TCP service for any given load, but would continue to function at very large loads because of its inherently loosely coupled design. An example of a REST service is the NO-SQL implementation in the Microsoft cloud called Azure Tables. Now, back to cloud computing… Cloud computing is designed to help you scale your applications, specifically when you use Platform as a Service (PaaS) offerings. However it’s not automatic. You can design a tightly-coupled TCP service as discussed above, and as you can imagine, it probably won’t scale even if you place the service in the cloud because it isn’t using a connection pattern that will allow it to scale [note: I am not implying that all TCP systems do not scale; I am just illustrating the scalability concepts with an imaginary TCP service that isn’t designed to scale for the purpose of this discussion]. The other service, using REST, will have a better chance to scale because, by design, it minimizes resource consumption for individual requests and doesn’t tie a client connection to a specific endpoint (which means you can easily deploy this service to hundreds of machines without much trouble, as long as your pockets are deep enough). The TCP and REST services discussed above are both valid designs; the TCP service is faster and the REST service scales better. So is it fair to say that one service is fundamentally better than the other? No; not unless you need to scale. And if you don’t need to scale, then you don’t need the cloud in the first place. However, it is interesting to note that if you do need to scale, then a loosely coupled system becomes a better design because it can almost always scale better than a tightly-coupled system. And because most applications grow overtime, with an increasing user base, new functional requirements, increased data and so forth, most applications eventually do need to scale. So in my humble opinion, I conclude that a loosely coupled system is not just different than a tightly coupled system; it is a better design, because it will stand the test of time. And in my book, if a system stands the test of time better than another, it is of superior quality. Because cloud computing demands loosely coupled systems so that its underlying service architecture can be leveraged, developers ultimately have no choice but to design loosely coupled systems for the cloud. And because loosely coupled systems are better… … the cloud forces better design practices. My 2 cents.

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• select from varchar2 column with numeric value sometimes gives invalid number error

  - by Rene

  I'm trying to understand why, on some systems, I get an invalid number error message when I'm trying to select a value from a varchar2 column while on other systems I don't get the error while doing the exact same thing. The table is something like this: ID Column_1 Column_2 1 V text 2 D 1 3 D 2 4 D 3 and a query: select ID from table where column_1='D' and column_2 = :some_number_value :some_number_value is always numeric but can be null. We've fixed the query: select ID from table where column_1='D' and column_2 = to_char(:some_number_value) This original query runs fine on most systems but on some systems gives an "invalid number" error. The question is why? Why does it work on most systems and not on some?

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• When to use Hibernate?

  - by Ramo

  Hi All, I was asked in an interview this question so I answered with the following: -Better Performance: - Efficient queries. - 1st and 2nd level caching. - Good caching gives better scalability. - Good Database Portability: - Changing the DB is as easy as changing the dialect configuration. - Increased Developer Productivity: - Think only in object terms not in query language terms. But I also feel that systems fall in one of the below categories, and Hibernate may not be suited for all these cases, I'm interested in your thoughts about this, do you agree with me? please let me know when would use HB in the following case and why. Write Only Systems: Read Only Systems: Write Mostly Systems: Read Mostly Systems: Regards Ramo

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• Unleash the Power of Cryptography on SPARC T4

  - by B.Koch

  by Rob Ludeman Oracle’s SPARC T4 systems are architected to deliver enhanced value for customer via the inclusion of many integrated features.  One of the best examples of this approach is demonstrated in the on-chip cryptographic support that delivers wire speed encryption capabilities without any impact to application performance.  The Evolution of SPARC Encryption SPARC T-Series systems have a long history of providing this capability, dating back to the release of the first T2000 systems that featured support for on-chip RSA encryption directly in the UltraSPARC T1 processor.  Successive generations have built on this approach by support for additional encryption ciphers that are tightly coupled with the Oracle Solaris 10 and Solaris 11 encryption framework.  While earlier versions of this technology were implemented using co-processors, the SPARC T4 was redesigned with new crypto instructions to eliminate some of the performance overhead associated with the former approach, resulting in much higher performance for encrypted workloads. The Superiority of the SPARC T4 Approach to Crypto As companies continue to engage in more and more e-commerce, the need to provide greater degrees of security for these transactions is more critical than ever before.  Traditional methods of securing data in transit by applications have a number of drawbacks that are addressed by the SPARC T4 cryptographic approach. 1. Performance degradation – cryptography is highly compute intensive and therefore, there is a significant cost when using other architectures without embedded crypto functionality.  This performance penalty impacts the entire system, slowing down performance of web servers (SSL), for example, and potentially bogging down the speed of other business applications.  The SPARC T4 processor enables customers to deliver high levels of security to internal and external customers while not incurring an impact to overall SLAs in their IT environment. 2. Added cost – one of the methods to avoid performance degradation is the addition of add-in cryptographic accelerator cards or external offload engines in other systems.  While these solutions provide a brute force mechanism to avoid the problem of slower system performance, it usually comes at an added cost.  Customers looking to encrypt datacenter traffic without the overhead and expenditure of extra hardware can rely on SPARC T4 systems to deliver the performance necessary without the need to purchase other hardware or add-on cards. 3. Higher complexity – the addition of cryptographic cards or leveraging load balancers to perform encryption tasks results in added complexity from a management standpoint.  With SPARC T4, encryption keys and the framework built into Solaris 10 and 11 means that administrators generally don’t need to spend extra cycles determining how to perform cryptographic functions.  In fact, many of the instructions are built-in and require no user intervention to be utilized.  For example, For OpenSSL on Solaris 11, SPARC T4 crypto is available directly with a new built-in OpenSSL 1.0 engine, called the "t4 engine."  For a deeper technical dive into the new instructions included in SPARC T4, consult Dan Anderson’s blog. Conclusion In summary, SPARC T4 systems offer customers much more value for applications than just increased performance. The integration of key virtualization technologies, embedded encryption, and a true Enterprise Operating System, Oracle Solaris, provides direct business benefits that supersedes the commodity approach to data center computing.   SPARC T4 removes the roadblocks to secure computing by offering integrated crypto accelerators that can save IT organizations in operating cost while delivering higher levels of performance and meeting objectives around compliance. For more on the SPARC T4 family of products, go to here.

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• Are there too many qualified software development engineers chasing too few jobs?

  - by T Gregory

  I am trying to write this question in a non-argumentative way, but it is quite emotionally charged for some, so please bear with me. In the U.S., we hear constantly from CEOs that they cannot find enough qualified software engineers. In fact, it is the position of the U.S. government that demand for software engineering talent outpaces supply. This position can be clearly seen in the granting of tens of thousands of H1B visas, but also in the following excerpt from the official 2010-11 Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Outlook Handbook: Employment of computer software engineers is expected to increase by 32 percent from 2008-2018, which is much faster than the average for all occupations. In addition, this occupation will see a large number of new jobs, with more than 295,000 created between 2008 and 2018. Demand for computer software engineers will increase as computer networking continues to grow. For example, expanding Internet technologies have spurred demand for computer software engineers who can develop Internet, intranet, and World Wide Web applications. Likewise, electronic data-processing systems in business, telecommunications, healthcare, government, and other settings continue to become more sophisticated and complex. Implementing, safeguarding, and updating computer systems and resolving problems will fuel the demand for growing numbers of systems software engineers. New growth areas will also continue to arise from rapidly evolving technologies. The increasing uses of the Internet, the proliferation of Web sites, and mobile technology such as the wireless Internet have created a demand for a wide variety of new products. As more software is offered over the Internet, and as businesses demand customized software to meet their specific needs, applications and systems software engineers will be needed in greater numbers. In addition, the growing use of handheld computers will create demand for new mobile applications and software systems. As these devices become a larger part of the business environment, it will be necessary to integrate current computer systems with this new, more mobile technology. However, from the the employee side of the equation, we often hear the opposite. Many of the stories of SDEs with graduate degrees and decades of experience on the unemployment line, or the big tech interview war stories, are anecdotal, for sure. But, there is one piece of data that is neither anecdotal nor transitory, and that is the aggregate decisions of millions of undergraduates of what degree to pursue. Here, a different picture emerges from the data, and that picture is not good for the software profession. According the most recent Taulbee Survey from Computer Research Association, undergrad degree production in CS and CE has fallen nearly 60% since 2004. (Undergrad enrollments have ticked up in the past two years, but only modestly). Here we see that a basic disconnect between what corporate CEOs and the US government are saying and what potential employees really think about job prospects in software engineering. So my questions are these. Who are we to believe? Is there an acute talent shortage, or is there a long-term structural oversupply in the SDE labor market? Can anyone provide reliable data on long-term unemployment among SDEs? How many are leaving the profession due to lack of work? Real data is most helpful. Thanks.

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• Enterprise Integration: Can Companies Afford It?

  - by Ralph Wheaton

  Each year, my company holds a global sales conference where employees and partners from around the world some together to collaborate, share knowledge and ideas and learn about future plans.  As a member of the professional services division, several of us had been asked to make a presentation, an elevator pitch in 3 minutes or less that relates to a success we have worked on or directly relates to our tag (that is, our primary technology focus).  Mine happens to be Enterprise Integration as it relates Business Intelligence.  I found it rather difficult to present that pitch in a short amount of time and had to pare it down.  At any rate, in just a little over 3 minutes, this is the presentation I submitted.  Here is a link to the full presentation video in WMV format.   Many companies today subscribe to a buy versus build mentality in an attempt to drive down costs and improve time to implementation. Sometimes this makes sense, especially as it relates to specialized software or software that performs a small number of tasks extremely well. However, if not carefully considered or planned out, this oftentimes leads to multiple disparate systems with silos of data or multiple versions of the same data. For instance, client data (contact information, addresses, phone numbers, opportunities, sales) stored in your CRM system may not play well with Accounts Receivables. Employee data may be stored across multiple systems such as HR, Time Entry and Payroll. Other data (such as member data) may not originate internally, but be provided by multiple outside sources in multiple formats. And to top it all off, some data may have to be manually entered into multiple systems to keep it all synchronized. When left to grow out of control like this, overall performance is lacking, stability is questionable and maintenance is frequent and costly. Worse yet, in many cases, this topology, this hodgepodge of data creates a reporting nightmare. Decision makers are forced to try to put together pieces of the puzzle attempting to find the information they need, wading through multiple systems to find what they think is the single version of the truth. More often than not, they find they are missing pieces, pieces that may be crucial to growing the business rather than closing the business. across applications. Master data owners are defined to establish single sources of data (such as the CRM system owns client data). Other systems subscribe to the master data and changes are replicated to subscribers as they are made. This can be one way (no changes are allowed on the subscriber systems) or bi-directional. But at all times, the master data owner is current or up to date. And all data, whether internal or external, use the same processes and methods to move data from one place to another, leveraging the same validations, lookups and transformations enterprise wide, eliminating inconsistencies and siloed data. Once implemented, an enterprise integration solution improves performance and stability by reducing the number of moving parts and eliminating inconsistent data. Overall maintenance costs are mitigated by reducing touch points or the number of places that require modification when a business rule is changed or another data element is added. Most importantly, however, now decision makers can easily extract and piece together the information they need to grow their business, improve customer satisfaction and so on. So, in implementing an enterprise integration solution, companies can position themselves for the future, allowing for easy transition to data marts, data warehousing and, ultimately, business intelligence. Along this path, companies can achieve growth in size, intelligence and complexity. Truly, the question is not can companies afford to implement an enterprise integration solution, but can they afford not to.   Ralph Wheaton Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist Microsoft Certified Professional Developer Microsoft VTS-P BizTalk, .Net

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• Launching Ops Center 12c

  - by user12601629

  Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center 12c is most ambitious version of the Ops Center tooling that we've ever released. I think that make it appropriate that we launched it in grand style! When it became clear we were going to be complete with the 12c final release about this time of year, the marketing team proposed that we roll the launch of 12c into Oracle OpenWorld Tokyo.  I thought that sounded like a fine idea!  You see, I have always loved Japan.  I even studied a bit of Japanese language back in school. OpenWorld Tokyo was an outstanding even this year.  It was held in Roppongi, one of the most stylish districts in Tokyo. And, to make things even better, the Sakura (cherry blossoms) were blooming.  If you've never been in Japan for cherry blossom season, it's a must see!  Here are a couple of pics for you. Here is a picture from Roppongi, near the conference.  Here's a picture near the Imperial Palace.  A couple of friends from the local sales team took me here before my flight out. So, now back to the product launch! We choose to launch the product in John Fowler's "Engineered Systems" keynote address.  It made perfect sense because of the close ties of Ops Center to the Systems portfolio of products.  It was a packed house for the keynote.  Here's a picture I took just before we started -- there were also hundreds more people in "overflow" rooms in other parts of the venue. Here's a picture of me on stage during the launch. While there are countless new features in Ops Center 12c that customers will love, I had to limit myself to discussing just three. Mission Critical Clouds Solaris 11 Engineered Systems So, what does Mission Critical Cloud mean?  It means we've expanded EM's cloud capabilities in a couple of key areas. First, we've expanded the "self service provisioning" capabilities we have to include SPARC -- not just x86.  Now you can build clouds of Solaris Zones with ease!  Second, we've much more deeply integrated high-end storage and network management into the cloud layers.  These may our IaaS story is now much more powerful! For Solaris 11, we didn't simply port our monitoring agent to S11.  That would have been easy, but also boring! We support S11 deeply.  Full access to the power of the IPS packaging system, the new virtualized networking stack, new Zones features, the Auto Install framework.  If you're ready to try Solaris 11 then Ops Center is ready for you. Last is on the area of Engineered Systems.  These combinations of hardware and software are fast and powerful. However, we're also on a mission to make them ever easier to manage.  We've made major strides with Ops Center 12c. Manage these systems as racks, not individual components.  The new capabilities for the new engineered systems like Exalogic and SPARC SuperCluster and striking. You can read more here: Oracle Unveils Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center 12c So, I'll wrap this up with one final bit of fun. One of my friends from the Oracle marketing department found a super cool place to get dinner.  It's a restaurant called Gonpachi. It turns out this is the place that inspired the scene in the Quentin Taratino movie Kill Bill where Uma Thurman fights 88 Ninjas.  Here is a picture I snapped while we were there. It was surely a good time. Check it out next time you're in Tokyo.

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• Orchestrating the Virtual Enterprise, Part I

  - by Kathryn Perry

  A guest post by Jon Chorley, Oracle's Chief Sustainability Officer & Vice President, SCM Product Strategy During the American Industrial Revolution, the Ford Motor Company did it all. It turned raw materials into a showroom full of Model Ts. It owned a steel mill, a glass factory, and an automobile assembly line. The company was both self-sufficient and innovative and went on to become one of the largest and most profitable companies in the world. Nowadays, it's unusual for any business to follow this vertical integration model because its much harder to be best in class across such a wide a range of capabilities and services. Instead, businesses focus on their core competencies and outsource other business functions to specialized suppliers. They exchange vertical integration for collaboration. When done well, all parties benefit from this arrangement and the collaboration leads to the creation of an agile, lean and successful "virtual enterprise." Case in point: For Sun hardware, Oracle outsources most of its manufacturing and all of its logistics to third parties. These are vital activities, but ones where Oracle doesn't have a core competency, so we shift them to business partners who do. Within our enterprise, we always retain the core functions of product development, support, and most of the sales function, because that's what constitutes our core value to our customers. This is a perfect example of a virtual enterprise.  What are the implications of this? It means that we must exchange direct internal control for indirect external collaboration. This fundamentally changes the relative importance of different business processes, the boundaries of security and information sharing, and the relationship of the supply chain systems to the ERP. The challenge is that the systems required to support this virtual paradigm are still mired in "island enterprise" thinking. But help is at hand. Developments such as the Web, social networks, collaboration, and rules-based orchestration offer great potential to fundamentally re-architect supply chain systems to better support the virtual enterprise.  Supply Chain Management Systems in a Virtual Enterprise Historically enterprise software was constructed to automate the ERP - and then the supply chain systems extended the ERP. They were joined at the hip. In virtual enterprises, the supply chain system needs to be ERP agnostic, sitting above each of the ERPs that are distributed across the virtual enterprise - most of which are operating in other businesses. This is vital so that the supply chain system can manage the flow of material and the related information through the multiple enterprises. It has to have strong collaboration tools. It needs to be highly flexible. Users need to be able to see information that's coming from multiple sources and be able to react and respond to events across those sources.  Oracle Fusion Distributed Order Orchestration (DOO) is a perfect example of a supply chain system designed to operate in this virtual way. DOO embraces the idea that a company's fulfillment challenge is a distributed, multi-enterprise problem. It enables users to manage the process and the trading partners in a uniform way and deliver a consistent user experience while operating over a heterogeneous, virtual enterprise. This is a fundamental shift at the core of managing supply chains. It forces virtual enterprises to think architecturally about how best to construct their supply chain systems. In my next post, I will share examples of companies that have made that shift and talk more about the distributed orchestration process.

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• mod perl in apache 2.2 not parsing perl scripts

  - by futureelite7

  Hi, I've set up a fresh Apache 2.2.15 server on windows server 2008 R2 with mod_perl (mod perl v2.0.4 / perl v5.10.1). Mod_perl and Perl 5.10 has been installed and loaded without problems. However, despite my configuration, the mod_perl module is failing to recognize and execute my .pl file, instead opting to print out the perl source instead. What did I do wrong, and how do I make perl process my pl script instead of sending it to the client? My configuration: <VirtualHost *:80> ServerAdmin [email protected] DocumentRoot "C:\Program Files (x86)\AWStats\wwwroot" ServerName analysis.example.com ServerAlias analysis.example.com ErrorLog "logs/analysis.example.com-error.log" CustomLog "logs/analysis.example.com-access.log" common DirectoryIndex index.php index.htm index.html PerlSwitches -T <Directory "C:\Program Files (x86)\AWStats\wwwroot"> Options Indexes FollowSymLinks AllowOverride None Order allow,deny Allow from all </Directory> <Directory "C:\Program Files (x86)\AWStats\wwwroot\cgi-bin"> AllowOverride None Options None Order allow,deny Allow from all <FilesMatch "\.pl$"> SetHandler perl-script # #PerlResponseHandler ModPerl::Registry PerlOptions +ParseHeaders Options +ExecCGI </FilesMatch> </directory> </VirtualHost> Many many thanks for the help!

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• How to deal with alias registers in data-flow analysis using SSA form? (e.g. EAX/AX/AH/AL in x86)

  - by forgot

  For exmaple: How to represent the following x86 in SSA form: xor eax, eax inc ax

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• The Oracle Enterprise Linux Software and Hardware Ecosystem

  - by sergio.leunissen

  It's been nearly four years since we launched the Unbreakable Linux support program and with it the free Oracle Enterprise Linux software. Since then, we've built up an extensive ecosystem of hardware and software partners. Oracle works directly with these vendors to ensure joint customers can run Oracle Enterprise Linux. As Oracle Enterprise Linux is fully--both source and binary--compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), there is minimal work involved for software and hardware vendors to test their products with it. We develop our software on Oracle Enterprise Linux and perform full certification testing on Oracle Enterprise Linux as well. Due to the compatibility between Oracle Enterprise Linux and RHEL, Oracle also certifies its software for use on RHEL, without any additional testing. Oracle Enterprise Linux tracks RHEL by publishing freely downloadable installation media on edelivery.oracle.com/linux and updates, bug fixes and security errata on Unbreakable Linux Network (ULN). At the same time, Oracle's Linux kernel team is shaping the future of enterprise Linux distributions by developing technologies and features that matter to customers who deploy Linux in the data center, including file systems, memory management, high performance computing, data integrity and virtualization. All this work is contributed to the Linux and Xen communities. The list below is a sample of the partners who have certified their products with Oracle Enterprise Linux. If you're interested in certifying your software or hardware with Oracle Enterprise Linux, please contact us via [email protected] Chip Manufacturers Intel, Intel Enabled Server Acceleration Alliance AMD Server vendors Cisco Unified Computing System Dawning Dell Egenera Fujitsu HP Huawei IBM NEC Sun/Oracle Storage Systems, Volume Management and File Systems 3Par Compellent EMC VPLEX FalconStor Fusion-io Hitachi Data Systems HP Storage Array Systems Lustre Network Appliance OCFS2 PillarData Symantec Veritas Storage Foundation Networking: Switches, Host Bus Adapters (HBAs), Converged Network Adapters (CNAs), InfiniBand Brocade Emulex Mellanox QLogic Voltaire SOA and Middleware ActiveState ActivePerl, ActivePython Tibco Zend Backup, Recovery & Replication Arkeia Network Backup Suite BakBone NetVault CommVault Simpana 8 EMC Networker, Replication Manager FalconStor Continuous Data Protector HP Data Protector NetApp Snapmanager Quest LiteSpeed Engine Steeleye Data Replication, Disaster Recovery Symantec NetBackup, Veritas Volume Replicator, Symantec Backup Exec Zmanda Amanda Enterprise Data Center Automation BMC CA Unicenter HP Server Automation (formerly Opsware), System Management Homepage Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center Quest Vizioncore vFoglight Pro TeamQuest Manager Clustering & High Availability FUJITSU x10sure NEC Express Cluster X Steeleye Lifekeeper Symantec Cluster Server Univa UniCluster Virtualization Platforms and Cloud Providers Amazon EC2 Citrix XenServer Rackspace Cloud VirtualBox VMWare ESX Security Management ArcSight: Enterprise Security Manager, Logger CA Access Control Centrify Suite Ecora Auditor FoxT Manager Likewise: Unix Account Management Lumension Endpoint Management and Security Suite QualysGuard Suite Quest Privilege Manager McAfee Application Control, Change ControlIntegrity Monitor, Integrity Control, PCI Pro Solidcore S3 Symantec Enterprise Security Manager (ESM) Tripwire Trusted Computer Solutions

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• Windows Azure Use Case: Fast Acquisitions

  - by BuckWoody

  This is one in a series of posts on when and where to use a distributed architecture design in your organization's computing needs. You can find the main post here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/buckwoody/archive/2011/01/18/windows-azure-and-sql-azure-use-cases.aspx  Description: Many organizations absorb, take over or merge with other organizations. In these cases, one of the most difficult parts of the process is the merging or changing of the IT systems that the employees use to do their work, process payments, and even get paid. Normally this means that the two companies have disparate systems, and several approaches can be used to have the two organizations use technology between them. An organization may choose to retain both systems, and manage them separately. The advantage here is speed, and keeping the profit/loss sheets separate. Another choice is to slowly “sunset” or stop using one organization’s system, and cutting to the other system immediately or at a later date. Although a popular choice, one of the most difficult methods is to extract data and processes from one system and import it into the other. Employees at the transitioning system have to be trained on the new one, the data must be examined and cleansed, and there is inevitable disruption when this happens. Still another option is to integrate the systems. This may prove to be as much work as a transitional strategy, but may have less impact on the users or the balance sheet. Implementation: A distributed computing paradigm can be a good strategic solution to most of these strategies. Retaining both systems is made more simple by allowing the users at the second organization immediate access to the new system, because security accounts can be created quickly inside an application. There is no need to set up a VPN or any other connections than just to the Internet. Having the users stop using one system and start with the other is also simple in Windows Azure for the same reason. Extracting data to Azure holds the same limitations as an on-premise system, and may even be more problematic because of the large data transfers that might be required. In a distributed environment, you pay for the data transfer, so a mixed migration strategy is not recommended. However, if the data is slowly migrated over time with a defined cutover, this can be an effective strategy. If done properly, an integration strategy works very well for a distributed computing environment like Windows Azure. If the Azure code is architected as a series of services, then endpoints can expose the service into and out of not only the Azure platform, but internally as well. This is a form of the Hybrid Application use-case documented here. References: Designing for Cloud Optimized Architecture: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dachou/archive/2011/01/23/designing-for-cloud-optimized-architecture.aspx 5 Enterprise steps for adopting a Platform as a Service: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/davidmcg/archive/2010/12/02/5-enterprise-steps-for-adopting-a-platform-as-a-service.aspx?wa=wsignin1.0

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• The way I think about Diagnostic tools

  - by Daniel Moth

  Every software has issues, or as we like to call them "bugs". That is not a discussion point, just a mere fact. It follows that an important skill for developers is to be able to diagnose issues in their code. Of course we need to advance our tools and techniques so we can prevent bugs getting into the code (e.g. unit testing), but beyond designing great software, diagnosing bugs is an equally important skill. To diagnose issues, the most important assets are good techniques, skill, experience, and maybe talent. What also helps is having good diagnostic tools and what helps further is knowing all the features that they offer and how to use them. The following classification is how I like to think of diagnostics. Note that like with any attempt to bucketize anything, you run into overlapping areas and blurry lines. Nevertheless, I will continue sharing my generalizations ;-) It is important to identify at the outset if you are dealing with a performance or a correctness issue. If you have a performance issue, use a profiler. I hear people saying "I am using the debugger to debug a performance issue", and that is fine, but do know that a dedicated profiler is the tool for that job. Just because you don't need them all the time and typically they cost more plus you are not as familiar with them as you are with the debugger, doesn't mean you shouldn't invest in one and instead try to exclusively use the wrong tool for the job. Visual Studio has a profiler and a concurrency visualizer (for profiling multi-threaded apps). If you have a correctness issue, then you have several options - that's next :-) This is how I think of identifying a correctness issue Do you want a tool to find the issue for you at design time? The compiler is such a tool - it gives you an exact list of errors. Compilers now also offer warnings, which is their way of saying "this may be an error, but I am not smart enough to know for sure". There are also static analysis tools, which go a step further than the compiler in identifying issues in your code, sometimes with the aid of code annotations and other times just by pointing them at your raw source. An example is FxCop and much more in Visual Studio 11 Code Analysis. Do you want a tool to find the issue for you with code execution? Just like static tools, there are also dynamic analysis tools that instead of statically analyzing your code, they analyze what your code does dynamically at runtime. Whether you have to setup some unit tests to invoke your code at runtime, or have to manually run your app (and interact with it) under the tool, or have to use a script to execute your binary under the tool… that varies. The result is still a list of issues for you to address after the analysis is complete or a pause of the execution when the first issue is encountered. If a code path was not taken, no analysis for it will exist, obviously. An example is the GPU Race detection tool that I'll be talking about on the C++ AMP team blog. Another example is the MSR concurrency CHESS tool. Do you want you to find the issue at design time using a tool? Perform a code walkthrough on your own or with colleagues. There are code review tools that go beyond just diffing sources, and they help you with that aspect too. For example, there is a new one in Visual Studio 11 and searching with my favorite search engine yielded this article based on the Developer Preview. Do you want you to find the issue with code execution? Use a debugger - let’s break this down further next. This is how I think of debugging: There is post mortem debugging. That means your code has executed and you did something in order to examine what happened during its execution. This can vary from manual printf and other tracing statements to trace events (e.g. ETW) to taking dumps. In all cases, you are left with some artifact that you examine after the fact (after code execution) to discern what took place hoping it will help you find the bug. Learn how to debug dump files in Visual Studio. There is live debugging. I will elaborate on this in a separate post, but this is where you inspect the state of your program during its execution, and try to find what the problem is. More from me in a separate post on live debugging. There is a hybrid of live plus post-mortem debugging. This is for example what tools like IntelliTrace offer. If you are a tools vendor interested in the diagnostics space, it helps to understand where in the above classification your tool excels, where its primary strength is, so you can market it as such. Then it helps to see which of the other areas above your tool touches on, and how you can make it even better there. Finally, see what areas your tool doesn't help at all with, and evaluate whether it should or continue to stay clear. Even though the classification helps us think about this space, the reality is that the best tools are either extremely excellent in only one of this areas, or more often very good across a number of them. Another approach is to offer a toolset covering all areas, with appropriate integration and hand off points from one to the other. Anyway, with that brain dump out of the way, in follow-up posts I will dive into live debugging, and specifically live debugging in Visual Studio - stay tuned if that interests you. Comments about this post by Daniel Moth welcome at the original blog.

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• Oracle Customer Hub - Directions, Roadmap and Customer Success

  - by Mala Narasimharajan

   By Gurinder Bahl With less than a week from OOW 2012, I would like to introduce you all to the core Oracle Customer MDM Strategy sessions. Fragmentation of customer data across disparate systems prohibits companies from achieving a complete and accurate view of their customers. Oracle Customer Hub provide a comprehensive set of services, utilities and applications to create and maintain a trusted master customer system of record across the enterprise. Customer Hub centralizes customer data from disparate systems across your enterprise into a master repository. Existing systems are integrated in real-time or via batch with the Hub, allowing you to leverage legacy platform investments while capitalizing on the benefits of a single customer identity. Don’t miss out on two sessions geared towards Oracle Customer Hub:   1) Attend session CON9747 - Turn Customer Data into an Enterprise Asset with Oracle Fusion Customer Hub Applications at Oracle Open World 2012 on Monday, Oct 1st, 10:45 AM - 11:45 AM @ Moscone West – 2008. Manouj Tahiliani, Sr. Director MDM Product Management will provide insight into the vision of Oracle Fusion Customer Hub solutions, and review the roadmap. You will discover how Fusion Customer MDM can help your enterprise improve data quality, create accurate and complete customer information,  manage governance and help create great customer experiences. You will also understand how to leverage data quality capabilities and create a sophisticated customer foundation within Oracle Fusion Applications. You will also hear Danette Patterson, Group Lead, Church Pension Group talk about how Oracle Fusion Customer Hub applications provide a modern, next-generation, multi-domain foundation for managing customer information in a private cloud. 2)  Don't miss session  CON9692 - Customer MDM is key to Strategic Business Success and Customer Experience Management at Oracle Open World 2012 on Wednesday, October 3rd 2012 from 3:30-4:30pm @ Westin San Francisco Metropolitan 1. JP Hurtado, Director, Customer Systems, will provide insight on how RCCL overcame challenges of data quality, guest recognition & centralized customer view to provide consolidated customer view to multiple reservation, CRM, marketing, service, sales, data warehouse and loyalty systems. You will learn how Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines (RCCL), which has over 30 million customer and maintain multiple brands, leveraged Oracle Customer Hub (Siebel UCM) as backbone to customer data management strategy for past 5 years. Gurinder Bahl from MDM Product Management will provide an update on Oracle Customer Hub strategy, what we have achieved since last Open World and our future plans for the Oracle Customer Hub. You will learn about Customer Hub Data Quality capabilities around data analysis, cleansing, matching, address validation as well as reporting and monitoring capabilities. The MDM track at Oracle Open World covers variety of topics related to MDM. In addition to the product management team presenting product updates and roadmap, we have several Customer Panels, and Conference sessions. You can see an overview of MDM sessions here.  Looking forward to see you at Open World, the perfect opportunity to learn about cutting edge Oracle technologies. 

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• Merck Serono Gains Deep Understanding of Product Portfolio Value-Drivers, Risks, and Sales Expectations Through Forecasting Solution

  - by Melissa Centurio Lopes

  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-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Merck Serono S.A. is the biopharmaceutical division of Merck KGaA. It offers leading brands in 150 countries to help patients with cancer, multiple sclerosis, infertility, endocrine and metabolic disorders, as well as cardiovascular diseases. Challenges: Establish a better decision-making framework for its complex, development portfolio of pharmaceutical products, where single-point estimates or expected averages of portfolio values, portfolio risks, and sales forecasts are insufficient and can be misleading Enable the company to be aware at all times of the range of possible outcomes of technical and market risks and uncertainties, such as the technical uncertainty of whether a product will produce the desired clinical outcomes, or the market-related uncertainty of whether a product will be outperformed by its competitors Solutions to Overcome the Challenges: Used Oracle Crystal Ball to devise a Monte-Carlo-based approach to better analyze and define the values and risks of the company’s development portfolio, laying the groundwork for optimized decision-making Enabled a better understanding of the range of potential values and risks to improve portfolio planning Enabled detailed analysis of the likelihood of favorable or unfavorable outcomes, such as the likelihood of whether Merck Serono can meet its sales targets planned for the next ten years with its existing product portfolio Gained the ability to take into account correlative risks, synergies and project interactions, enabling Merck Serono to better forecast what the company may achieve—for example, that there is a 70% probability of a particular sales target being met Established Monte-Carlo-based analysis using Oracle Crystal Ball as a useful element in decision-making at the board level, as the approach provides a better analysis of values and risks associated with the company’s product portfolio “Oracle Crystal Ball enables us to make Monte Carlo simulations of the potential value and sales of our development portfolio. It is a very powerful tool for gaining a thorough understanding and improved awareness of value drivers, uncertainties, and risks, along with associated probabilities.” – Riccardo Lampariello, Associate Director, Merck Serono S.A Why Oracle “We chose Oracle Crystal Ball to enable us to perform Monte Carlo analysis, which gives us a deeper understanding and improved awareness of the value drivers, uncertainties and risks of our portfolio of development projects,” said Kimber Hardy, head of valuation and analysis, Merck Serono S.A. 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-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Click here to read the full version of the customer success story 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-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}

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