Inatech to attend Siebel Oracle Open World

Inatech plans to take part in Siebel Oracle OpenWorld Highlights in Reading, UK this November.

The one-day conference will include sessions with Steve Austen and Ian Keleher of the Siebel committee; Steve Fearon of Oracle; and Anthony Jones of BA.

Discussions at the conference will cover topics such as how customers can use Siebel 8.1.1 to lower costs, drive operational performance to new levels, improve ROI and boost user productivity.

New developments with Siebel were hot topics at this year’s Oracle Openworld in October. Oracle senior vice president of CRM Anthony Lye told attendees of plans to allow users to run Siebel in Microsoft Outlook or Lotus Notes, in response to the high percentage of mobile Outlook users. On the topic of the new development, Lye said:

"We face the commoditization of our products. We have less and less value and are faced with a challenge; differentiate on price - never a really good strategy - or choose to differentiate on relationship. The relationship is the way that makes you different. Increasingly it's more important than the products you deliver."

Oracle Announces Oracle Business Process analysis suite 11g

Oracle has released its Business Process Analysis Suite 11g as part of its Fusion Middleware product stack.

The new release of BPA 11g will give Inatech customers enhanced capabilities around developing and deploying efficient business processes on top of the underlying Service Oriented Architecture platform. This means that users will be able to achieve better internal communications and cut IT costs through greater efficiency.

Doug Toop, UK Oracle and Open Source Technology Practice Lead for Inatech, said:

“Oracle BPA Suite 11g is the latest addition to the 11g Suite of products, and complements the latest Fusion Middleware components released earlier this year. BPA Suite 11g will deliver enhanced business process modelling capabilities to our customers through it’s many new features and tight integration with the Fusion Middleware stack.”

Amlan Bebnath, Oracle Senior Vice President, Product Development, said: "Offering unmatched integration with Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle BPA Suite 11g brings together EA, BPA and BPM solutions on a common platform for better alignment of strategy, analysis and execution. Now business and IT users have the right set of tools designed for their individual needs.

“Business users design process models with Oracle BPA Suite 11g and IT uses the same process models for execution with Oracle SOA Suite. With this latest release, our customers can reduce the gap between IT and business and will experience firsthand the power and benefits of leveraging the leading IDS Scheer ARIS Design platform along with the industry's #1 middleware platform, Oracle Fusion Middleware."

Based on the IDS Scheer ARIS Design Platform, Oracle BPA Suite 11g delivers more complete integration with Oracle SOA Suite.

The new offering from Oracle provides comprehensive process modeling capabilities for methodology-driven process design and a common process model in a unified environment, enabling both business and IT users to utilize the best tools for their respective requirements. The latest release also improves Process Lifecycle Management by simplifying process change management and delivers greater business visibility through improved process visibility and reporting.

Business analysts and architects (business and process), can now capture end-to-end business processes using standard notations including BPMN, EPC, and Value Chain Diagrams. Oracle BPA Suite includes rich reporting capabilities along with the ability to capture context around supporting systems, products, services, organizations, strategy, risks, and objectives to help enterprises plan and optimize their process improvement initiatives.

Collaboration is another strong component in Oracle BPA Suite use. The product fosters collaboration among business analysts and their line of business stakeholders with Process Publisher, a web based component that enables sharing of processes and related data between business users and analysts. The collaboration between business analysts and developers on shared processes is further enhanced by the round-trip integration between Oracle BPA Suite and Oracle BPEL Process Manager, components of Oracle SOA Suite.

Other features of Oracle BPA Suite include: round-trip integration with Oracle SOA 11g platform; service discovery and identification; and new version and change management.

Larry Ellison Announces Oracle Exadata V2

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison announced the launch of Oracle Exadata V2, the first database machine for online transaction procession (OLTP).

The new machine builds on the success of Oracle Exadata V1, which in itself increased performance speeds from 10 to 50 times, according to satisfied users. V2 is twice as fast as V1 for data warehousing, and is the fastest in the world for OLTP.

Speed is of the essence when it comes to the new machine. Its distinguishing feature is Oracle Exadata Smart Flash Cache, based on Sun FlashFire technology. Oracle Exadata Smart Flash Cache addresses the random disk I/O bottleneck by transparently moving “hot data” to Sun FlashFire cards. “We can do random I/O very quickly. In fact, a single-rack Sun Oracle Database Machine can do over a million random I/Os in a second,” says Ellison.

Emphasising the ease with which customers can use the new product, Ellison said: “All of the hardware and all of the software is preconfigured. You roll in this box, you load up your data, and you run. You get it in the morning and you’re running by the afternoon with your existing applications unchanged.”

The Sun Oracle Database Machine is available in four models: full rack (8 database servers and 14 Oracle Exadata storage servers), half-rack (4 database servers and 7 storage servers), quarter-rack (2 database servers and 3 storage servers), and a basic system (1 database server and 1 storage server).
Podcast: Tom Kyte Reviews Oracle Database 11g Release 2

Oracle's Business Intelligence and Performance Management Solutions Drive Leadership in Business Analytics

As part of Oracle OpenWorld 2009, Oracle announced that its Business Analytics family of products continue to lead the industry.

Oracle's strengthened its Business Analytics position as the industry leader in vendor share, growth, performance, partner ecosystem and developer communities through continued commitment to delivering innovative products.

Business Analytics. according to a major industry analyst firm, includes the following four primary segments: Analytic Applications, Business Intelligence Tools, Data Warehousing Platform Software, and Spatial Information Analysis Tools.

Rick Shultz, Oracle Vice President, Technology Marketing, said:

"Customer adoption of Oracle's Business Intelligence and Performance Management solutions continues to outpace the overall market sector.

"Organizations in both the private and public sectors are standardizing their BI and EPM initiatives on Oracle in order to help improve enterprise decision-making and increase financial and operational performance."

Oracle showcased the success of Business Analytics throughout the OpenWorld event. In the past year alone, Oracle Business Intelligence (BI) and Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) have maintained their status as first in Financial Performance Management, rated as leading products by industry analysis reports. In 2009, Oracle has delivered seven new category-leading products into the Business Analytics family, and completed the integration of BI tools, BI Applications and EPM Applications with all of its packaged Business Applications. Testament to these successes is the number of partners gained by Oracle this year; Oracle trained over 7,000 practitioners as partners on Oracle BI and EPM software in 2009 alone.

Inatech India supports North Karnataka flood victims

Employees of Inatech India have contributed to two initiatives set up to help flood victims in North Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh.

Earlier this month, severe flooding after heavy rain led to the deaths of 250 people and the displacement of over five million more. Charity Action Aid is now concerned for the lives of those displaced by the disaster, as clean water supplies in emergency camps run low. At the same time, millions of dollars worth of food crops have been ruined by the rains, leaving thousands without access to food and dependent on aid agencies.

Inatech employees were encouraged to donate one day’s basic salary to the victims of the flood. Inatech India also ran a clothes collection, asking employees to donate their unwanted clothes to people all of their possessions in the disaster.

Various groups have also donated to the flood victims’ fund. An estimated 60,000 homes will need to be rebuilt, and companies such as Dell, Microsoft, Essar and Coffee Day have donated towards meeting the costs of this project. A group of sex workers in Bangalore donated Rs. 50,000 to the flood victim fund, whilst Chief Minister B.S. Yeddyurappa has been on a march around Bangalore to raise funds of around Rs. 700 crore.

The violent rainstorms were blamed by weather experts on a cyclone in the Bay of Bengal.

Final Day at the SharePoint Conference

Final day and many individuals arrive with fatigue for a very technical day of sessions and education. The key for me today is the focus on Search and Apply technology which is primarily been the domain of third party product providers as SharePoint has lacked greatly in this area. The tools are very varied from the simple ‘replicate and secure’ to Knowledge-Based surfacing of critical information.

A great aspect of the new 2010 product is the Document Stores. In the past SharePoint has had document stores but the library is a more intimate and detailed presentation showing the library summary, who owns the library, how many documents posted, the categories for documents and the search criteria available. A key aspect of improved search is the ‘tagging’ and simplified metadata areas of SharePoint – this has been a poor feature of 2007 which is now an enterprise strength function available out-of-the-box.

I attended a special event (by invitation) with Colligo – desktop tooling for SharePoint Portals. This is another poor functional area which they addressed with their own tool kit. The lunch included three guest speakers: two from companies that have implemented and one partner (Quest Software). Although a little contrived on how the tool has delivered but the screen grabs and examples left me feeling this is still too basic.

My Summary: overall the showcase had many good ‘add-on-supplier’ products but I did not see any business solutions being offered. This is an opportunity for Calsoft. Las Vegas as a venue is a crazy but interesting place. The venue served everyone well and the food and entertainment has been first class. That’s it for another year.

David Gardiner

Day 3: The SharePoint Fairy to the rescue

After a couple of days looking at the new SharePoint technology it was time to turn to the question ‘how do we become better partners and win more business?’. The day started with an excellent presentation on using Story Telling to convey our strength and capability and to resonate with our prospects and clients. Bob McDowell, VP of Information Worker at Microsoft delivered a very passionate session with very good story telling examples. These will come in handy!

A great aspect of today was the continuous switch from selling technology to engaging with prospects and clients. Knowing more about your intended customers is a key to quick and positive engagement. It is no longer sensible or feasible just to be technology specialist but you must be able to talk the talk. Bob gave a great rendition of being asked ‘so what keeps you up at night?’ question – one which he loathes as it is still ‘sales speak’. He followed by suggesting ‘tell me about your current objectives and the challenges you are facing Mr Customer in reaching those objectives so I can determine how or if we can help you overcome them’; I know which would work best.

As it is a key requirement within our client base the ‘Proven Principles and Best Practices for Intranets’ session doubled a consultancy approach to the actual delivery for DelMonte foods (co-hosted by the Portal Manager involved from DelMonte). Much as what you would expect but sometimes the obvious is missed. This was followed by the ‘Building an enterprise knowledge management solution with SharePoint and Solving Information Chaos. The former was focused on 2010 and the road Microsoft themselves have been treading on building a better KM service. A key part of the information was how under 2007 they have over 350 different SharePoint sites all supposed to be providing knowledge. Under 2010 they will have a one-site-one-style environment which learns about the users and delivers the right information through tagging and meta data extraction – very cool and very powerful.

Having wandered the Showcase I must admit my surprise that there are NO application vendors on any stand. Everyone is selling a ‘SharePoint add-on or booster’. This must be an opportunity for Calsoft.

During my tour of the Showcase arena I came across the SharePoint Fairy – see picture. Believe it or not she is the Marketing Director for a sizable SharePoint services partner in the US – nice marketing tactics!

Dave Gardiner