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• Welcome to the ISV Migration Center (IMC) Team blog

  - by lukasz.romaszewski(at)oracle.com

  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: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;} Welcome to the ISV Migration Center (IMC) Team blog.The IMC is a a team of senior Oracle technical consultants who's aim is to enable partners to rapidly and successfully adopt and implement Oracle's latest technology.  The IMC consultants are trained and equipped to deliver leading-edge, enterprise-quality technology solutions. This blog has been created to serve as an  information exchange platform on Oracle Fusion Middleware and Database products so you will find how-tos, articles, demos and other technical resources.  We will also publish our upcoming workshops, webcasts and seminars so make sure you check it regularly to get the latest updates.   Here's our team:Lukasz Romaszewski Java & middleware specialist, 8 years experience in architecting, developing and supporting enterprise solutions based on J2EE and Oracle Database technology. At Oracle from April 2008, working as an IMC Migration Consultant in Oracle Partner Hub in Cracow, Poland. Helping Oracle Partners in migrating their solutions to the latest Oracle Fusion Middleware stack, running hands-on migration workshops and seminars across Europe. Experienced in the following areas and products Oracle Weblogic Application Server 11gApplication Development Framework (ADF)Oracle SOA Suite 11gOracle Forms 6i, 10g and 11gOracle Database (PL/SQL, AQ, XML DB)Java EE 5.0 based architecture Murat Teksoz Oracle DB and DB options - Oracle Linux- Apex- Oracle Business intelligence specilist, 13 years experince in Database managment, Performans Tuning, Diagnosting ,Installation and Configurationg database, Database Security, High Avalibility and Disaster Recovery solutions. Working at Oracle IMC Istanbul from September 2008, delivering partner workshops and seminars in Europe and Central Asia. Experienced in the following areas and products Oracle 9i,10g,11g Database SolutionsOracle Partitioning, Total Recall Advantage compressingOracle High Avalability Solutions - Real Application ClusterOracle Disaster Recovery Solutions - Oracle DataguardOracle Grid ControlOracle LinuxOracle Business intelligence solutions - Oracle Bi 10g-11gMigration Tools (Sqldeveloper) - Migrate from SqlServer,Mysql,Sysbase,Db2 to Oracle DatabaseOracle APEX (Application Express Tool) Vadim Melnikov Oracle Database specialist with DB Options, Linux and virtualization skills. Vadim has more than 8 years experience with Oracle products and is now working as Database consultant in Oracle IMC Moscow as employee of FORS Development center, Russian Oracle Platinum partner. Helping Oracle Partners to migrate solutions to Oracle from other platforms and adopt new oracle technologies, running workshops and seminars. Experienced in the following areas and products Oracle Database 9i,10g,11g Database Solutions (SQL, PL/SQL, Installing, Configuring, Performance Tuning, Diagnosting, Database management)Oracle DB options (Partitioning, Total Recall, Advanced compression)Oracle Enterprise ManagerOracle Enterprise LinuxOracle VM 2 for x86Migration to Oracle DatabaseOracle Application Express Gokhan Gungor Java (J2EE) Lead Developer and Architect. Designed and Developed Web Applications, Middleware Systems/Services, Desktop Applications and Back-end Tools/Services using Java, WebLogic Server, JBoss and Open Source Frameworks. Joined Oracle in 2010 as Fussion middleware consultant in Istanbul IMC , responsible for running migration and adoption workshops and seminars covering Java technology, ADF, WebLogic and SOA and providing technical consultancy for migration projects. Experienced in the following areas and products Oracle WebLogic ServerApplication Development Framework (ADF)JDeveloperJava EE (EJB, JMS, Servlet, JSP, JSF, JavaMail, JTA, JAAS, JSTL, JAXB)Java SE (JavaBeans, JDBC, XML, XSL, RMI, JNDI, JAXP)Oracle Database 10g,11g Dmitry Nefedkin Oracle Middleware & Java specialist, 7+ years experience in developing, designing enterprise solutions based on Oracle Database and Middleware, developing Oracle e-Business Suite customizations, designing integration architecture within the companies . Joined Oracle team in October 2010 as IMC FMW Consultant in Oracle Alliances & Channels in Moscow, Russia. Experienced in the following areas and products Oracle Weblogic Application Server 11gOracle Service Bus 11gOracle SOA Suite 10g (BPEL PM, ESB, OWSM)Oracle Application Server 10gOracle Forms 6i and 9iOracle BI PublisherOracle ADF 10gOracle Database (SQL tuning, PL/SQL, AQ, Streams)Java EE 5 developmentCheck out our web site as well: 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: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;} http://www.oracle.com/partners/en/most-popular-resources/027930

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• Announcing Solaris Technical Track at NLUUG Spring Conference on Operating Systems

  - by user9135656

  The Netherlands Unix Users Group (NLUUG) is hosting a full-day technical Solaris track during its spring 2012 conference. The official announcement page, including registration information can be found at the conference page.This year, the NLUUG spring conference focuses on the base of every computing platform; the Operating System. Hot topics like Cloud Computing and Virtualization; the massive adoption of mobile devices that have their special needs in the OS they run but that at the same time put the challenge of massive scalability onto the internet; the upspring of multi-core and multi-threaded chips..., all these developments cause the Operating System to still be a very interesting area where all kinds of innovations have taken and are taking place.The conference will focus specifically on: Linux, BSD Unix, AIX, Windows and Solaris. The keynote speech will be delivered by John 'maddog' Hall, infamous promotor and supporter of UNIX-based Operating Systems. He will talk the audience through several decades of Operating Systems developments, and share many stories untold so far. To make the conference even more interesting, a variety of talks is offered in 5 parallel tracks, covering new developments in and  also collaboration  between Linux, the BSD's, AIX, Solaris and Windows. The full-day Solaris technical track covers all innovations that have been delivered in Oracle Solaris 11. Deeply technically-skilled presenters will talk on a variety of topics. Each topic will first be introduced at a basic level, enabling visitors to attend to the presentations individually. Attending to the full day will give the audience a comprehensive overview as well as more in-depth understanding of the most important new features in Solaris 11.NLUUG Spring Conference details:* Date and time:        When : April 11 2012        Start: 09:15 (doors open: 8:30)        End  : 17:00, (drinks and snacks served afterwards)* Venue:        Nieuwegein Business Center        Blokhoeve 1             3438 LC Nieuwegein              The Nederlands          Tel     : +31 (0)30 - 602 69 00        Fax     : +31 (0)30 - 602 69 01        Email   : [email protected]        Route   : description - (PDF, Dutch only)* Conference abstracts and speaker info can be found here.* Agenda for the Solaris track: Note: talks will be in English unless marked with 'NL'.1.      Insights to Solaris 11         Joerg Moellenkamp - Solaris Technical Specialist         Oracle Germany2.      Lifecycle management with Oracle Solaris 11         Detlef Drewanz - Solaris Technical Specialist         Oracle Germany3.      Solaris 11 Networking - Crossbow Project        Andrew Gabriel - Solaris Technical Specialist        Oracle UK4.      ZFS: Data Integrity and Security         Darren Moffat - Senior Principal Engineer, Solaris Engineering         Oracle UK5.      Solaris 11 Zones and Immutable Zones (NL)         Casper Dik - Senior Staff Engineer, Software Platforms         Oracle NL6.      Experiencing Solaris 11 (NL)         Patrick Ale - UNIX Technical Specialist         UPC Broadband, NLTalks are 45 minutes each.There will be a "Solaris Meeting point" during the conference where people can meet-up, chat with the speakers and with fellow Solaris enthousiasts, and where live demos or other hands-on experiences can be shared.The official announcement page, including registration information can be found at the conference page on the NLUUG website. This site also has a complete list of all abstracts for all talks.Please register on the NLUUG website.

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• #OOW 2012 @PARIS...talking Oracle and Clouds, and Optimized Datacenter

  - by Eric Bezille

  For those of you who want to get most out of Oracle technologies to evolve your IT to the Next Wave, I encourage you to register to the up coming Oracle Optimized Datacenter event that will take place in Paris on November 28th. You will get the opportunity to exchange with Oracle experts and customers having successfully evolve their IT by leveraging Oracle technologies. You will also get the latest news on some of the Oracle systems announcements made during OOW 2012. During this event we will make an update about Oracle and Clouds, from private to public and hybrid models. So in preparing this session, I thought it was a good start to make a status of Cloud Computing in France, and CIO requirements in particular. Starting in 2009 with the first Cloud Camp in Paris, the market has evolved, but the basics are still the same : think hybrid. From Traditional IT to Clouds One size doesn't fit all, and for big companies having already an IT in place, there will be parts eligible to external (public) cloud, and parts that would be required to stay inside the firewalls, so ability to integrate both side is key.  None the less, one of the major impact of Cloud Computing trend on IT, reported by Forrester, is the pressure it makes on CIO to evolve towards the same model that end-users are now used to in their day to day life, where self-service and flexibility are paramount. This is what is driving IT to transform itself toward "a Global Service Provider", or for some as "IT "is" the Business" (see : Gartner Identifies Four Futures for IT and CIO), and for both models toward a Private Cloud Service Provider. In this journey, there is still a big difference between most of existing external Cloud and a firm IT : the number of applications that a CIO has to manage. Most cloud providers today are overly specialized, but at the end of the day, there are really few business processes that rely on only one application. So CIOs has to combine everything together external and internal. And for the internal parts that they will have to make them evolve to a Private Cloud, the scope can be very large. This will often require CIOs to evolve from their traditional approach to more disruptive ones, the time has come to introduce new standards and processes, if they want to succeed. So let's have a look at the different Cloud models, what type of users they are addressing, what value they bring and most importantly what needs to be done by the  Cloud Provider, and what is left over to the user. IaaS, PaaS, SaaS : what's provided and what needs to be done First of all the Cloud Provider will have to provide all the infrastructure needed to deliver the service. And the more value IT will want to provide, the more IT will have to deliver and integrate : from disks to applications. As we can see in the above picture, providing pure IaaS, left a lot to cover for the end-user, that’s why the end-user targeted by this Cloud Service is IT people. If you want to bring more value to developers, you need to provide to them a development platform ready to use, which is what PaaS is standing for, by providing not only the processors power, storage and OS, but also the Database and Middleware platform. SaaS being the last mile of the Cloud, providing an application ready to use by business users, the remaining part for the end-users being configuring and specifying the application for their specific usage. In addition to that, there are common challenges encompassing all type of Cloud Services : Security : covering all aspect, not only of users management but also data flows and data privacy Charge back : measuring what is used and by whom Application management : providing capabilities not only to deploy, but also to upgrade, from OS for IaaS, Database, and Middleware for PaaS, to a full Business Application for SaaS. Scalability : ability to evolve ALL the components of the Cloud Provider stack as needed Availability : ability to cover “always on” requirements Efficiency : providing a infrastructure that leverage shared resources in an efficient way and still comply to SLA (performances, availability, scalability, and ability to evolve) Automation : providing the orchestration of ALL the components in all service life-cycle (deployment, growth & shrink (elasticity), upgrades,...) Management : providing monitoring, configuring and self-service up to the end-users Oracle Strategy and Clouds For CIOs to succeed in their Private Cloud implementation, means that they encompass all those aspects for each component life-cycle that they selected to build their Cloud. That’s where a multi-vendors layered approach comes short in terms of efficiency. That’s the reason why Oracle focus on taking care of all those aspects directly at Engineering level, to truly provide efficient Cloud Services solutions for IaaS, PaaS and SaaS. We are going as far as embedding software functions in hardware (storage, processor level,...) to ensure the best SLA with the highest efficiency. The beauty of it, as we rely on standards, is that the Oracle components that you are running today in-house, are exactly the same that we are using to build Clouds, bringing you flexibility, reversibility and fast path to adoption. With Oracle Engineered Systems (Exadata, Exalogic & SPARC SuperCluster, more specifically, when talking about Cloud), we are delivering all those components hardware and software already engineered together at Oracle factory, with a single pane of glace for the management of ALL the components through Oracle Enterprise Manager, and with high-availability, scalability and ability to evolve by design. To give you a feeling of what does that bring in terms just of implementation project timeline, for example with Oracle SPARC SuperCluster, we have a consistent track of record to have the system plug into existing Datacenter and ready in a week. This includes Oracle Database, OS, virtualization, Database Storage (Exadata Storage Cells in this case), Application Storage, and all network configuration. This strategy enable CIOs to very quickly build Cloud Services, taking out not only the complexity of integrating everything together but also taking out the automation and evolution complexity and cost. I invite you to discuss all those aspect in regards of your particular context face2face on November 28th.

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• Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c Release 2 (12.1.0.2) is Available Now !

  - by Anand Akela

  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";} Oracle today announced the availability of Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c Release 2 (12.1.0.2). It is now available for download on OTN on ALL platforms. This is the first major release since the launch of Enterprise Manager 12c in October of 2011. This is the first time when Enterprise Manager release is available on all platforms simultaneously. This is primarily a stability release which incorporates many of issues and feedback reported by early adopters. In addition, this release contains many new features and enhancements in areas across the board. New Capabilities and Features Enhanced management capabilities for enterprise private clouds: Introduces new capabilities to allow customers to build and manage a Java Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) cloud based on Oracle Weblogic Server. The new capabilities include guided set up of PaaS Cloud, self-service provisioning, automatic scale out and metering and chargeback. Enhanced lifecycle management capabilities for Oracle WebLogic Server environments: Combining in-context multiple domain, patching and configuration file synchronizations. Integrated Hardware-Software management for Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud through features such as rack schematics visualization and integrated monitoring of all hardware and software components. The latest management capabilities for business-critical applications include: Business Application Management: A new Business Application (BA) target type and dashboard with flexible definitions provides a logical view of an application’s business transactions, end-user experiences and the cloud infrastructure the monitored application is running on. Enhanced User Experience Reporting: Oracle Real User Experience Insight has been enhanced to provide reporting capabilities on client-side issues for applications running in the cloud and has been more tightly coupled with Oracle Business Transaction Management to help ensure that real-time user experience and transaction tracing data is provided to users in context. Several key improvements address ease of administration, reporting and extensibility for massively scalable cloud environments including dynamic groups, self-updateable monitoring templates, bulk operations against many events, etc. New and Revised Plug-Ins: Several plug-Ins have been updated as a part of this release resulting in either new versions or revisions. Revised plug-ins contain only bug-fixes and while new plug-ins incorporate both bug fixes as well as new functionality. Plug-In Name Version Enterprise Manager for Oracle Database 12.1.0.2 (revision) Enterprise Manager for Oracle Fusion Middleware 12.1.0.3 (new) Enterprise Manager for Chargeback and Capacity Planning 12.1.0.3 (new) Enterprise Manager for Oracle Fusion Applications 12.1.0.3 (new) Enterprise Manager for Oracle Virtualization 12.1.0.3 (new) Enterprise Manager for Oracle Exadata 12.1.0.3 (new) Enterprise Manager for Oracle Cloud 12.1.0.4 (new) Installation and Upgrade: All major platforms have been released simultaneously (Linux 32 / 64 bit, Solaris (SPARC), Solaris x86-64, IBM AIX 64-bit, and Windows x86-64 (64-bit) ) Enterprise Manager 12.1.0.2 is a complete release that includes both the EM OMS and Agent versions of 12.1.0.2. Installation options available with EM 12.1.0.2: User can do fresh Install or an upgrade from versions EM 10.2.0.5, 11.1, or 12.1.0.2 ( Bundle Patch 1 not mandatory). Upgrading to EM 12.1.0.2 from EM 12.1.0.1 is not a patch application (similar to Bundle Patch 1) but is achieved through a 1-system upgrade. Documentation: Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control Introduction Document provides a broad overview of capabilities and highlights"What's New" in EM 12.1.0.2. All updated Oracle Enterprise Manager documentation can be found on OTN Upgrade Guide Please feel free to ask questions related to the new Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c Release 2 (12.1.0.2) at the Oracle Enterprise Manager Forum . You could also share your feedback at twitter  using hash tag #em12c or at Facebook . Stay Connected: Twitter |  Face book |  You Tube |  Linked in |  Newsletter

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• Top Questions and Answers for Pluging into Oracle Database as a Service

  - by David Swanger

  Yesterday we hosted a comprehensive online forum that shared a comprehensive path to help your organization design, deploy, and deliver a Database as a Service cloud. If you missed the online forum, you can watch it on demand by registering here. We received numerous questions.  Below are highlights of the most informative: DBaaS requires a lengthy and careful design efforts. What is the minimum requirements of setting up a scaled-down environment and test it out? You should have an OEM 12c environment for DBaaS administration and then a target database deployment platform that has the key characteristics of what your production environment will look like. This could be a single server or it could be a small pool of hosts if your production DBaaS will be larger and you want to test a more robust / real world configuration with Zones and Pools or DR capabilities for example. How does this benefit companies having their own data center? This allows companies to transform their internal IT to a service delivery model for the database. The benefits to the company are significant cost savings, improved business agility and reduced risk. The benefits to the consumers (internal) of services if much fast provisioning, and response to change in business requirements. From a deployment perspective, is DBaaS's job solely DBA's job? The best deployment model enables the DBA (or end-user) to control the entire process. All resources required to deploy the service are pre-provisioned, and there are no external dependencies (on network, storage, sysadmins teams). The service is created either via a self-service portal or by the DBA. The purpose of self service seems to be that the end user does not rely on the DBA. I just need to give him a template. He decides how much AMM he needs. Why shall I set it one by one. That doesn't seem to be the purpose of self service. Most customers we have worked with define a standardized service catalog, with a few (2 to 5) different classes of service. For each of these classes, there is a pre-defined deployment template, and the user has the ability to select from some pre-defined service sizes. The administrator only has to create this catalog once. Each user then simply selects from the options offered in the catalog.  Looking at DBaaS service definition, it seems to be no different from a service definition provided by a well defined DBA team. Why do you attribute it to DBaaS? There are a couple of perspectives. First, some organizations might already be operating with a high level of standardization and a higher level of maturity from an ITIL or Service Management perspective. Their journey to DBaaS could be shorter and their Service Definition will evolve less but they still might need to add capabilities such as Self Service and Metering/Chargeback. Other organizations are still operating in highly siloed environments with little automation and their formal Service Definition (if they have one) will be a lot less mature today. Therefore their future state DBaaS will look a lot different from their current state, as will their Service Definition. How database as a service impact or help with "Click to Compute" or deploying "Database in cloud infrastructure" DBaaS enables Click to Compute. Oracle DBaaS can be implemented using three architecture models: Oracle Multitenant 12c, native consolidation using Oracle Database and consolidation using virtualization in infrastructure cloud. As Deploy session showed, you get higher consolidating density and efficiency using Multitenant and higher isolation using infrastructure cloud. Depending upon your business needs, DBaaS can be implemented using any of these models. How exactly is the DBaaS different from the traditional db? Storage/OS/DB all together to 'transparently' provide service to applications? Will there be across-databases access by application/user. Some key differences are: 1) The services run on a shared platform. 2) The services can be rapidly provisioned (< 15 minutes). 3) The services are dynamic and can be relocated, grown, shrunk as needed to meet business needs without disruption and rapidly. 4) The user is able to provision the services directly from a standardized service catalog.. With 24x7x365 databases its difficult to find off peak hrs to do basic admin tasks such as gathering stats, running backups, batch jobs. How does pluggable database handle this and different needs/patching downtime of apps databases might be serving? You can gather stats in Oracle Multitenant the same way you had been in regular databases. Regarding patching/upgrading, Oracle Multitenant makes patch/upgrade very efficient in that you can pre-provision a new version/patched multitenant db in a different ORACLE_HOME and then unplug a PDB from its CDB and plug it into the newer/patched CDB in seconds.  Thanks for all the great questions!  If you'd like to learn more and missed the online forum, you can watch it on demand here.

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• #OOW 2012 : IaaS, Private Cloud, Multitenant Database, and X3H2M2

  - by Eric Bezille

  The title of this post is a summary of the 4 announcements made by Larry Ellison today, during the opening session of Oracle Open World 2012... To know what's behind X3H2M2, you will have to wait a little, as I will go in order, beginning with the IaaS - Infrastructure as a Service - announcement. Oracle IaaS goes Public... and Private... Starting in 2004 with Fusion development, Oracle Cloud was launch last year to provide not only SaaS Application, based on standard development, but also the underlying PaaS, required to build the specifics, and required interconnections between applications, in and outside of the Cloud. Still, to cover the end-to-end Cloud  Services spectrum, we had to provide an Infrastructure as a Service, leveraging our Servers, Storage, OS, and Virtualization Technologies, all "Engineered Together". This Cloud Infrastructure, was already available for our customers to build rapidly their own Private Cloud either on SPARC/Solaris or x86/Linux... The second announcement made today bring that proposition a big step further : for cautious customers (like Banks, or sensible industries) who would like to benefits from the Cloud value of "as a Service", but don't want their Data out in the Cloud... We propose to them to operate the same systems, Exadata, Exalogic & SuperCluster, that are providing our Public Cloud Infrastructure, behind their firewall, in a Private Cloud model. Oracle 12c Multitenant Database This is also a major announcement made today, on what's coming with Oracle Database 12c : the ability to consolidate multiple databases with no extra additional  cost especially in terms of memory needed on the server node, which is often THE consolidation limiting factor. The principle could be compare to Solaris Zones, where, you will have a Database Container, who is "owning" the memory and Database background processes, and "Pluggable" Database in this Database Container. This particular feature is a strong compelling event to evaluate rapidly Oracle Database 12c once it will be available, as this is major step forward into true Database consolidation with Multitenancy on a shared (optimized) infrastructure. X3H2M2, enabling the new Exadata X3 in-Memory Database Here we are :  X3H2M2 stands for X3 (the new version of Exadata announced also today) Heuristic Hierarchical Mass Memory, providing the capability to keep most if not all the Data in the memory cache hierarchy. Of course, this is the major software enhancement of the new X3 Exadata machine, but as this is a software, our current customers would be able to benefit from it on their existing systems by upgrading to the new release. But that' not the only thing that we did with X3, at the same time we have upgraded everything : the CPUs, adding more cores per server node (16 vs. 12, with the arrival of Intel E5 / Sandy Bridge), the memory with 512GB memory as well per node,  and the new Flash Fire card, bringing now up to 22 TB of Flash cache. All of this 4TB of RAM + 22TB of Flash being use cleverly not only for read but also for write by the X3H2M2 algorithm... making a very big difference compare to traditional storage flash extension. But what does those extra performances brings to you on an already very efficient system: double your performances compare to the fastest storage array on the market today (including flash) and divide you storage price x10 at the same time... Something to consider closely this days... Especially that we also announced the availability of a new Exadata X3-2 8th rack : a good starting point. As you have seen a major opening for this year again with true innovation. But that was not the only thing that we saw today, as before Larry's talk, Fujitsu did introduce more in deep the up coming new SPARC processor, that they are co-developing with us. And as such Andrew Mendelsohn - Senior Vice President Database Server Technologies came on stage to explain that the next step after I/O optimization for Database with Exadata, was to accelerate the Database at execution level by bringing functions in the SPARC processor silicium. All in all, to process more and more Data... The big theme of the day... and of the Oracle User Groups Conferences that were also happening today and where I had the opportunity to attend some interesting sessions on practical use cases of Big Data one in Finances and Fraud profiling and the other one on practical deployment of Oracle Exalytics for Data Analytics. In conclusion, one picture to try to size Oracle Open World ... and you can understand why, with such a rich content... and this only the first day !

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• WEBLOGIC 12C HANDS-ON BOOTCAMP

  - by agallego

    Oracle PartnerNetwork | Account | Feedback   JOIN THE ORACLE WEBLOGIC PARTNER COMMUNITY AND ATTEND A WEBLOGIC 12C HANDS-ON BOOTCAMP Dear partner As a valued partner we would like to invite you for the WebLogic Partner Community and our WebLogic 12c hands-on Bootcamps – free of charge! Please first login at http://partner.oracle.com and then visit: WebLogic Partner Community. (If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center). The goal of the WebLogic Partner Community is to provide you with the latest information on Oracle's offerings and to facilitate the exchange of experience within community members. Register Now FREE Assessment vouchers to become certified and WebLogic Server 12c 200 new Features and Training Connect and Network   WebLogic Blogs   WebLogic on Facebook   WebLogic on LinkedIn   WebLogic on Twitter   WebLogic on Oracle Mix WebLogic 12c hands-on Workshops We offer free3 days hands-on WebLogic 12c workshops for Oracle partners who want to become Application Grid Specialized: Register Here! Country Date Location Registration   Germany  3-5 April 2012 Oracle Düsseldorf Click here   France  24-26 April 2012 Oracle Colombes Click here   Spain 08-10 May 2012  Oracle Madrid  Click here   Netherlands  22-24 May 2012  Oracle Amsterdam  Click here   United Kingdom  06-08 June 2012  Oracle Reading  Click here   Italy  19-21 June 2012  Oracle Cinisello Balsamo  Click here   Portugal  10-12 July 2012  Oracle Lisbon  Click here Skill requirements Attendees need to have the following skills as this is required by the product-set and to make sure they get the most out of the training: Basic knowledge in Java and JavaEE Understanding the Application Server concept Basic knowledge in older releases of WebLogic Server would be beneficial Member of WebLogic Partner Community for registration please vist http://www.oracle.com/partners/goto/wls-emea Hardware requirements Every participant works on his own notebook. The minimal hardware requirements are: 4Gb physical RAM (we will boot the image with 2Gb RAM)  dual core CPU 15 GB HD Software requirements Please install Oracle VM VirtualBox 4.1.8 Follow-up and certification  With the workshop registration you agree to the following next steps Follow-up training attend and pass the Oracle Application Grid Certified Implementation Specialist Registration For details and registration please visit Register Here Free WebLogic Certification (Free assessment voucher to become certified) For all WebLogic experts, we offer free vouchers worth $195 for the Oracle Application Grid Certified Implementation Specialist assessment. To demonstrate your WebLogic knowledge you first have to pass the free online assessment Oracle Application Grid PreSales Specialist. For free vouchers, please send an e-mail with the screenshot of your Oracle Application Grid PreSales certirficate to [email protected] including your Name, Company, E-mail and Country. Note: This offer is limited to partners from Europe Middle East and Africa. Partners from other countries please contact your Oracle partner manager. WebLogic Specialization To become specialized in Application Grid, please make sure that you access the: Application Grid Specialization Guide Application Grid Specialization Checklist If you have any questions please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center. Oracle WebLogic Server 12c Key New Capabilities Java EE 6 and Developer Productivity Simplified Deployment and Management with Virtualization Integrated Traffic Management Enhanced High Availability and Disaster Recovery Much Higher Performance For more information please visit: Presentation from the WebLogic 12c launch Technical Presentation from the WebLogic 12c launch WebLogic OTN Website WebLogic 12c Virtual Conference Environment WebLogic Partner Community For regular information become a member in the WebLogic Partner Community please visit: http://www.oracle.com/partners/goto/wls-emea (OPN account required). If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center. Best regards, Jürgen Kress WebLogic Partner Adoption EMEA Tel. +49 89 1430 1479 E-Mail: [email protected]   Copyright © 2012, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Contact PBC | Legal Notices and Terms of Use | Privacy Statement Oracle Corporation - Worldwide Headquarters, 500 Oracle Parkway, OPL - E-mail Services, Redwood Shores, CA 94065, United States Your privacy is important to us. You can login to your account to update your e-mail subscriptions or you can opt-out of all Oracle Marketing e-mails at any time. Please note that opting-out of Marketing communications does not affect your receipt of important business communications related to your current relationship with Oracle such as Security Updates, Event Registration notices, Account Management and Support/Service communications.

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• Migrating Virtual Iron guest to Oracle VM 3.x

  - by scoter

  As stated on the official site, Oracle in 2009, acquired a provider of server virtualization management software named Virtual Iron; you can find all the acquisition details at this link. Into the FAQ on the official site you can also view that, for the future, Oracle plans to fully integrate Virtual Iron technology into Oracle VM products, and any enhancements will be delivered as a part of the combined solution; this is what is going on with Oracle VM 3.x. So, customers started asking us to migrate Virtual Iron guests to Oracle VM. IMPORTANT: This procedure needs a dedicated OVM-Server with no-guests running on top; be careful while execute this procedure on production environments. In these little steps you will find how-to migrate, as fast as possible, your guests between VI ( Virtual Iron ) and Oracle VM; keep in mind that OracleVM has a built-in P2V utility ( Official Documentation )  that you can use to migrate guests between VI and Oracle VM. Concepts: VI repositories.  On VI we have the same "repository" concept as in Oracle VM; the difference between these two products is that VI use a raw-lun as repository ( instead of using ocfs2 and its capabilities, like ref-links ). The VI "raw-lun" repository, with a pure operating-system perspective, may be presented as in this picture: Infact on this "raw-lun" VI create an LVM2 volume-group. The VI "raw-lun" repository, with an hypervisor perspective, may be presented as in this picture: So, the relationships are: LVM2-Volume-Group <-> VI Repository LVM2-Logical-Volume <-> VI guest virtual-disk The first step is to present the VI repository ( raw-lun ) to your dedicated OVM-Server. Prepare dedicated OVM-Server On the OVM-Server ( OVS ) you need to discover new lun and, after that, discover volume-group and logical-volumes containted in VI repository; due to default OVS configuration you need to edit lvm2 configuration file: /etc/lvm/lvm.conf     # By default for OVS we restrict every block device:     # filter = [ "r/.*/" ] and comment the line starting with "filter" as above. Now you have to discover the raw-lun presented and, next, activate volume-group and logical-volumes: #!/bin/bash for HOST in `ls /sys/class/scsi_host`;do echo '- - -' > /sys/class/scsi_host/$HOST/scan; done CPATH=`pwd` cd /dev for DEVICE in `ls sd[a-z] sd?[a-z]`;do echo '1' > /sys/block/$DEVICE/device/rescan; done cd $CPATH cd /dev/mapper for PARTITION in `ls *[a-z] *?[a-z]`;do partprobe /dev/mapper/$PARTITION; done cd $CPATH vgchange -a yAfter that you will see a new device:[root@ovs01 ~]# cd /dev/6000F4B00000000000210135bef64994[root@ovs01 6000F4B00000000000210135bef64994]# ls -l 6000F4B0000000000061013* lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 77 Oct 29 10:50 6000F4B00000000000610135c3a0b8cb -> /dev/mapper/6000F4B00000000000210135bef64994-6000F4B00000000000610135c3a0b8cb By your OVM-Manager create a guest server with the same definition as on VI:same core number as VI source guestsame memory as VI source guestsame number of disks as VI source guest ( you can create OVS virtual disk with a small size of 1GB because the "clone" will, eventually, extend the size of your new virtual disks )Summarizing:source-virtual-disk path ( VI ):/dev/mapper/6000F4B00000000000210135bef64994-6000F4B00000000000610135c3a0b8cbdest-virtual-disk path ( OVS ):/OVS/Repositories/0004fb00000300006cfeb81c12f12f00/VirtualDisks/0004fb000012000055e0fc4c5c8a35ee.img ** ** = to identify your virtual disk you have verify its name under the "vm.cfg" file of your new guest.Clone VI virtual-disk to OVS virtual-diskdd if=/dev/mapper/6000F4B00000000000210135bef64994-6000F4B00000000000610135c3a0b8cb of=/OVS/Repositories/0004fb00000300006cfeb81c12f12f00/VirtualDisks/0004fb000012000055e0fc4c5c8a35ee.img Clean unsupported parameters and changes on OVS.1. Restore original /etc/lvm/lvm.conf    # By default for OVS we restrict every block device:     filter = [ "r/.*/" ]    and uncomment the line starting with "filter" as above.2. Force-stop lvm2-monitor service  # service lvm2-monitor force-stop 3. Restore original /etc/lvm directories ( archive, backup and cache )  # cd /etc/lvm  # rm -fr archive backup cache; mkdir archive backup cache4. Reboot OVSRefresh OVS repository and start your guest.By OracleVM Manager refresh your repository:By OracleVM Manager start your "migrated" guest: Comments and corrections are welcome.  Simon COTER 

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• Cloud to On-Premise Connectivity Patterns

  - by Rajesh Raheja

  Do you have a requirement to convert an Opportunity in Salesforce.com to an Order/Quote in Oracle E-Business Suite? Or maybe you want the creation of an Oracle RightNow Incident to trigger an on-premise Oracle E-Business Suite Service Request creation for RMA and Field Scheduling? If so, read on. In a previous blog post, I discussed integrating TO cloud applications, however the use cases above are the reverse i.e. receiving data FROM cloud applications (SaaS) TO on-premise applications/databases that sit behind a firewall. Oracle SOA Suite is assumed to be on-premise with with Oracle Service Bus as the mediation and virtualization layer. The main considerations for the patterns are are security i.e. shielding enterprise resources; and scalability i.e. minimizing firewall latency. Let me use an analogy to help visualize the patterns: the on-premise system is your home - with your most valuable possessions - and the SaaS app is your favorite on-line store which regularly ships (inbound calls) various types of parcels/items (message types/service operations). You need the items at home (on-premise) but want to safe guard against misguided elements of society (internet threats) who may masquerade as postal workers and vandalize property (denial of service?). Let's look at the patterns. Pattern: Pull from Cloud The on-premise system polls from the SaaS apps and picks up the message instead of having it delivered. This may be done using Oracle RightNow Object Query Language or SOAP APIs. This is particularly suited for certain integration approaches wherein messages are trickling in, can be centralized and batched e.g. retrieving event notifications on an hourly schedule from the Oracle Messaging Service. To compare this pattern with the home analogy, you are avoiding any deliveries to your home and instead go to the post office/UPS/Fedex store to pick up your parcel. Every time. Pros: On-premise assets not exposed to the Internet, firewall issues avoided by only initiating outbound connections Cons: Polling mechanisms may affect performance, may not satisfy near real-time requirements Pattern: Open Firewall Ports The on-premise system exposes the web services that needs to be invoked by the cloud application. This requires opening up firewall ports, routing calls to the appropriate internal services behind the firewall. Fusion Applications uses this pattern, and auto-provisions the services on the various virtual hosts to secure the topology. This works well for service integration, but may not suffice for large volume data integration. Using the home analogy, you have now decided to receive parcels instead of going to the post office every time. A door mail slot cut out allows the postman can drop small parcels, but there is still concern about cutting new holes for larger packages. Pros: optimal pattern for near real-time needs, simpler administration once the service is provisioned Cons: Needs firewall ports to be opened up for new services, may not suffice for batch integration requiring direct database access Pattern: Virtual Private Networking The on-premise network is "extended" to the cloud (or an intermediary on-demand / managed service offering) using Virtual Private Networking (VPN) so that messages are delivered to the on-premise system in a trusted channel. Using the home analogy, you entrust a set of keys with a neighbor or property manager who receives the packages, and then drops it inside your home. Pros: Individual firewall ports don't need to be opened, more suited for high scalability needs, can support large volume data integration, easier management of one connection vs a multitude of open ports Cons: VPN setup, specific hardware support, requires cloud provider to support virtual private computing Pattern: Reverse Proxy / API Gateway The on-premise system uses a reverse proxy "API gateway" software on the DMZ to receive messages. The reverse proxy can be implemented using various mechanisms e.g. Oracle API Gateway provides firewall and proxy services along with comprehensive security, auditing, throttling benefits. If a firewall already exists, then Oracle Service Bus or Oracle HTTP Server virtual hosts can provide reverse proxy implementations on the DMZ. Custom built implementations are also possible if specific functionality (such as message store-n-forward) is needed. In the home analogy, this pattern sits in between cutting mail slots and handing over keys. Instead, you install (and maintain) a mailbox in your home premises outside your door. The post office delivers the parcels in your mailbox, from where you can securely retrieve it. Pros: Very secure, very flexible Cons: Introduces a new software component, needs DMZ deployment and management Pattern: On-Premise Agent (Tunneling) A light weight "agent" software sits behind the firewall and initiates the communication with the cloud, thereby avoiding firewall issues. It then maintains a bi-directional connection either with pull or push based approaches using (or abusing, depending on your viewpoint) the HTTP protocol. Programming protocols such as Comet, WebSockets, HTTP CONNECT, HTTP SSH Tunneling etc. are possible implementation options. In the home analogy, a resident receives the parcel from the postal worker by opening the door, however you still take precautions with chain locks and package inspections. Pros: Light weight software, IT doesn't need to setup anything Cons: May bypass critical firewall checks e.g. virus scans, separate software download, proliferation of non-IT managed software Conclusion The patterns above are some of the most commonly encountered ones for cloud to on-premise integration. Selecting the right pattern for your project involves looking at your scalability needs, security restrictions, sync vs asynchronous implementation, near real-time vs batch expectations, cloud provider capabilities, budget, and more. In some cases, the basic "Pull from Cloud" may be acceptable, whereas in others, an extensive VPN topology may be well justified. For more details on the Oracle cloud integration strategy, download this white paper.

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• Cloud to On-Premise Connectivity Patterns

  - by Rajesh Raheja

  Do you have a requirement to convert an Opportunity in Salesforce.com to an Order/Quote in Oracle E-Business Suite? Or maybe you want the creation of an Oracle RightNow Incident to trigger an on-premise Oracle E-Business Suite Service Request creation for RMA and Field Scheduling? If so, read on. In a previous blog post, I discussed integrating TO cloud applications, however the use cases above are the reverse i.e. receiving data FROM cloud applications (SaaS) TO on-premise applications/databases that sit behind a firewall. Oracle SOA Suite is assumed to be on-premise with with Oracle Service Bus as the mediation and virtualization layer. The main considerations for the patterns are are security i.e. shielding enterprise resources; and scalability i.e. minimizing firewall latency. Let me use an analogy to help visualize the patterns: the on-premise system is your home - with your most valuable possessions - and the SaaS app is your favorite on-line store which regularly ships (inbound calls) various types of parcels/items (message types/service operations). You need the items at home (on-premise) but want to safe guard against misguided elements of society (internet threats) who may masquerade as postal workers and vandalize property (denial of service?). Let's look at the patterns. Pattern: Pull from Cloud The on-premise system polls from the SaaS apps and picks up the message instead of having it delivered. This may be done using Oracle RightNow Object Query Language or SOAP APIs. This is particularly suited for certain integration approaches wherein messages are trickling in, can be centralized and batched e.g. retrieving event notifications on an hourly schedule from the Oracle Messaging Service. To compare this pattern with the home analogy, you are avoiding any deliveries to your home and instead go to the post office/UPS/Fedex store to pick up your parcel. Every time. Pros: On-premise assets not exposed to the Internet, firewall issues avoided by only initiating outbound connections Cons: Polling mechanisms may affect performance, may not satisfy near real-time requirements Pattern: Open Firewall Ports The on-premise system exposes the web services that needs to be invoked by the cloud application. This requires opening up firewall ports, routing calls to the appropriate internal services behind the firewall. Fusion Applications uses this pattern, and auto-provisions the services on the various virtual hosts to secure the topology. This works well for service integration, but may not suffice for large volume data integration. Using the home analogy, you have now decided to receive parcels instead of going to the post office every time. A door mail slot cut out allows the postman can drop small parcels, but there is still concern about cutting new holes for larger packages. Pros: optimal pattern for near real-time needs, simpler administration once the service is provisioned Cons: Needs firewall ports to be opened up for new services, may not suffice for batch integration requiring direct database access Pattern: Virtual Private Networking The on-premise network is "extended" to the cloud (or an intermediary on-demand / managed service offering) using Virtual Private Networking (VPN) so that messages are delivered to the on-premise system in a trusted channel. Using the home analogy, you entrust a set of keys with a neighbor or property manager who receives the packages, and then drops it inside your home. Pros: Individual firewall ports don't need to be opened, more suited for high scalability needs, can support large volume data integration, easier management of one connection vs a multitude of open ports Cons: VPN setup, specific hardware support, requires cloud provider to support virtual private computing Pattern: Reverse Proxy / API Gateway The on-premise system uses a reverse proxy "API gateway" software on the DMZ to receive messages. The reverse proxy can be implemented using various mechanisms e.g. Oracle API Gateway provides firewall and proxy services along with comprehensive security, auditing, throttling benefits. If a firewall already exists, then Oracle Service Bus or Oracle HTTP Server virtual hosts can provide reverse proxy implementations on the DMZ. Custom built implementations are also possible if specific functionality (such as message store-n-forward) is needed. In the home analogy, this pattern sits in between cutting mail slots and handing over keys. Instead, you install (and maintain) a mailbox in your home premises outside your door. The post office delivers the parcels in your mailbox, from where you can securely retrieve it. Pros: Very secure, very flexible Cons: Introduces a new software component, needs DMZ deployment and management Pattern: On-Premise Agent (Tunneling) A light weight "agent" software sits behind the firewall and initiates the communication with the cloud, thereby avoiding firewall issues. It then maintains a bi-directional connection either with pull or push based approaches using (or abusing, depending on your viewpoint) the HTTP protocol. Programming protocols such as Comet, WebSockets, HTTP CONNECT, HTTP SSH Tunneling etc. are possible implementation options. In the home analogy, a resident receives the parcel from the postal worker by opening the door, however you still take precautions with chain locks and package inspections. Pros: Light weight software, IT doesn't need to setup anything Cons: May bypass critical firewall checks e.g. virus scans, separate software download, proliferation of non-IT managed software Conclusion The patterns above are some of the most commonly encountered ones for cloud to on-premise integration. Selecting the right pattern for your project involves looking at your scalability needs, security restrictions, sync vs asynchronous implementation, near real-time vs batch expectations, cloud provider capabilities, budget, and more. In some cases, the basic "Pull from Cloud" may be acceptable, whereas in others, an extensive VPN topology may be well justified. For more details on the Oracle cloud integration strategy, download this white paper.

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• Clouds, Clouds, Clouds Everywhere, Not a Drop of Rain!

  - by sxkumar

  At the recently concluded Oracle OpenWorld 2012, the center of discussion was clearly Cloud. Over the five action packed days, I got to meet a large number of customers and most of them had serious interest in all things cloud.  Public Cloud - particularly the Oracle Cloud - clearly got a lot of attention and interest. I think the use cases and the value proposition for public cloud is pretty straight forward. However, when it comes to private cloud, there were some interesting revelations.  Well, I shouldn’t really call them revelations since they are pretty consistent with what I have heard from customers at other conferences as well as during 1:1 interactions. While the interest in enterprise private cloud remains to be very high, only a handful of enterprises have truly embarked on a journey to create what the purists would call true private cloud - with capabilities such as self-service and chargeback/show back. For a large majority, today's reality is simply consolidation and virtualization - and they are quite far off from creating an agile, self-service and transparent IT infrastructure which is what the enterprise cloud is all about.  Even a handful of those who have actually implemented a close-to-real enterprise private cloud have taken an infrastructure centric approach and are seeing only limited business upside. Quite a few were frank enough to admit that chargeback and self-service isn’t something that they see an immediate need for.  This is in quite contrast to the picture being painted by all those surveys out there that show a large number of enterprises having already implemented an enterprise private cloud.  On the face of it, this seems quite contrary to the observations outlined above. So what exactly is the reality? Well, the reality is that there is undoubtedly a huge amount of interest among enterprises about transforming their legacy IT environment - which is often seen as too rigid, too fragmented, and ultimately too expensive - to something more agile, transparent and business-focused. At the same time however, there is a great deal of confusion among CIOs and architects about how to get there. This isn't very surprising given all the buzz and hype surrounding cloud computing. Every IT vendor claims to have the most unique solution and there isn't a single IT product out there that does not have a cloud angle to it. Add to this the chatter on the blogosphere, it will get even a sane mind spinning.  Consequently, most  enterprises are still struggling to fully understand the concept and value of enterprise private cloud.  Even among those who have chosen to move forward relatively early, quite a few have made their decisions more based on vendor influence/preferences rather than what their businesses actually need.  Clearly, there is a disconnect between the promise of the enterprise private cloud and the current adoption trends.  So what is the way forward?  I certainly do not claim to have all the answers. But here is a perspective that many cloud practitioners have found useful and thus worth sharing. To take a step back, the fundamental premise of the enterprise private cloud is IT transformation. It is the quest to create a more agile, transparent and efficient IT infrastructure that is driven more by business needs rather than constrained by operational and procedural inefficiencies. It is the new way of delivering and consuming IT services - where the IT organizations operate more like enablers of  strategic services rather than just being the gatekeepers of IT resources. In an enterprise private cloud environment, IT organizations are expected to empower the end users via self-service access/control and provide the business stakeholders a transparent view of how the resources are being used, what’s the cost of delivering a given service, how well are the customers being served, etc.  But the most important thing to note here is the enterprise private cloud is not just an IT project, rather it is a business initiative to create an IT setup that is more aligned with the needs of today's dynamic and highly competitive business environment. Surprised? You shouldn’t be. Just remember how the business users have been at the forefront of public cloud adoption within enterprises and private cloud is no exception.   Such a broad-based transformation makes cloud more than a technology initiative. It requires people (organizational) and process changes as well, and these changes are as critical as is the choice of right tools and technology. In my next blog,  I will share how essential it is for enterprise cloud technology to go hand-in hand with process re-engineering and organization changes to unlock true value of  enterprise cloud. I am sharing a short video from my session "Managing your private Cloud" at Oracle OpenWorld 2012. More videos from this session will be posted at the recently introduced Zero to Cloud resource page. Many other experts of Oracle enterprise private cloud solution will join me on this blog "Zero to Cloud"  and share best practices , deployment tips and information on how to plan, build, deploy, monitor, manage , meter and optimize the enterprise private cloud. We look forward to your feedback, suggestions and having an engaging conversion with you on this blog.

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• With Its MySQL Database-as-a-Service CERN Empowers Scientists

  - by Bertrand Matthelié

  The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) is one of the world’s largest and most respected centers for scientific research. Founded in 1954 and located near Geneva on the Franco-Swiss border, CERN was one of Europe’s first joint ventures. Today, it has 20 member states. The organization uses the world’s largest and most complex scientific instruments to study fundamental particles and the origin of the universe. 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:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Cambria","serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} 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:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Cambria","serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} Challenges Better support the scientists associated with a CERN research program who selected MySQL as their database. Empower users, enabling them to be as self-reliant as possible. Minimize complexity and costs for the CERN IT department to support the growing number of MySQL deployments. Solution Delivered a MySQL Database-as-a-Service offering to the CERN employees and the scientists associated with the organization. Allowed researchers selecting MySQL for their project to get access to a database instance hosted by the CERN IT department, either from the start or once their application has become critical. Implemented the service using Oracle’s server virtualization software, Oracle VM, for increased flexibility and reduced costs. Empowered users with a self-service approach, providing them with tools to manage MySQL themselves while handling backups and other basic database administration tasks for them. Enabled scientists to rely on MySQL with increased reliability, security and manageability while reducing complexity and minimizing costs. 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:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Cambria","serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} "The Cloud model has allowed us to deliver a self-service platform to our MySQL users, empowering them while minimizing costs for CERN." Tony Cass, Database Services Group Leader, IT department, CERN.

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• What's New in Oracle VM VirtualBox 4.2?

  - by Fat Bloke

  A year is a long time in the IT industry. Since the last VirtualBox feature release, which was a little over a year ago, we've seen: new releases of cool new operating systems, such as Windows 8, ChromeOS, and Mountain Lion; we've seen a myriad of new Linux releases from big Enterprise class distributions like Oracle 6.3, to accessible desktop distros like Ubuntu 12.04 and Fedora 17; and we've also seen the spec of a typical PC or laptop double in power. All of these events have influenced our new VirtualBox version which we're releasing today. Here's how... Powerful hosts  One of the trends we've seen is that as the average host platform becomes more powerful, our users are consistently running more and more vm's. Some of our users have large libraries of vm's of various vintages, whilst others have groups of vm's that are run together as an assembly of the various tiers in a multi-tiered software solution, for example, a database tier, middleware tier, and front-ends.  So we're pleased to unveil a more powerful VirtualBox Manager to address the needs of these users: VM Groups Groups allow you to organize your VM library in a sensible way, e.g.  by platform type, by project, by version, by whatever. To create groups you can drag one VM onto another or select one or more VM's and choose Machine...Group from the menu bar. You can expand and collapse groups to save screen real estate, and you can Enter and Leave a group (think iPad navigation here) by using the right and left arrow keys when groups are selected. But groups are more than passive folders, because you can now also perform operations on groups, rather than all the individual VMs. So if you have a multi-tiered solution you can start the whole stack up with just one click. Autostart Many VirtualBox users run dedicated services in their VMs, for example, running a Wiki. With these types of VM workloads, you really want the VM start up when the host machine boots up. So with 4.2 we've introduced a cross-platform Auto-start mechanism to allow you to treat VMs as host services. Headless VM Launching With VM's such as web servers, wikis, and other types of server-class workloads, the Console of the VM is pretty much redundant. For some time now VirtualBox has offered a separate launch mechanism for these VM's, namely the command-line interface commands VBoxHeadless or VBoxManage startvm ... --type headless commands. But with 4.2 we also allow you launch headless VMs from the Manager. Simply hold down Shift when launching the VM from the Manager.  It's that easy. But how do you stop a headless VM? Well, with 4.2 we allow you to Close the VM from the Manager. (BTW best to use the ACPI Shutdown method which allows the guest VM to close down gracefully.) Easy VM Creation For our expert users, the  New VM Wizard was a little tiresome, so now there's a faster 2-click VM creation mode. Just Hide the description when creating a new VM. Powerful VMs  As the hosts have become more powerful, so are the guests that are running inside them. Here are some of the 4.2 features to accommodate them: Virtual Network Interface Cards  With 4.2, it's now possible to create VMs with up to 36 NICs, when using the ICH9 chipset emulation. But with great power comes great responsibility (didn't Obi-Wan say something similar?), and so we have also introduced bandwidth limiting to prevent a rogue VM stealing the whole pipe. VLAN tagging Some of our users leverage VLANs extensively so we've enhanced the E1000 NICs to support this.  Processor Performance If you are running a CPU which supports Nested Paging (aka EPT in the Intel world) such as most of the Core i5 and i7 CPUs, or are running an AMD Bulldozer or later, you should see some performance improvements from our work with these processors. And while we're talking Processors, we've added support for some of the more modern VIA CPUs too. Powerful Automation Because VirtualBox runs atop a fully blown operating system, it makes sense to leverage the capabilities of the host to run scripts that can drive the guest VMs. Guest Automation was introduced in a prior release but with 4.2 we've revamped the APIs to allow a richer and more powerful set of operations to be executed by the guest. Check out the IGuest APIs in the VirtualBox Programming Guide and Reference (SDK). Powerful Platforms  All the hardcore engineering that has gone into 4.2 has been done for a purpose and that is to deliver a fast and powerful engine that can run almost any x86 OS because of the integrity of the virtualization. So we're pleased to add support for these platforms: Mac OS X "Mountain Lion"  Windows 8 Windows Server 2012 Ubuntu 12.04 (“Precise Pangolin”) Fedora 17 Oracle Linux 6.3  Here's the proof: We don't have time to go into the myriad of smaller improvements such as support for burning audio CDs from a guest, bi-directional clipboard control,  drag-and-drop of files into Linux guests, etc. so we'll leave that as an exercise for the user as soon as you've downloaded from the Oracle or community site and taken a peek at the User Guide. So all in all, a pretty solid release, one that we hope you'll enjoy discovering. - FB 

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• What's New in SGD 5.1?

  - by Fat Bloke

  Oracle announced the latest version of Secure Global Desktop (SGD) this week with 3 major themes: Support for Android devices; Support for Desktop Chrome clients;  Support for Oracle Unified Directory. I'll talk about the new features in a moment, but a bit of context first: Oracle SGD - what, how and why?  Oracle Secure Global Desktop is Oracle's secure remote access product which allows users on almost any device, to access almost any type application which  is hosted in the data center, from almost any location. And it does this by sitting on the edge of the datacenter, between the user and the applications: This is actually a really smart environment for an increasing number of use cases where: Users need mobility of location AND device (i.e. work from anywhere); IT needs to ensure security of applications and data (of course!) The application requires an end-user environment which can't be guaranteed and IT may not own the client platform (e.g. BYOD, working from home, partners or contractors). Oracle has a a specific interest in this of course. As the leading supplier of enterprise applications, many of Oracle's customers, and indeed Oracle itself, fit these criteria. So, as an IT guy rolling out an application to your employees, if one of your apps absolutely needs, say,  IE10 with Java 6 update 32, how can you be sure that the user population has this, especially when they're using their own devices? In the SGD model you, the IT guy, can set up, say, a Windows Server running the exact environment required, and then use SGD to publish this app, without needing to worry any further about the device the end user is using. What's new?  So back to SGD 5.1 and what is new there: Android devices Since we introduced our support for iPad tablets in SGD 5.0 we've had a big demand from customers to extend this to Android tablets too, and so we're pleased to announce that 5.1 supports Android 4.x tablets such as Nexus 7 and 10, and the Galaxy Tab. Here's how it works, with screenshots from my Nexus 7: Simply point your browser to the SGD server URL and login; The workspace is the list of apps that the admin has deemed ok for you to run. You click on an application to run it (here's Excel and Oracle E-Business Suite): There's an extended on-screen keyboard (extended because desktop apps need keys that don't appear on a tablet keyboard such as ctrl, WIndow key, etc) and touch gestures can be mapped to desktop events (such as tap and hold to right click) All in all a pretty nice implementation for Android tablet users. Desktop Chrome Browsers SGD has always been designed around using a browser to access your applications. But traditionally, this has involved using Java to deliver the SGD client component. With HTML5 and Javascript engines becoming so powerful, we thought we'd see how well a pure web client could perform with desktop apps. And the answer was, surprisingly well. So with this release we now offer this additional way of working, which can be enabled by a simple bit of configuration. Here's a Linux desktop running in a tab in Chrome. And if you resize the browser window, the Linux desktop is resized by SGD too. Very cool! Oracle Unified Directory As I mentioned above, a lot of Oracle users already benefit from SGD. And a lot of Oracle customers use Oracle Unified Directory as their Enterprise and Carrier grade user directory. So it makes a lot of sense that SGD now supports this LDAP directory for both Authentication and as a means to determine which users get which applications, e.g. publish the engineering app to the guys in the Development group, but give everyone E-Business Suite to let them do their expenses. Summary With new devices, and faster 4G networking becoming more prevalent, the pressure for businesses to move to a increasingly mobile enterprise is stronger than ever. SGD is good for users, and even better for IT. By offering the user the ability to work from anywhere, and IT the control and security they need, everyone wins with SGD. To try this for yourself, download SGD 5.1 (look under Desktop Virtualization Products) from the Oracle Software Delivery Cloud or if you're an existing customer, get it from My Oracle Support.  -FB 

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• Symantec Protection Suite and System Recovery 2011 Desktop Edition

  - by rihatum

  I am re-posting this as my previous question was being treated as if I am "Shopping or seeking Product Recommendations" even though I was NOT - BTW they have deleted my comments too which were not offensive in nature. anyway - I have re-phrased some parts of my question and I hope SF Admins "Do Not Modify / Edit" this one - will be most grateful for that. I have a lot of respect for the People who visit this SITE and help others ! Just To clarify : Just to go by SF rules - I am not seeking someone to Design this solution, I am simply seeking real world examples, experiences, technical expert opinions / suggestions, any tips or tricks they may have or any problems they may have faced while doing something similar above with these products. I am also not asking for Capacity Planning for Storage, We have done some research and I am seeking Expert Assurance / Suggestions. We (our company) are planning to deploy Symantec Endpoint Protection and Symantec Desktop Recovery 2011 Desktop Edition to our 3000 - 4000 workstations (Windows7 32 and 64) with a few 100s with Windows XP 32/64 Bit. I have read the implementation guide for SEP and have read tech-notes for Desktop Recovery 2011. Our team have planned to deploy this as follows : 1 x dedicated SQL 2008R2 for Symantec Endpoint Protection (Instead of using the Embedded Database) 1 x Dedicated SQL 2008R2 for Symantec Desktop Recovery 2011 (Instead of using the Embedded Database) 1 x Dedicated W2K8 R2 Box for the SEPM (Symantec Endpoint Protection Manager - Mgmt. APP) 1 x Dedicated W2K8 R2 Box for the Symantec Desktop Recovery 2011 Management Application Agent Deployment : As per Symantec Documentation for both of the above, an agent can be pushed via the Mgmt. Application (provided no firewalls are blocking ports required etc. - we have Windows firewall disabled already). Server Hardware : Per SQL Server : 16GB RAM + SAS DISKS + Dual XEON, RAID-10 for the SQL DB or I can always mount a LUN from our existing Hitachi or EMC SAN. SEPM Server : 16GB RAM + SAS DISKS + DUAL XEON System Recovery MGMT SERVER : 16GB RAM + SAS DISKS + DUAL XEON Above is the initial plan we have for 3000 - 4000 client workstation (Windows) Now my Questions :-) a) If we had these users distributed amongst two sites with AD DC / GC in each site, How would I restrict SEPM and Desktop Mgmt. solution to only check for users in their respective site ? b) At present all users are under one building but we are going to move some dept. to a new location (with dedicated connectivity), How would we control which SEPM / MGMT Server is responsible for which site ? c) We have netbackup in our environment backing up other servers, I am planning to protect these 4 (2 x SQL, 1 x SEPM, 1 x System Recovery Mgmt. Server) via netbackup or I can use System recovery 2011 server edition on all 4 of these boxes as well. (License is not an issue as we have the complete symantec portfolio included in our license). d) Now - Saving Desktop backups - What strategies have you implemented ? Any best practice recommendation for a large user base ? I was thinking to either mount a LUN from our Hitachi SAN on the Symantec Recovery Server itself or backup to the users hard drive locally and then copy it over to a network location ? Suggestions welcome :-) If you have anything to add / correct - that will be really helpful before diving into the actual implementation phase. Will be most grateful with your suggestions, recommendations and corrections with above - Many Thanks !

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• Best of Breed vs. Suite – Oracle’s SaaS Delivers Both

  - by yaldahhakim

  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;} The debate of which is better: “best of breed” business applications vs. an integrated suite is certainly not a new conversation. This has been argued between IT vendors and CIOs for years. It’s also important to clarify that “best of breed” does not necessarily translate into being the richest functionality; rather it’s often about just having the best fit solution to solve a specific business problem or need. So what does cloud have to do with the niche vs. suite debate? Consuming business applications in a cloud or SaaS deployment model can change the best of breed vs. suite discussion - if the cloud is done right. It’s having your cake and eating it too only better: you don’t have to gather all the ingredients or wait to bake your cake, and you can adjust how big of slice you take. Before you eat, it’s worth pausing to recall much of what we learned about IT over the last decade. These basic IT principles still hold true even though the financial model has changed from buying to renting. In other words, what’s under the technology hood still matters. Architecture and development methodologies like building an application based on open standards so it works with other systems - is still important. Data and information silos, complex integrations, and proprietary technologies that lock you in, are still bad. While some may argue that IT no longer matters with cloud, the opposite is actually true. If anything cloud can help return IT back to its rightful place as key strategic asset vs. a liability on the balance sheet. The “I” in CIO was never meant to stand for “integration” yet it’s amazing how much time and money is poured into these types of initiatives for most organizations each year. Rather the “I” needs to stand for “innovation”. This is where Oracle SaaS can uniquely help. Oracle’s application strategy has not really changed over the years. It’s always been about bringing the best and richest functionality across the enterprise to our customers while leveraging a common, standards-based, and enterprise-grade platform. So not jut best fit, but the best capabilities based on the input of thousands of enterprise customers across the globe. Oracle invests billions in R&D every year to add new capabilities to the broadest cloud portfolio in the industry, spanning across functional pillars like CRM, HCM, ERP, etc. And where it makes sense, Oracle combines key strategic acquisitions to complement organic functionality. The result is best of breed delivered in a suite. Again this is not something new. The game changer now with cloud is that it impacts HOW Oracle customers adopt the richest, most modern applications across the business – and continue on getting it. Consuming oracle applications in the cloud means you can adopt new capabilities and updates very quickly and easily. There’s no hardware to buy or software to manage. Oracle does it for you. Low upfront costs and an OpEx financial model is the easy part. Oracle Cloud Applications take it a big step further. For organizations that demand having the latest and richest functionality and accelerating the time to value from their IT investment, Oracle Cloud is the right path. It’s about holistically changing the “hows” and the “whys” of the organization by leveraging transformational innovations like social, mobile, and big data in a consistent and more powerful way. Not just about sales force automation or talent management. These technologies should impact all parts of the company and Oracle Cloud is the enterprise-grade delivery vehicle. Oracle SaaS helps break down barriers of adoption and is eases the headache of upgrades, investing in new supporting hardware, or adding internal expertise to manage it all. With Oracle Cloud, customers can get best of breed capabilities in either a full suite model or a la carte. And because it’s entirely built on open standards, it’s built to co-exist with existing IT investments. Updates can be automatic or delayed based on a customer’s requirements. And it’s complete – a full suite of cross pillar functionality. Even better, if you don’t like it, need more or less, just turn the dial up or down. Just like your utility bill, you pay for what you use, and can consume more or less power whenever you need it. Lower cost, lower investment risk, without compromising on functionality, security, or performance. Technology still matters in the cloud. So our cloud customers also like that when they adopt our cloud applications, they also get the best underlying technology, from the middleware and database platform down to infrastructure and Oracle’s engineered systems. Therefore it’s not just the greatest and latest in application functionality, but everything underneath that makes it work is also the latest and greatest. The best of breed technology stack powering best of breed business applications, and all delivered in a subscription based model. The best of both worlds. Yep, that’s the idea.

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• Taking the training wheels off: Accelerating the Business with Oracle IAM by Brian Mozinski (Accenture)

  - by Greg Jensen

  Today, technical requirements for IAM are evolving rapidly, and the bar is continuously raised for high performance IAM solutions as organizations look to roll out high volume use cases on the back of legacy systems.  Existing solutions were often designed and architected to support offline transactions and manual processes, and the business owners today demand globally scalable infrastructure to support the growth their business cases are expected to deliver. To help IAM practitioners address these challenges and make their organizations and themselves more successful, this series we will outline the: • Taking the training wheels off: Accelerating the Business with Oracle IAM The explosive growth in expectations for IAM infrastructure, and the business cases they support to gain investment in new security programs. • "Necessity is the mother of invention": Technical solutions developed in the field Well proven tricks of the trade, used by IAM guru’s to maximize your solution while addressing the requirements of global organizations. • The Art & Science of Performance Tuning of Oracle IAM 11gR2 Real world examples of performance tuning with Oracle IAM • No Where to go but up: Extending the benefits of accelerated IAM Anything is possible, compelling new solutions organizations are unlocking with accelerated Oracle IAM Let’s get started … by talking about the changing dynamics driving these discussions. Big Companies are getting bigger everyday, and increasingly organizations operate across state lines, multiple times zones, and in many countries or continents at the same time.  No longer is midnight to 6am a safe time to take down the system for upgrades, to run recon’s and import or update user accounts and attributes.  Further IT organizations are operating as shared services with SLA’s similar to telephone carrier levels expected by their “clients”.  Workers are moved in and out of roles on a weekly, daily, or even hourly rate and IAM is expected to support those rapid changes.  End users registering for services during business hours in Singapore are expected their access to be green-lighted in custom apps hosted in Portugal within the hour.  Many of the expectations of asynchronous systems and batched updates are not adequate and the number and types of users is growing. When organizations acted more like independent teams at functional or geographic levels it was manageable to have processes that relied on a handful of people who knew how to make things work …. Knew how to get you access to the key systems to get your job done.  Today everyone is expected to do more with less, the finance administrator previously supporting their local Atlanta sales office might now be asked to help close the books for the Johannesburg team, and access certification process once completed monthly by Joan on the 3rd floor is now done by a shared pool of resources in Sao Paulo.   Fragmented processes that rely on institutional knowledge to get access to systems and get work done quickly break down in these scenarios.  Highly robust processes that have automated workflows for connected or disconnected systems give organizations the dynamic flexibility to share work across these lines and cut costs or increase productivity. As the IT industry computing paradigms continue to change with the passing of time, and as mature or proven approaches become clear, it is normal for organizations to adjust accordingly. Businesses must manage identity in an increasingly hybrid world in which legacy on-premises IAM infrastructures are extended or replaced to support more and more interconnected and interdependent services to a wider range of users. The old legacy IAM implementation models we had relied on to manage identities no longer apply. End users expect to self-request access to services from their tablet, get supervisor approval over mobile devices and email, and launch the application even if is hosted on the cloud, or run by a partner, vendor, or service provider. While user expectations are higher, they are also simpler … logging into custom desktop apps to request approvals, or going through email or paper based processes for certification is unacceptable.  Users expect security to operate within the paradigm of the application … i.e. feel like the application they are using. Citizen and customer facing applications have evolved from every where, with custom applications, 3rd party tools, and merging in from acquired entities or 3rd party OEM’s resold to expand your portfolio of services.  These all have their own user stores, authentication models, user lifecycles, session management, etc.  Often the designers/developers are no longer accessible and the documentation is limited.  Bringing together underlying directories to scale for growth, and improve user experience is critical for revenue … but also for operations. Job functions are more dynamic.... take the Olympics for example.  Endless organizations from corporations broadcasting, endorsing, or marketing through the event … to non-profit athletic foundations and public/government entities for athletes and public safety, all operate simultaneously on the world stage.  Each organization needs to spin up short-term teams, often dealing with proprietary information from hot ads to racing strategies or security plans.  IAM is expected to enable team’s to spin up, enable new applications, protect privacy, and secure critical infrastructure.  Then it needs to be disabled just as quickly as users go back to their previous responsibilities. On a more technical level … Optimized system directory; tuning guidelines and parameters are needed by businesses today. Business’s need to be making the right choices (virtual directories) and considerations via choosing the correct architectural patterns (virtual, direct, replicated, and tuning), challenge is that business need to assess and chose the correct architectural patters (centralized, virtualized, and distributed) Today's Business organizations have very complex heterogeneous enterprises that contain diverse and multifaceted information. With today's ever changing global landscape, the strategic end goal in challenging times for business is business agility. The business of identity management requires enterprise's to be more agile and more responsive than ever before. The continued proliferation of networking devices (PC, tablet, PDA's, notebooks, etc.) has caused the number of devices and users to be granted access to these devices to grow exponentially. Business needs to deploy an IAM system that can account for the demands for authentication and authorizations to these devices. Increased innovation is forcing business and organizations to centralize their identity management services. Access management needs to handle traditional web based access as well as handle new innovations around mobile, as well as address insufficient governance processes which can lead to rouge identity accounts, which can then become a source of vulnerabilities within a business’s identity platform. Risk based decisions are providing challenges to business, for an adaptive risk model to make proper access decisions via standard Web single sign on for internal and external customers,. Organizations have to move beyond simple login and passwords to address trusted relationship questions such as: Is this a trusted customer, client, or citizen? Is this a trusted employee, vendor, or partner? Is this a trusted device? Without a solid technological foundation, organizational performance, collaboration, constituent services, or any other organizational processes will languish. A Single server location presents not only network concerns for distributed user base, but identity challenges. The network risks are centered on latency of the long trip that the traffic has to take. Other risks are a performance around availability and if the single identity server is lost, all access is lost. As you can see, there are many reasons why performance tuning IAM will have a substantial impact on the success of your organization.  In our next installment in the series we roll up our sleeves and get into detailed tuning techniques used everyday by thought leaders in the field implementing Oracle Identity & Access Management Solutions.

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• Big Data Matters with ODI12c

  - by Madhu Nair

  contributed by Mike Eisterer On October 17th, 2013, Oracle announced the release of Oracle Data Integrator 12c (ODI12c).  This release signifies improvements to Oracle’s Data Integration portfolio of solutions, particularly Big Data integration. Why Big Data = Big Business Organizations are gaining greater insights and actionability through increased storage, processing and analytical benefits offered by Big Data solutions.  New technologies and frameworks like HDFS, NoSQL, Hive and MapReduce support these benefits now. As further data is collected, analytical requirements increase and the complexity of managing transformations and aggregations of data compounds and organizations are in need for scalable Data Integration solutions. ODI12c provides enterprise solutions for the movement, translation and transformation of information and data heterogeneously and in Big Data Environments through: The ability for existing ODI and SQL developers to leverage new Big Data technologies. A metadata focused approach for cataloging, defining and reusing Big Data technologies, mappings and process executions. Integration between many heterogeneous environments and technologies such as HDFS and Hive. Generation of Hive Query Language. Working with Big Data using Knowledge Modules  ODI12c provides developers with the ability to define sources and targets and visually develop mappings to effect the movement and transformation of data.  As the mappings are created, ODI12c leverages a rich library of prebuilt integrations, known as Knowledge Modules (KMs).  These KMs are contextual to the technologies and platforms to be integrated.  Steps and actions needed to manage the data integration are pre-built and configured within the KMs.  The Oracle Data Integrator Application Adapter for Hadoop provides a series of KMs, specifically designed to integrate with Big Data Technologies.  The Big Data KMs include: Check Knowledge Module Reverse Engineer Knowledge Module Hive Transform Knowledge Module Hive Control Append Knowledge Module File to Hive (LOAD DATA) Knowledge Module File-Hive to Oracle (OLH-OSCH) Knowledge Module  Nothing to beat an Example: To demonstrate the use of the KMs which are part of the ODI Application Adapter for Hadoop, a mapping may be defined to move data between files and Hive targets.  The mapping is defined by dragging the source and target into the mapping, performing the attribute (column) mapping (see Figure 1) and then selecting the KM which will govern the process.  In this mapping example, movie data is being moved from an HDFS source into a Hive table.  Some of the attributes, such as “CUSTID to custid”, have been mapped over. Figure 1  Defining the Mapping Before the proper KM can be assigned to define the technology for the mapping, it needs to be added to the ODI project.  The Big Data KMs have been made available to the project through the KM import process.   Generally, this is done prior to defining the mapping. Figure 2  Importing the Big Data Knowledge Modules Following the import, the KMs are available in the Designer Navigator. v\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} o\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} w\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} .shape {behavior:url(#default#VML);} Normal 0 false false false EN-US ZH-TW 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:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} Figure 3  The Project View in Designer, Showing Installed IKMs Once the KM is imported, it may be assigned to the mapping target.  This is done by selecting the Physical View of the mapping and examining the Properties of the Target.  In this case MOVIAPP_LOG_STAGE is the target of our mapping. Figure 4  Physical View of the Mapping and Assigning the Big Data Knowledge Module to the Target Alternative KMs may have been selected as well, providing flexibility and abstracting the logical mapping from the physical implementation.  Our mapping may be applied to other technologies as well. The mapping is now complete and is ready to run.  We will see more in a future blog about running a mapping to load Hive. To complete the quick ODI for Big Data Overview, let us take a closer look at what the IKM File to Hive is doing for us.  ODI provides differentiated capabilities by defining the process and steps which normally would have to be manually developed, tested and implemented into the KM.  As shown in figure 5, the KM is preparing the Hive session, managing the Hive tables, performing the initial load from HDFS and then performing the insert into Hive.  HDFS and Hive options are selected graphically, as shown in the properties in Figure 4. Figure 5  Process and Steps Managed by the KM What’s Next Big Data being the shape shifting business challenge it is is fast evolving into the deciding factor between market leaders and others. Now that an introduction to ODI and Big Data has been provided, look for additional blogs coming soon using the Knowledge Modules which make up the Oracle Data Integrator Application Adapter for Hadoop: Importing Big Data Metadata into ODI, Testing Data Stores and Loading Hive Targets Generating Transformations using Hive Query language Loading Oracle from Hadoop Sources For more information now, please visit the Oracle Data Integrator Application Adapter for Hadoop web site, http://www.oracle.com/us/products/middleware/data-integration/hadoop/overview/index.html Do not forget to tune in to the ODI12c Executive Launch webcast on the 12th to hear more about ODI12c and GG12c. Normal 0 false false false EN-US ZH-TW 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:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";}

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• The Business of Winning Innovation: An Exclusive Blog Series

  - by Kerrie Foy

  "The Business of Winning Innovation” is a series of articles authored by Oracle Agile PLM experts on what it takes to make innovation a successful and lucrative competitive advantage. Our customers have proven Agile PLM applications to be enormously flexible and comprehensive, so we’ve launched this article series to showcase some of the most fascinating, value-packed use cases. In this article by Keith Colonna, we kick-off the series by taking a look at the science side of innovation within the Consumer Products industry and how PLM can help companies innovate faster, cheaper, smarter. This article will review how innovation has become the lifeline for growth within consumer products companies and how certain companies are “winning” by creating a competitive advantage for themselves by taking a more enterprise-wide,systematic approach to “innovation”.   Managing the Science of Innovation within the Consumer Products Industry By: Keith Colonna, Value Chain Solution Manager, Oracle The consumer products (CP) industry is very mature and competitive. Most companies within this industry have saturated North America (NA) with their products thus maximizing their NA growth potential. Future growth is expected to come from either expansion outside of North America and/or by way of new ideas and products. Innovation plays an integral role in both of these strategies, whether you’re innovating business processes or the products themselves, and may cause several challenges for the typical CP company, Becoming more innovative is both an art and a science. Most CP companies are very good at the art of coming up with new innovative ideas, but many struggle with perfecting the science aspect that involves the best practice processes that help companies quickly turn ideas into sellable products and services. Symptoms and Causes of Business Pain Struggles associated with the science of innovation show up in a variety of ways, like: · Establishing and storing innovative product ideas and data · Funneling these ideas to the chosen few · Time to market cycle time and on-time launch rates · Success rates, or how often the best idea gets chosen · Imperfect decision making (i.e. the ability to kill projects that are not projected to be winners) · Achieving financial goals · Return on R&D investment · Communicating internally and externally as more outsource partners are added globally · Knowing your new product pipeline and project status These challenges (and others) can be consolidated into three root causes: A lack of visibility Poor data with limited access The inability to truly collaborate enterprise-wide throughout your extended value chain Choose the Right Remedy Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) solutions are uniquely designed to help companies solve these types challenges and their root causes. However, PLM solutions can vary widely in terms of configurability, functionality, time-to-value, etc. Business leaders should evaluate PLM solution in terms of their own business drivers and long-term vision to determine the right fit. Many of these solutions are point solutions that can help you cure only one or two business pains in the short term. Others have been designed to serve other industries with different needs. Then there are those solutions that demo well but are owned by companies that are either unable or unwilling to continuously improve their solution to stay abreast of the ever changing needs of the CP industry to grow through innovation. What the Right PLM Solution Should Do for You Based on more than twenty years working in the CP industry, I recommend investing in a single solution that can help you solve all of the issues associated with the science of innovation in a totally integrated fashion. By integration I mean the (1) integration of the all of the processes associated with the development, maintenance and delivery of your product data, and (2) the integration, or harmonization of this product data with other downstream sources, like ERP, product catalogues and the GS1 Global Data Synchronization Network (or GDSN, which is now a CP industry requirement for doing business with most retailers). The right PLM solution should help you: Increase Revenue. A best practice PLM solution should help a company grow its revenues by consolidating product development cycle-time and helping companies get new and improved products to market sooner. PLM should also eliminate many of the root causes for a product being returned, refused and/or reclaimed (which takes away from top-line growth) by creating an enterprise-wide, collaborative, workflow-driven environment. Reduce Costs. A strong PLM solution should help shave many unnecessary costs that companies typically take for granted. Rationalizing SKU’s, components (ingredients and packaging) and suppliers is a major opportunity at most companies that PLM should help address. A natural outcome of this rationalization is lower direct material spend and a reduction of inventory. Another cost cutting opportunity comes with PLM when it helps companies avoid certain costs associated with process inefficiencies that lead to scrap, rework, excess and obsolete inventory, poor end of life administration, higher cost of quality and regulatory and increased expediting. Mitigate Risk. Risks are the hardest to quantify but can be the most costly to a company. Food safety, recalls, line shutdowns, customer dissatisfaction and, worst of all, the potential tarnishing of your brands are a few of the debilitating risks that CP companies deal with on a daily basis. These risks are so uniquely severe that they require an enterprise PLM solution specifically designed for the CP industry that safeguards product information and processes while still allowing the art of innovation to flourish. Many CP companies have already created a winning advantage by leveraging a single, best practice PLM solution to establish an enterprise-wide, systematic approach to innovation. Oracle’s Answer for the Consumer Products Industry Oracle is dedicated to solving the growth and innovation challenges facing the CP industry. Oracle’s Agile Product Lifecycle Management for Process solution was originally developed with and for CP companies and is driven by a specialized development staff solely focused on maintaining and continuously improving the solution per the latest industry requirements. Agile PLM for Process helps CP companies handle all of the processes associated with managing the science of the innovation process, including: specification management, new product development/project and portfolio management, formulation optimization, supplier management, and quality and regulatory compliance to name a few. And as I mentioned earlier, integration is absolutely critical. Many Oracle CP customers, both with Oracle ERP systems and non-Oracle ERP systems, report benefits from Oracle’s Agile PLM for Process. In future articles we will explain in greater detail how both existing Oracle customers (like Gallo, Smuckers, Land-O-Lakes and Starbucks) and new Oracle customers (like ConAgra, Tyson, McDonalds and Heinz) have all realized the benefits of Agile PLM for Process and its integration to their ERP systems. More to Come Stay tuned for more articles in our blog series “The Business of Winning Innovation.” While we will also feature articles focused on other industries, look forward to more on how Agile PLM for Process addresses innovation challenges facing the CP industry. Additional topics include: Innovation Data Management (IDM), New Product Development (NPD), Product Quality Management (PQM), Menu Management,Private Label Management, and more! . Watch this video for more info about Agile PLM for Process

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• The Top 5 MDM Sessions You Can’t Miss at OpenWorld

  - by Mala Narasimharajan

  Sessions, Demo pods, Hands On Labs, and much more – but where should you focus?  MDM has some excellent sessions planned for OOW –  here is a top 5 list to identify the sessions you just can’t afford to miss. October 3, 2012  1:15 PM - 2:15 PM    Moscone West - 3002/3004     What's There to Know About Oracle’s Master Data Management Portfolio and Roadmap? Hear about product strategy our vision for the future and how Oracle MDM is positioned to excel in helping organizations make the most of their customer,      partner, supplier or product data. October 3, 2012  5:00 PM - 6:00 PM   Westin San Francisco – Metropolitan I Oracle Customer MDM Applications: Implementation Best Practices, Data Governance, and ROI       Customers successes provide solid examples of technology at work and how organizations derive value from it. Attend this session and hear from our customers on how they built a business case, established governance and are realizing the benefits of Oracle Customer Hub. October 2, 2012  10:15 AM - 11:15 AM   Moscone West – 3001 Mastering Product Data: Strategies for Effective Product Information Management                                                                      Product data is vital for any enterprise in being able to provide a consolidated representation of products to their partners, customers and suppliers.  Hear how our customers leverage product information to be a leader in their respective area and how Oracle is critical to achieving this. October 2, 2012  11:45 AM - 12:45 PM   Moscone West – 2022 Enabling Trusted Enterprise Product Data with Oracle Fusion Product Hub                                                                                       Learn how Oracle Fusion Product Hub is paving the way for providing organizations with trusted product data as well as helping organizations make the most of the information and infrastructure they already possess. October 1, 2012  4:45 PM – 5:45 PM   InterContinental - Ballroom A Oracle Hyperion Data Relationship Management: Enabling Enterprise Transformation                                                                         Hear how Data Relationship Management drives enterprise transformation and why any organization embarking on an master data management initiative needs it, plus hear from our customers best practices as well as lessons learned.  Check out the Master Data Management Focus On document for all our sessions at OpenWorld 2012. 

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• Windows Phone Developer Spotlight: Nikolai Joukov

  - by Lori Lalonde

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/lorilalonde/archive/2014/06/04/windows-phone-developer-spotlight-nikolai-joukov.aspxAs part of an ongoing series, I plan to include a spotlight post on people within the community that are stars in their field and area of expertise. For my first spotlight post, I interviewed Nikolai Joukov, who is a regular attendee at my local area .NET User Group (CTTDNUG), and has also participated in many of the Mobile and Cloud workshops we have hosted over the past few years. Nikolai stood out immediately, because of his passion for developing mobile apps, his interest in continuous learning, and his drive to publish quality apps that people will find useful and entertaining. Background: Nikolai immigrated to Canada in 1995, and has been working in IT since 1997. He moved on to become an independent contractor in 2005, and has worked at various large scale organizations over the course of his career, including BMO, Enbridge, Economical Insurance, Equitable Life, Manulife and Sun Life. Nikolai is an accomplished Windows Phone and Windows Store publisher, with 11 published Windows Phone apps, and 8 published Windows Store apps. He has almost 6000 downloads and favourable reviews. Q & A with Nikolai How many years have you been developing Windows Phone apps? 2 years When did you develop your very first Windows Phone app, and what was it about? Actually, the very first app I wrote was for the Microsoft “Smart Phone” back in 2004. This phone was given to me by Microsoft during the Developers Days Conference in Toronto. It was some kind of experimental model named Smart Phone, but you had to use VB 3 to develop the applications. Needless to say, this was not very successful at that time. My app was a Stock Trades Calculator. Very primitive, but it was working for me. The phone was heavy and the battery barely lasted 4 hours. Microsoft stopped supporting it few months later and the phone stopped working shortly after, but I still have it as a souvenir. For Windows Phone, my first app was “Trip Packing Assistant”. This is a simple trip packing check list that allows you to list items by category, set required quantity of items, and mark off the item in the list when it is packed. I designed it for me and my wife Galina, since we love to travel and this program helps manage our list for us. How did you get started in Windows Phone development? I have to say thanks to our .NET User Group for introducing me to Windows Phone development. I was intrigued and decided to give it a try. In October 2012 during a 2 day training event that ObjectSharp hosted in London, I met Bruce Johnson. On his advice, I registered for Developer Movement, and it is was a good push to actually complete the apps that I started. You have a great series of travel guide apps both for Windows Phone and Windows Store. Tell us about how you came up with the idea to develop those apps and what process you went through to put it all together. Like I said earlier, my wife and I love to travel. Before I created Trip Packing Assistant, every time we were planning to travel somewhere new, Galina would spend 3-4 weeks doing research. She would create a Word document with all of the information. We didn’t want to have to carry our laptop with us all the time, so we printed out the Word document she created, and would take it with us. After we returned from the trip, we would bring back tons of pictures and materials. Then our friends started to ask us about our materials before they planned their trips to the same places we had visited. So I decided to give it a try and started making apps for Windows Phone and for Windows 8. I hope these applications will help people who are planning to travel. So, all of the pictures used in the travel apps you created were actually taken by you during these amazing trips? Yes Do you have another Windows Store/Windows Phone project in development right now? If so, can you give us a hint at what it will be about? I want to stay with travel apps for now. But this time I will try to write an app for us (Galina and I). Usually we go on the trip, then I write the apps after we have all this beautiful pictures in our hands. We are planning a trip to Rome. This app will not have the pictures, but I want to add a map with points of interest and all information that can be useful for us. Then we will go on our trip and test it on location. As well I am planning to work on my existing apps to make them better. What learning resources would you recommend for other developers that want to get started in Window Store and Windows Phone development? I would start with dev.windowsphone.com to get all tools and samples, also links to training materials. I like MVA (Microsoft Virtual Academy). Their videos are really useful and it is free. Pluralsight is good too but it is not free and I do not have a subscription anymore. Our .NET User Group meetings give good insights too. I went to all meetings and full day training events. When you start to develop your app, you need to do research for specific questions that arise during development. The Developer Portal and Nokia Developer are good resources too. Wrap Up Thanks Nikolai for participating in my first Spotlight blog post! Shown below is Nikolai’s publisher page in the Windows Phone Store and his publisher page in the Windows Store. Simply click on it to be taken to there to check out his portfolio of apps. Be sure to download his apps and try them out! They are all free! Nikolai’s Windows Phone apps   Nikolai’s Windows Store Apps

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• Evaluating Solutions to Manage Product Compliance? Don't Wait Much Longer

  - by Kerrie Foy

  Depending on severity, product compliance issues can cause all sorts of problems from run-away budgets to business closures. But effective policies and safeguards can create a strong foundation for innovation, productivity, market penetration and competitive advantage. If you’ve been putting off a systematic approach to product compliance, it is time to reconsider that decision, or indecision. Why now?  No matter what industry, companies face a litany of worldwide and regional regulations that require proof of product compliance and environmental friendliness for market access.  For example, Restriction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS) is a regulation that restricts the use of six dangerous materials used in the manufacture of electronic and electrical equipment.  ROHS was originally adopted by the European Union in 2003 for implementation in 2006, and it has evolved over time through various regional versions for North America, China, Japan, Korea, Norway and Turkey.  In addition, the RoHS directive allowed for material exemptions used in Medical Devices, but that exemption ends in 2014.   Additional regulations worth watching are the Battery Directive, Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE), and Registration, Evaluation, Authorization and Restriction of Chemicals (REACH) directives.  Additional evolving regulations are coming from governing bodies like the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). Corporate sustainability initiatives are also gaining urgency and influencing product design. In a survey of 405 corporations in the Global 500 by Carbon Disclosure Project, co-written by PwC (CDP Global 500 Climate Change Report 2012 entitled Business Resilience in an Uncertain, Resource-Constrained World), 48% of the respondents indicated they saw potential to create new products and business services as a response to climate change. Just 21% reported a dedicated budget for the research. However, the report goes on to explain that those few companies are winning over new customers and driving additional profits by exploiting their abilities to adapt to environmental needs. The article cites Dell as an example – Dell has invested in research to develop new products designed to reduce its customers’ emissions by more than 10 million metric tons of CO2e per year. This reduction in emissions should save Dell’s customers over $1billion per year as a result! Over time we expect to see many additional companies prove that eco-design provides marketplace benefits through differentiation and direct customer value. How do you meet compliance requirements and also successfully invest in eco-friendly designs? No doubt companies struggle to answer this question. After all, the journey to get there may involve transforming business models, go-to-market strategies, supply networks, quality assurance policies and compliance processes per the rapidly evolving global and regional directives. There may be limited executive focus on the initiative, inability to quantify noncompliance, or not enough resources to justify investment. To make things even more difficult to address, compliance responsibility can be a passionate topic within an organization, making the prospect of change on an enterprise scale problematic and time-consuming. Without a single source of truth for product data and without proper processes in place, ensuring product compliance burgeons into a crushing task that is cost-prohibitive and overwhelming to an organization. With all the overhead, certain markets or demographics become simply inaccessible. Therefore, the risk to consumer goodwill and satisfaction, revenue, business continuity, and market potential is too great not to solve the compliance challenge. Companies are beginning to adapt and even thrive in today’s highly regulated and transparent environment by implementing systematic approaches to product compliance that are more than functional bandages but revenue-generating engines. Consider partnering with Oracle to help you address your compliance needs. Many of the world’s most innovative leaders and pioneers are leveraging Oracle’s Agile Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) portfolio of enterprise applications to manage the product value chain, centralize product data, automate processes, and launch more eco-friendly products to market faster.   Particularly, the Agile Product Governance & Compliance (PG&C) solution provides out-of-the-box functionality to integrate actionable regulatory information into the enterprise product record from the ideation to the disposal/recycling phase. Agile PG&C makes it possible to efficiently manage compliance per corporate green initiatives as well as regional and global directives. Options are critical, but so is ease-of-use. Anyone who’s grappled with compliance policy knows legal interpretation plays a major role in determining how an organization responds to regulation. Agile PG&C gives you the freedom to configure product compliance per your needs, while maintaining rigorous control over the product record in an easy-to-use interface that facilitates adoption efforts. It allows you to assign regulations as specifications for a part or BOM roll-up. Each specification has a threshold value that alerts you to a non-compliance issue if the threshold value is exceeded. Set however many regulations as specifications you need to make sure a product can be sold in your target countries. Another option is to implement like one of our leading consumer electronics customers and define your own “catch-all” specification to ensure compliance in all markets. You can give your suppliers secure access to enter their component data or integrate a third party’s data. With Agile PG&C you are able to design compliance earlier into your products to reduce cost and improve quality downstream when stakes are higher. Agile PG&C is a comprehensive solution that makes product compliance more reliable and efficient. Throughout product lifecycles, use the solution to support full material disclosures, efficiently manage declarations with your suppliers, feed compliance data into a corrective action if a product must be changed, and swiftly satisfy audits by showing all due diligence tracked in one solution. Given the compounding regulation and consumer focus on urgent environmental issues, now is the time to act. Implementing an enterprise, systematic approach to product compliance is a competitive investment. From the start, Agile Product Governance & Compliance enables companies to confidently design for compliance and sustainability, reduce the cost of compliance, minimize the risk of business interruption, deliver responsible products, and inspire new innovation.  Don’t wait any longer! To find out more about Agile Product Governance & Compliance download the data sheet, contact your sales representative, or call Oracle at 1-800-633-0738. Many thanks to Shane Goodwin, Senior Manager, Oracle Agile PLM Product Management, for contributions to this article. 

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• Why We Should Learn to Stop Worrying and Love Millennials

  - by HCM-Oracle

  By Christine Mellon Much is said and written about the new generations of employees entering our workforce, as though they are a strange specimen, a mysterious life form to be “figured out,” accommodated and engaged – at a safe distance, of course.  At its worst, this talk takes a critical and disapproving tone, with baby boomer employees adamantly refusing to validate this new breed of worker, let alone determine how to help them succeed and achieve their potential.   The irony of our baby-boomer resentments and suspicions is that they belie the fact that we created the very vision that younger employees are striving to achieve.  From our frustrations with empty careers that did not fulfill us, from our opposition to “the man,” from our sharp memories of our parents’ toiling for 30 years just for the right to retire, from the simple desire not to live our lives in a state of invisibility, came the seeds of hope for something better. One characteristic of Millennial workers that grew from these seeds is the desire to experience as much as possible.  They are the “Experiential Employee”, with a passion for growing in diverse ways and expanding personal and professional horizons.  Rather than rooting themselves in a single company for a career, or even in a single career path, these employees are committed to building a broad portfolio of experiences and capabilities that will enable them to make a difference and to leave a mark of significance in the world.  How much richer is the organization that nurtures and leverages this inclination?  Our curmudgeonly ways must be surrendered and our focus redirected toward building the next generation of talent ecosystems, if we are to optimize what future generations have to offer.   Accelerating Professional Development In spite of our Boomer grumblings about Millennials’ “unrealistic” expectations, the truth is that we have a well-matched set of circumstances.  We have executives-in-waiting who want to learn quickly and a concurrent, urgent need to ramp up their development time, based on anticipated high levels of retirement in the next 10+ years.  Since we need to rapidly skill up these heirs to the corporate kingdom, isn’t it a fortunate coincidence that they are hungry to learn, develop and move fluidly throughout our organizations??  So our challenge now is to efficiently operationalize the wisdom we have acquired about effective learning and development.   We have already evolved from classroom-based models to diverse instructional methods.  The next step is to find the best approaches to help younger employees learn quickly and apply new learnings in an impactful way.   Creating temporary or even permanent functional partnerships among Millennial employees is one way to maximize outcomes.  This might take the form of 2 or more employees owning aspects of what once fell under a single role.  While one might argue this would mean duplication of resources, it could be a short term cost while employees come up to speed.  And the potential benefits would be numerous:  leveraging and validating the inherent sense of community of new generations, creating cross-functional skills with broad applicability, yielding additional perspectives and approaches to traditional work outcomes, and accelerating the performance curve for incumbents through Cooperative Learning (Johnson, D. and Johnson R., 1989, 1999).  This well-researched teaching strategy, where students support each other in the absorption and application of new information, has been shown to deliver faster, more efficient learning, and greater retention. Alternately, perhaps short term contracts with exiting retirees, or former retirees, to help facilitate the development of following generations may have merit.  Again, a short term cost, certainly.  However, the gains realized in shortening the learning curve, and strengthening engagement are substantial and lasting. Ultimately, there needs to be creative thinking applied for each organization on how to accelerate the capabilities of our future leaders in unique ways that mesh with current culture. The manner in which performance is evaluated must finally shift as well.  Employees will need to be assessed on how well they have developed key skills and capabilities vs. end-to-end mastery of functional positions they have no interest in keeping for an entire career. As we become more comfortable in placing greater and greater weight on competencies vs. tasks, we will realize increased organizational agility via this new generation of workers, which will be further enhanced by their natural flexibility and appetite for change. Revisiting Succession  For many years, organizations have failed to deliver desired succession planning outcomes.  According to CEB’s 2013 research, only 28% of current leaders were pre-identified in a succession plan. These disappointing results, along with the entrance of the experiential, Millennial employee into the workforce, may just provide the needed impetus for HR to reinvent succession processes.   We have recognized that the best professional development efforts are not always linear, and the time has come to fully adopt this philosophy in regard to succession as well.  Paths to specific organizational roles will not look the same for newer generations who seek out unique learning opportunities, without consideration of a singular career destination.  Rather than charting particular jobs as precursors for key positions, the experiences and skills behind what makes an incumbent successful must become essential in succession mapping.  And the multitude of ways in which those experiences and skills may be acquired must be factored into the process, along with the individual employee’s level of learning agility. While this may seem daunting, it is necessary and long overdue.  We have talked about the criticality of competency-based succession, however, we have not lived up to our own rhetoric.  Many Boomers have experienced the same frustration in our careers; knowing we are capable of shining in a particular role, but being denied the opportunity due to how our career history lined up, on paper, with documented job requirements.  These requirements usually emphasized past jobs/titles and specific tasks, versus capabilities, drive and willingness (let alone determination) to learn new things.  How satisfying would it be for us to leave a legacy where such narrow thinking no longer applies and potential is amplified? Realizing Diversity Another bloom from the seeds we Boomers have tried to plant over the past decades is a completely evolved view of diversity.  Millennial employees assume a diverse workforce, and are startled by anything less.  Their social tolerance, nurtured by wide and diverse networks, is unprecedented.  College graduates expect a similar landscape in the “real world” to what they experienced throughout their lives.  They appreciate and seek out divergent points of view and experiences without needing any persuasion.  The face of our U.S. workforce will likely see dramatic change as Millennials apply their fresh take on hiring and building strong teams, with an inherent sense of inclusion.  This wonderful aspect of the Millennial wave should be celebrated and strongly encouraged, as it is the fulfillment of our own aspirations. Future Perfect The Experiential Employee is operating more as a free agent than a long term player, and their commitment will essentially last as long as meaningful organizational culture and personal/professional opportunities keep their interest.  As Boomers, we have laid the foundation for this new, spirited employment attitude, and we should take pride in knowing that.  Generations to come will challenge organizations to excel in how they identify, manage and nurture talent. Let’s support and revel in the future that we’ve helped invent, rather than lament what we think has been lost.  After all, the future is always connected to the past.  And as so eloquently phrased by Antoine Lavoisier, French nobleman, chemist and politico:  “Nothing is Lost, Nothing is Created, and Everything is Transformed.” Christine has over 25 years of diverse HR experience.  She has held HR consulting and corporate roles, including CHRO positions for Echostar in Denver, a 6,000+ employee global engineering firm, and Aepona, a startup software firm, successfully acquired by Intel. Christine is a resource to Oracle clients, to assist in Human Capital Management strategy development and implementation, compensation practices, talent development initiatives, employee engagement, global HR management, and integrated HR systems and processes that support the full employee lifecycle. 

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• The Sensemaking Spectrum for Business Analytics: Translating from Data to Business Through Analysis

  - by Joe Lamantia

  One of the most compelling outcomes of our strategic research efforts over the past several years is a growing vocabulary that articulates our cumulative understanding of the deep structure of the domains of discovery and business analytics. Modes are one example of the deep structure we’ve found.  After looking at discovery activities across a very wide range of industries, question types, business needs, and problem solving approaches, we've identified distinct and recurring kinds of sensemaking activity, independent of context.  We label these activities Modes: Explore, compare, and comprehend are three of the nine recognizable modes.  Modes describe *how* people go about realizing insights.  (Read more about the programmatic research and formal academic grounding and discussion of the modes here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/235971352_A_Taxonomy_of_Enterprise_Search_and_Discovery) By analogy to languages, modes are the 'verbs' of discovery activity.  When applied to the practical questions of product strategy and development, the modes of discovery allow one to identify what kinds of analytical activity a product, platform, or solution needs to support across a spread of usage scenarios, and then make concrete and well-informed decisions about every aspect of the solution, from high-level capabilities, to which specific types of information visualizations better enable these scenarios for the types of data users will analyze. The modes are a powerful generative tool for product making, but if you've spent time with young children, or had a really bad hangover (or both at the same time...), you understand the difficult of communicating using only verbs.  So I'm happy to share that we've found traction on another facet of the deep structure of discovery and business analytics.  Continuing the language analogy, we've identified some of the ‘nouns’ in the language of discovery: specifically, the consistently recurring aspects of a business that people are looking for insight into.  We call these discovery Subjects, since they identify *what* people focus on during discovery efforts, rather than *how* they go about discovery as with the Modes. Defining the collection of Subjects people repeatedly focus on allows us to understand and articulate sense making needs and activity in more specific, consistent, and complete fashion.  In combination with the Modes, we can use Subjects to concretely identify and define scenarios that describe people’s analytical needs and goals.  For example, a scenario such as ‘Explore [a Mode] the attrition rates [a Measure, one type of Subject] of our largest customers [Entities, another type of Subject] clearly captures the nature of the activity — exploration of trends vs. deep analysis of underlying factors — and the central focus — attrition rates for customers above a certain set of size criteria — from which follow many of the specifics needed to address this scenario in terms of data, analytical tools, and methods. We can also use Subjects to translate effectively between the different perspectives that shape discovery efforts, reducing ambiguity and increasing impact on both sides the perspective divide.  For example, from the language of business, which often motivates analytical work by asking questions in business terms, to the perspective of analysis.  The question posed to a Data Scientist or analyst may be something like “Why are sales of our new kinds of potato chips to our largest customers fluctuating unexpectedly this year?” or “Where can innovate, by expanding our product portfolio to meet unmet needs?”.  Analysts translate questions and beliefs like these into one or more empirical discovery efforts that more formally and granularly indicate the plan, methods, tools, and desired outcomes of analysis.  From the perspective of analysis this second question might become, “Which customer needs of type ‘A', identified and measured in terms of ‘B’, that are not directly or indirectly addressed by any of our current products, offer 'X' potential for ‘Y' positive return on the investment ‘Z' required to launch a new offering, in time frame ‘W’?  And how do these compare to each other?”.  Translation also happens from the perspective of analysis to the perspective of data; in terms of availability, quality, completeness, format, volume, etc. By implication, we are proposing that most working organizations — small and large, for profit and non-profit, domestic and international, and in the majority of industries — can be described for analytical purposes using this collection of Subjects.  This is a bold claim, but simplified articulation of complexity is one of the primary goals of sensemaking frameworks such as this one.  (And, yes, this is in fact a framework for making sense of sensemaking as a category of activity - but we’re not considering the recursive aspects of this exercise at the moment.) Compellingly, we can place the collection of subjects on a single continuum — we call it the Sensemaking Spectrum — that simply and coherently illustrates some of the most important relationships between the different types of Subjects, and also illuminates several of the fundamental dynamics shaping business analytics as a domain.  As a corollary, the Sensemaking Spectrum also suggests innovation opportunities for products and services related to business analytics. The first illustration below shows Subjects arrayed along the Sensemaking Spectrum; the second illustration presents examples of each kind of Subject.  Subjects appear in colors ranging from blue to reddish-orange, reflecting their place along the Spectrum, which indicates whether a Subject addresses more the viewpoint of systems and data (Data centric and blue), or people (User centric and orange).  This axis is shown explicitly above the Spectrum.  Annotations suggest how Subjects align with the three significant perspectives of Data, Analysis, and Business that shape business analytics activity.  This rendering makes explicit the translation and bridging function of Analysts as a role, and analysis as an activity. Subjects are best understood as fuzzy categories [http://georgelakoff.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/hedges-a-study-in-meaning-criteria-and-the-logic-of-fuzzy-concepts-journal-of-philosophical-logic-2-lakoff-19731.pdf], rather than tightly defined buckets.  For each Subject, we suggest some of the most common examples: Entities may be physical things such as named products, or locations (a building, or a city); they could be Concepts, such as satisfaction; or they could be Relationships between entities, such as the variety of possible connections that define linkage in social networks.  Likewise, Events may indicate a time and place in the dictionary sense; or they may be Transactions involving named entities; or take the form of Signals, such as ‘some Measure had some value at some time’ - what many enterprises understand as alerts.   The central story of the Spectrum is that though consumers of analytical insights (represented here by the Business perspective) need to work in terms of Subjects that are directly meaningful to their perspective — such as Themes, Plans, and Goals — the working realities of data (condition, structure, availability, completeness, cost) and the changing nature of most discovery efforts make direct engagement with source data in this fashion impossible.  Accordingly, business analytics as a domain is structured around the fundamental assumption that sense making depends on analytical transformation of data.  Analytical activity incrementally synthesizes more complex and larger scope Subjects from data in its starting condition, accumulating insight (and value) by moving through a progression of stages in which increasingly meaningful Subjects are iteratively synthesized from the data, and recombined with other Subjects.  The end goal of  ‘laddering’ successive transformations is to enable sense making from the business perspective, rather than the analytical perspective.Synthesis through laddering is typically accomplished by specialized Analysts using dedicated tools and methods. Beginning with some motivating question such as seeking opportunities to increase the efficiency (a Theme) of fulfillment processes to reach some level of profitability by the end of the year (Plan), Analysts will iteratively wrangle and transform source data Records, Values and Attributes into recognizable Entities, such as Products, that can be combined with Measures or other data into the Events (shipment of orders) that indicate the workings of the business.  More complex Subjects (to the right of the Spectrum) are composed of or make reference to less complex Subjects: a business Process such as Fulfillment will include Activities such as confirming, packing, and then shipping orders.  These Activities occur within or are conducted by organizational units such as teams of staff or partner firms (Networks), composed of Entities which are structured via Relationships, such as supplier and buyer.  The fulfillment process will involve other types of Entities, such as the products or services the business provides.  The success of the fulfillment process overall may be judged according to a sophisticated operating efficiency Model, which includes tiered Measures of business activity and health for the transactions and activities included.  All of this may be interpreted through an understanding of the operational domain of the businesses supply chain (a Domain).   We'll discuss the Spectrum in more depth in succeeding posts.

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• The Madness of March

  - by Kristin Rose

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As many are aware, March Madness is well underway and continues to be a time when college basketball teams get together to bring their A-game to the court. Here at Oracle we also like to bring our A-game, and that includes some new players and talent from our newly acquired companies. Each new acquisition expands Oracle’s solution portfolio, fills customer requirements, and ultimately brings greater opportunities for partners. OPN follows a consistent approach to delivering key information about these acquisitions to you in a timely manner. We do this so partners can get educated, get trained and gain access to demand gen and sales tools. Through this slam dunk of a process we provide (using Pillar Data Systems as an example): A welcome page where partners can download information and learn how to sell and maximize sales returns. A Discovery section where partners can listen to key Oracle Executives speak about the many benefits this new solution brings, as well review a FAQ sheet. A Prepare section where partners can learn about the product strategies and the different OPN Knowledge Zones that have become available. A Sell and Deliver section that partners can leverage when discussing product positioning and functionality, as well as gain access to relevant deliverables. Just as any competitive team strives to be #1, Oracle also wants to stay best-in-class which is why we have recently joined forces with some ‘baller’ companies such as RightNow, Endeca and Pillar Axiom to secure our place in the industry bracket. By running our 3-2 Oracle play and bringing in our newly acquired products, we are able to deliver a solid, expanded solution to our partners. These and many other MVP companies have helped Oracle broaden its offerings and score big. Watch the half time show below to find out what Judson thinks about Oracle’s current offerings: Mergers and acquisitions are a strategic part of how we currently go to market. If you haven’t done so already, dribble down or post up and visit the Acquisition Catalog to learn more about Oracle’s acquired products and the unique benefits they can bring to your own court. Or click here to learn about the ways of monetizing opportunities through Oracle acquisitions. Until Next Time, It’s Game Time, The OPN Communications Team 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-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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