SMBs on Board for Application Express

Oracle tool helps mid-market companies transfer, centralize isolated data

For many small and medium businesses (SMBs), success depends on an optimized, agile, and responsive IT infrastructure. Yet, with limited resources and decentralized or desktop-oriented IT practices, consolidating information and creating responsive applications that enable the business to grow can be challenging.

Take the example of Roman Inc., a giftware distributor in Bloomingdale, Illinois. Like many organizations, Roman is faced with the challenge of keeping its costs down while trying to expand its services and offerings. It has a limited IT budget and IT resources to meet an increasing need for new enhancements and new applications. In essence it needs to do more with less.

That's why the IT department turned to Oracle Application Express. It needed help centralizing its data and data access as well as finding a way to meet its resource and productivity challenges. Oracle Application Express (formally known at HTMLDB) enables organizations to create easily manageable, database-driven, browser-based applications that can replace myriad spreadsheets and ad-hoc departmental applications. Oracle Application Express is included free as part of the Oracle Database and comes on the companion CD. Built-in wizards simplify the tasks of building applications, enabling organizations to duplicate and extend the functionality of existing spreadsheets or other departmental applications within a matter of minutes. The tool is fully Web-savvy and all development takes place via a browser, so there's no complicated development environment to learn.

"Because you can build applications so rapidly with Application Express, organizations can pick it up and use it to build all types of applications that they need today, rather than go through months of design and analysis," says David Peake, Principal Product Manager, Oracle. "It's not a long, drawn-out process. Some organizations are finding that Application Express is so intuitive that the business analysts themselves are using it to change or create reports or applications, rather than burdening the IT department with additional tasks."

For Roman, that speed has translated into higher productivity and the ability to meet changing business requirements.

"Oracle Application Express has enabled me to shorten my development timeframe so dramatically that I have been able to keep up with demand for enhancements and new applications without having to add new people into our IS department," said Tony Jedlinski, Vice President of Information Systems for Roman, Inc. in Bloomingdale, Illinois. "It's been a real godsend to the company because I am able to develop Application Express applications in anywhere from one-tenth to one-fourth the amount of time it would take in the traditional forms and reports approach. That ten-fold productivity improvement in developer productivity has been just tremendous for us."

That type of productivity is especially critical for SMBs, where the volume of both structured and unstructured data is growing. Just as large companies need the right data to make the right decisions, small and medium companies also need to be able to share and use that data, in a consistent manner, in real time, to make better business decisions.

"Today, SMBs are asking for better control and administration over their business data which is spread throughout their organization," says Noel Yuhanna, principal analyst, Forrester Research. "They need to be able to deliver the right data to the right people quickly enough so that they can make better business decisions. As a result, data integration and managing and using data across multiple databases and sources has become a big challenge for SMBs. And SMBs don't have too many resources to do such integration or provide comprehensive data management."

Using data effectively can be particularly difficult for businesses when that data is spread across multiple spreadsheets, ad-hoc departmental applications or simply not accessible. For example, many small and medium companies rely on spreadsheets to track everything from sales figures to customer account information, and then have to email them out to multiple employees to get updates, or have someone available to consolidate information. Either way, the process is typically hampered by delays and has a large potential for inaccurate or duplicated data.

"One of the key problems that we see, even in small and medium organizations, is the problem of having more than one version of the 'truth'," says Oracle's Peake. "While spreadsheets and Access databases can work great when you're small, organizations relying on them can run into problems as they expand. As businesses grow and become more complex, managing data through spreadsheets or departmental applications can become a full-time task, just trying to keep the information together and accurate. One of the key reasons that organizations like Application Express is that they're able to consolidate and report on all their data in an accurate and practical way."

But accessing and using data effectively isn't the only challenge facing SMBs as they move to centralize their data. There’s also the consideration of making sure that data is secure and backed up—a process that can be inconsistent and problematic when corporate data is distributed across multiple spreadsheets or database applications managed by individual users or departments. With Application Express, IT departments are able to manage backup and recovery, since the data is centralized into an Oracle database and isn't replicated or duplicated across the organization. Application Express also provides several options for implementing security protocols to ensure data security.

"Knowing what data you have and being able to ensure its consistency is increasingly important, even for small and medium organizations," says Peake. "Application Express provides organizations with great data quality and consistency assurance, a requirement that's become more and more critical to businesses as they strive to meet new regulatory and auditing requirements."

In addition, Application Express is integrated with Oracle BI Publisher, providing organizations with high fidelity reporting and the capability to create reports to very exacting requirements.

In the end, Application Express is all about enabling organizations to collect, manage and use critical corporate data more effective—especially in situations that are too small or rapidly changing for traditional application development approaches.

"The real advantage of Oracle Application Express is that you're able to access business data in a seamless manner, you're able to develop applications on the fly, and you don't have to have development teams and even developers, so it suits the SMB requirements very well," says Yuhanna. "If you need business users to be able to access data easily in an ad-hoc fashion based on their changing requirements, then that's where Oracle's Application Express comes in. It's really a paradigm shift from years ago, when business users had to rely on IT personal to help them. With Application Express, business users can access, share and change information as quickly as possible and develop simple custom applications on the fly to meet business requirements in a more productive and cost effective manner."