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 08.01.2009 20:04   oracle.com

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SOA ROI - Case Studies across various industries

 08.01.2009 16:05   oracle.com

Just to let folks be aware that SOA, the architecture-formerly-known-as-SOA, and the architecture-until-recently-known-as-SOA is alive-and-well, I gathered up some success stories that show tangible ROI from recent SOA projects across the industry, which include some Oracle customers. I came across this set of case studies from the OMG SOA Consortium web site - which highlights SOA success stories across Insurance, Transportation, Government, Financial Services, and Healthcare. Here are a few more from Oracle customers I culled from various sources – Apollo Group, one of the leading providers of higher education for working adults, used SOA to automate determining the eligibility of their 120,000 student population for additional funds. The eligibility verification process was driven by many complex rules and required integration with heterogeneous systems such as PeopleSoft Campus Solution, Oracle e-Business Suite Financials and homegrown student record application. The rules that govern a student's eligibility for additional funds were volatile and needed to be quickly and easily modifiable by business users. Once a student is determined to be eligible for additional loan funds by the Oracle Rules Engine, multiple areas of PeopleSoft have to be populated to complete the Additional Funds process. The business logic in the PeopleSoft system had been highly customized so PeopleSoft Component Interfaces were utilized to gain reuse of all Apollo custom business logic. By reusing Component Interfaces, Apollo Group prevented the need to duplicate any business logic in the BPEL processes The project took 4 months from start to finish with only 3 months to architect and develop the solution. The process was comprised of 12 BPEL sub processes containing over 450 BPEL activities. It interfaced with three different ERP systems to retrieve student information and inserted data into 12 PeopleSoft Components using Component Interfaces. Said Mark Forier, IT Director of Applications at Apollo Group. Success of this project demonstrated the capabilities of IT and the Oracle Fusion Middleware stack to upper management and the business. We achieved a 600% ROI on this project with a four month time frame on a $300,000 investment. Essentially, a significant and immediate return. Tucson Electric Power Company Unifies Business Processes with Oracle(r) Service-Oriented Architecture Suite Tucson Electric Power Company expects to implement and integrate new applications 36 percent faster and reduce time spent on supporting and maintaining the system by 50 percent. They expect to implement and integrate new applications 36 percent faster and reduce time spent on supporting and maintaining the system by 50 percent. Tucson Electric Power Company provides energy services in a regulated market and is focused on controlling costs while expanding IT services to increase business efficiency. The utility's IT infrastructure includes hundreds of specialized application interfaces and lacked a unified process for implementing new applications to deliver new services. To reduce IT complexity and administration requirements - and accelerate new application implementations - Tucson Electric Power Company selected Oracle SOA Suite to create a single enterprise-wide integration environment. They are integrating their STORMS Work Management application with the Oracle E-Business Suite, which allows them to streamline work requests sent from STORMS to Oracle Projects and to track project costs more efficiently. The STORMS application enables the organization to rapidly assign field crews to restore electricity service and make repairs caused by storm damage. Oracle SOA Suite (which enables underlying support for their service orientation) helps eliminate customized application integration requirements, establishing a framework of reusable components that allow Tucson Electric Power Company to simplify integration between additional work management applications and other back office systems - eliminating the requirement for custom, "hard wired" interfaces. Capitol Corridor Joint Powers Authority Selects Oracle to Support Automated Ticket Validation Services Initiative Capitol Corridor Joint Powers Authority (CCJPA), which manages an Amtrak intercity passenger train service in eight Northern California counties is using SOA as the foundation for its Automated Ticket Validation Services initiative. Committed to continually improving customer service and security, CCJPA plans to launch California's first real-time ticket sales and validation system on its trains. The system, which is scheduled to go live in 2009, will allow CCJPA conductors to use hand held scanners to validate and sell tickets to customers on the train. This will also improve security by being able to track when passengers board and exit the train. The scanners will utilize Web and business process execution language (BPEL) based services to link CCJPA and Amtrak's IT systems. Last but not least, is one of my favorites, Green ROI - It is widely believed that green revolution is the answer to the current downturn. How can SOA help you go green? Verizon Wireless did it using SOA, reducing their hardware footprint by 95% and measuring their ROI by reduction of tonnage of hardware in the datacenter. I blogged about this earlier in the year. Dave

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SOA Still Alive and Well--Sell it to the Business

 08.01.2009 16:05   oracle.com

In case you need to catch up, Anne Thomas Manes of Burton Group declared that "SOA met its demise on January 1, 2009, when it was wiped out by the catastrophic impact of the economic recession!". In her posting, she states – Service-orientation is a prerequisite for rapid integration of data and business processes; it enables situational development models, such as mashups; and it’s the foundational architecture for SaaS and cloud computing. (Imagine shifting aspects of your application portfolio to the cloud without enabling integration between on-premise and off-premise applications.) Although the word "SOA" is dead, the requirement for service-oriented architecture is stronger than ever I am happy to see that there’s renewed energy to try and find something new among some of my industry colleagues whom I respect. I’m not against finding a new name for this thing that we have been until-recently-referring-to-as-SOA but I still am looking for a reason why. Dave Linthicum claimed he predicted it would become less important, asked “Could the death of SOA bring it back to life?� , and purported that Anne Manes had simply signed and dated the certificate of death for it. Miko Matsumura and I had some fun with the whole thing, and the Yahoo!Groups service-orientated-architecture forum had a field day with it. Jack Vaughan of SearchSOA.com recently posted an interesting case study of a SOA at National City Bank that succeeded, yet eventually failed because the credit crisis came along and a government-forced merger with PNC Financial Services Group took its toll. In Jack’s posting he asks If one SOA succeeds is SOA still dead? What if it succeeds and fails? One could stretch and say that that this is an example of being wiped out by the catastrophic impact of the economic recession. However I don’t think Anne had this case in mind when she wrote this. I’m sure there were a lot of casualties of that merger, and I don’t think the demise of the project had anything to do with whether it was SOA. Joe McKendrick brought it up again in his 09 predictions saying that SOA will be de-emphasized by cloud computing. Nick Gall of Gartner Group used this as a way of promoting his pet peeve WOA with Long Live the Web, and as a bit of tongue-in-cheek retort, Steve Jones of CapGemini quickly proclaimed REST is dead long live the Web I have been thinking hard over the past year or more to come up with new models for how service-orientation, grid computing, cloud computing, and SAAS all come together in a coherent architecture, but I have always thought we would just call it SOA. So here’s my problem with all this noise …. I’m still looking for where’s the death!?? I’m not against joining the new bandwagon, but I’m still looking for a good reason to declare an acronym dead while still declaring everything that it stands for to be critical for future success. Not a one has bothered to substantiate any of the claims that are made about SOA being unsuccessful. The consensus is that all the elements of SOA such as service-orientation, governance, alignment with the business, etc are still critical to live on, and be joined with things like cloud computing and SAAS yet the term itself needs to die because IT has to stop selling that term to the business. In favor of what? Another term? I’m all ears. In fact I would like to issue a challenge to the industry of those are in the thick of it to suggest a new term. Just to let folks be aware that SOA, the architecture-formerly-known-as-SOA, and the architecture-until-recently-known-as-SOA is alive-and-well, I gathered up some success stories that show tangible ROI from recent SOA projects across the industry, which include some Oracle customers. If IT needs some ammunition to help sell SOA to the business, there's some right here - I came across this set of case studies from the OMG SOA Consortium web site - which highlights SOA success stories across Insurance, Transportation, Government, Financial Services, and Healthcare. Here are a few more from Oracle customers I culled from various sources – Apollo Group, one of the leading providers of higher education for working adults, used SOA to automate determining the eligibility of their 120,000 student population for additional funds. The eligibility verification process was driven by many complex rules and required integration with heterogeneous systems such as PeopleSoft Campus Solution, Oracle e-Business Suite Financials and homegrown student record application. The rules that govern a student's eligibility for additional funds were volatile and needed to be quickly and easily modifiable by business users. Once a student is determined to be eligible for additional loan funds by the Oracle Rules Engine, multiple areas of PeopleSoft have to be populated to complete the Additional Funds process. The business logic in the PeopleSoft system had been highly customized so PeopleSoft Component Interfaces were utilized to gain reuse of all Apollo custom business logic. By reusing Component Interfaces, Apollo Group prevented the need to duplicate any business logic in the BPEL processes The project took 4 months from start to finish with only 3 months to architect and develop the solution. The process was comprised of 12 BPEL sub processes containing over 450 BPEL activities. It interfaced with three different ERP systems to retrieve student information and inserted data into 12 PeopleSoft Components using Component Interfaces. Said Mark Forier, IT Director of Applications at Apollo Group. Success of this project demonstrated the capabilities of IT and the Oracle Fusion Middleware stack to upper management and the business. We achieved a 600% ROI on this project with a four month time frame on a $300,000 investment. Essentially, a significant and immediate return. Tucson Electric Power Company Unifies Business Processes with Oracle(r) Service-Oriented Architecture Suite Tucson Electric Power Company expects to implement and integrate new applications 36 percent faster and reduce time spent on supporting and maintaining the system by 50 percent. They expect to implement and integrate new applications 36 percent faster and reduce time spent on supporting and maintaining the system by 50 percent. Tucson Electric Power Company provides energy services in a regulated market and is focused on controlling costs while expanding IT services to increase business efficiency. The utility's IT infrastructure includes hundreds of specialized application interfaces and lacked a unified process for implementing new applications to deliver new services. To reduce IT complexity and administration requirements - and accelerate new application implementations - Tucson Electric Power Company selected Oracle SOA Suite to create a single enterprise-wide integration environment. They are integrating their STORMS Work Management application with the Oracle E-Business Suite, which allows them to streamline work requests sent from STORMS to Oracle Projects and to track project costs more efficiently. The STORMS application enables the organization to rapidly assign field crews to restore electricity service and make repairs caused by storm damage. Oracle SOA Suite (which enables underlying support for their service orientation) helps eliminate customized application integration requirements, establishing a framework of reusable components that allow Tucson Electric Power Company to simplify integration between additional work management applications and other back office systems - eliminating the requirement for custom, "hard wired" interfaces. Capitol Corridor Joint Powers Authority Selects Oracle to Support Automated Ticket Validation Services Initiative Capitol Corridor Joint Powers Authority (CCJPA), which manages an Amtrak intercity passenger train service in eight Northern California counties is using SOA as the foundation for its Automated Ticket Validation Services initiative. Committed to continually improving customer service and security, CCJPA plans to launch California's first real-time ticket sales and validation system on its trains. The system, which is scheduled to go live in 2009, will allow CCJPA conductors to use hand held scanners to validate and sell tickets to customers on the train. This will also improve security by being able to track when passengers board and exit the train. The scanners will utilize Web and business process execution language (BPEL) based services to link CCJPA and Amtrak's IT systems. Last but not least, is one of my favorites, Green ROI - It is widely believed that green revolution is the answer to the current downturn. How can SOA help you go green? Verizon Wireless did it using SOA, reducing their hardware footprint by 95% and measuring their ROI by reduction of tonnage of hardware in the datacenter. I blogged about this earlier in the year. In summary, I’m not against joining the new bandwagon, but I’m still looking for a good reason to declare an acronym dead while still declaring everything that it stands for to be critical for future success. Help me out here. Dave

World Oracle Corporation News

Python cx_Oracle gets Database Change Notification Support

 08.01.2009 16:05   oracle.com

Python's cx_Oracle gets Database Change Notification Support.

World Oracle Corporation News

Talking about the architecture that refuses to die

 08.01.2009 10:06   oracle.com

In the wake of Anne Thomas Mane's demonstration of the blogging value of bold pronouncements (See SOA is Dead, Long Live Services), tracking reaction to her article has been more fun than watching YouTube videos of skateboarders demonstrating Darwin's theories of natural selection -- though far more educational. Thanks to a post by David Linthicum, I followed a link to Did SOA die or do we just suck at architecture?, a wonderful post by Mike Kavis. Mike lists six points illustrating the latter possibility, among them:   We don't understand what an architect really is. How many people do you know that have the title of architect? How many of these same people have a clue on how to architect an enterprise system. I laugh when I see job openings for a .Net architect. What does that mean? Is this person capable of architecting a .Net framework to be used by the .Net community? No, this person knows .Net real well. That's not an architect, that's a "senior, sr. developer." We don't understand what architecture really is. I am a member of many LinkedIn groups that focus on architecture. There is so much discussion on what the value of EA is and hundreds of different answers. If we cant agree on the value of EA amongst ourselves, how in the world is the CEO or CFO going to support an EA initiative? There are so many good frameworks out there (Zachman, TOGAF, E2AF, etc.) yet it seems that we are trying to reinvent the wheel. Pick one, tweak it to your organizations needs, and follow it. It is not rocket science.   Based on what I've seen of the ongoing architecture discussion in various groups and communities, I think Mike makes a compelling case. And with so much debate about architects and architecture in general, is it any wonder that there is so much misunderstanding about what SOA is, how to do it, and what it's supposed to do? And that begs another question: if there is indeed so little consensus on architecture in general and on SOA in specific,  what guarantee is there that the "surviving" service-oriented concept's Ms. Manes mentions in her article, including cloud computing and SaaS,  won't suffer from the same misunderstanding? Perhaps there is no such guarantee. But the cure for misunderstanding is communication. So for architects, particularly those who have to bridge the gap between the IT and business sides of the house, the ability to clearly explain these concepts and technologies is essential, regardless of how they're labeled. Technorati Tags: otn,oracle,architecture,soa,david linthicum,mike kravis,saas,cloud computing

World Oracle Corporation News

Retail Space Management

 08.01.2009 10:06   oracle.com

Oracle's recent acquisition of AVT, a UK-based provider of 3-D visual macro space planning solutions, adds end-to-end space management to Oracle's existing footprint. But what does that really mean for retailers? Once a retailer decides what to buy from vendors and how much of it to allocate to specific stores, someone needs to decide where in the stores the products will sit. This is a very important step in retail since store layouts are crucial to the shopping experience. Products need to be easy to locate, near related products, and have the correct facings. Should this product be on the endcap? Should it be at eye level? Should it have 8 facings or 10? Space management is about maximizing every inch of the selling floor. Traditionally, headquarters creates a limited number of planograms (PoG) that define where products go for a particular store format. Unfortunately, not all stores are the same. Not only do their formats vary, but there's usually a degree of localization that makes them even more unique. So often the corporate PoG is treated as advice only and compliance is low. The answer is more collaboration between headquarters and the store. An increase of 10% in compliance can decrease stock-outs by 1%, and that leads to higher sales. AVT's software enables leading retail companies such as Tesco, SuperValu, The Container Store and The Carphone Warehouse to plan and execute their retail floor space, including collaboration between HQ, stores, and vendors as well as compliance checking. Want to know more? For ORUG members, there's a "Shop Talk" session scheduled for January 8th on this very topic. For those that plan to attend NRF, information about AVT will be available in the Oracle booth. And for existing AVT customers, there will be a welcome breakfast at NRF Monday morning.

World Oracle Corporation News

Who to Blame for the Crisis?

 08.01.2009 02:05   oracle.com

If you are lucky to live and work in the industry for some decades, you will notice that every crisis follows a similar pattern: Total Surprise, Total Shock - Oh my god, how could this happen? Everybody was working like hell in a "rock solid" company with a "rock solid foundation". That was expected - There is always someone, who expected it, and always someone who is able to blame someone. Blame Someone Else - Finally, after the first shocks and blames are gone, someone starts to blame things or ideas or technologies, just to become the World's Next Hero. Today's Victim Today's victim is ... (drum roll) ... SOA. I don't advocate for any opinion, just read these few links to make up your mind. The truth is somewhere in the middle. SOA is Dead, Long Live Services DZone Article: Is SOA Dead? SOA? No. Goodbye SOA, we hardly knew you SOA ain't dead but it certainly is transforming SOA vs SOI SOA is Dead, Long Live Whatever SOA is alive and well no matter what its called Morale The step from Hero to Zero is small. The gap between both is huge and not everybody is able to realize or accept these dangers. If you decide to be World's Next Hero, be prepared and good luck. There is always room enough for more then one hero. What about me? Well, no changes. I'm still following my own mantra, live to have fun and don't stop to be curious about the inner workings of the ideas that keep the world spinning...

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Date: 08 January 2009 - 20:43

Number of sources in English: 130