As Published In May/June 2004

Core to Your Business
By David A. Kelly

How you can benefit from Oracle's comprehensive, integration-ready architecture

When Scott Klimke, CIO of Network Appliance, Inc. (NetApp), a nearly US$1 billion supplier of storage solutions, says that his company's IT philosophy is to keep it simple, that's not because it hasn't tried other options.

"During the late 1990s, we were growing at 70 to 100 percent per year and chose a best-of-breed approach to our applications and IT solutions, because it was expedient," Klimke states. However, as the company grew, the cost of maintaining multiple systems increased and the complexity of adapting them to new business needs proved daunting. Critical corporate information was isolated in individual systems, making informed decisions difficult and a total view of the customers (and prospects) impossible.

"Eventually, the amount of reconciliation and work required with a best-of-breed approach made it very difficult to scale," says Klimke. "That's why we've focused on optimizing our infrastructure over the past couple of years and transitioning our environment from a best-of-breed infrastructure to really focusing on a handful of enterprise-class applications, of which Oracle is the centerpiece. In spring 2003, we went live with Oracle E-Business Suite, and we've been aggressively expanding that footprint."

NetApp isn't alone in facing the challenge of managing an increasingly diverse collection of applications and more and more individual data stores. The proliferation of new applications, technologies, and business requirements means that data fragmentation and one-off applications are everywhere. Most IT organizations are hard-pressed to provide basic integration across multiple applications, let alone create a single, integrated, adaptable IT infrastructure. Unlike proprietary, mainframe-type architectures, the architecture underlying everything from Oracle's database to its application server to the applications themselves is modular and based on industry standards, providing the ability to integrate what's needed now and the flexibility to adopt new products (Oracle or otherwise). Although Oracle has always designed its products to work together, the recent spike in IT complexity and integration costs is driving many customers to take a fresh look at the benefits to be gained from deploying multiple Oracle products.

But keep in mind that being integrated does not preclude the possibility of being open. "One of the good things about the Oracle stack is that it is integrated and open," says Ken Jacobs, Oracle's vice president of Product Strategy. "You get the full benefit of a comprehensive infrastructure built to work together in a tightly coupled fashion, yet it still provides options for choice and integration with third-party products and compliance with industry standards."

Standardizing on Oracle's open yet comprehensive software was particularly important for Network Appliance, because it anticipates additional expansion—perhaps not the 100 percent growth of the dot-com era, but substantial growth nevertheless. "We are preparing for growth that may be pretty significant over the next couple of years," confirms Klimke. And for a company with 2,500 employees, approximately 3,500 customers, and an installed base of more than 60,000 units, that's not a trivial task.

That's why Klimke and his team decided to phase out their best-of-breed infrastructure and adopt a more cohesive stack of applications and software infrastructure from a single vendor. "I prefer to select good technology partners that have good reputations, whose cultures and values are very similar to Network Appliance's, and who invest heavily in new technologies to drive their business," says Klimke. "With companies such as Oracle, it's worked out very well for us."

Today, Network Appliance is a 100 percent Oracle technology shop, from the database perspective, and that's worked out well enough that the setup has significantly improved the company's database management efficiency. According to a Forrester report, the average number of databases that can be managed by a single administrator is 21. "With our DBA team, the ratio is one DBA for 40 database instances," Klimke states. "The number is so large because we've standardized on one type of technology and benefit from the lower-maintenance requirements of running Oracle technology on Network Appliance storage technology."

To solve its best-of-breed application scalability problem, Network Appliance implemented Oracle E-Business Suite and now runs all of its financial applications, order management, and a large portion of manufacturing on it. It uses E-Business Suite On Demand from Oracle to deploy various finance modules, including General Ledger, Receivables, and Payables, as well as Assets and Order Management.

Also important for Network Appliance is having its customer data accessible—not only to its various Oracle applications but also to any outside application that needs it. That's why the company implemented the Oracle Customer Data Hub more than a year ago. The hub is a packaged solution that enables companies to create a single enterprise customer database by consolidating customer data from heterogeneous systems. After the data is consolidated into the central customer data store, it can be standardized, cleansed, and enriched by use of embedded functionality and then used by spoke applications with near-real-time synchronization. The Customer Data Hub operates independently of the E-Business Suite and Oracle applications and can be deployed and productive even in non-Oracle environments.

"The Customer Data Hub is a new architectural concept," explains Peter Heller, senior director of Oracle Applications Architecture, "that I call an 'active hub,' because once data is sent to the hub and cleansed, it is immediately available to other applications." Heller says that the hub provides a 360-degree view of all sources of a company's transactional data, including packaged, legacy, and custom applications.

Heller also credits recent technology innovations in enterprise grid computing. "For a hub to actually work and provide real-time data synchronization, it requires a highly available infrastructure, such as that provided by Oracle's enterprise grid computing technologies," explains Heller.

Klimke says the Customer Data Hub has been a tremendous help in linking together "siloed" systems. "The Customer Data Hub is key to ensuring that we have the same definition and a consistent view of a customer across all our transaction systems," says Klimke.

The Customer Data Hub is particularly important for managing NetApp prospects that aren't yet customers, such as companies that are evaluating Network Appliance technologies and have a piece of demo equipment. Although they're not customers per se, it's critically important that Network Appliance be able to help them with deployment or configuration questions as if they were.

Selling a Focused View of Customer Data

The German-based supplier Freudenberg Seals and Vibration Control (FDS) had to solve a different facet of the same "lack of a 360-degree customer view" problem Network Appliance solved with the Oracle Customer Data Hub. Freudenberg-Simrit, the sales organization for the [1-billion-per-year international company, faced the challenge of helping its salespeople selling different products in different countries get a more consistent view of their customers. FDS, an SAP customer since 1980, is a top SAP reference in Germany, and it had country-specific implementations of SAP, making the consolidation of customer data difficult.

Also, FDS had no CRM solution in place to aggregate individual customer contacts and records into a 360-degree customer view. With 200 users in Germany trying to take orders and create customer quotes, and potentially as many as 450 users spread across Europe, Freudenberg needed a better solution.

To find that solution, FDS turned to Oracle. After evaluating 14 other CRM applications, a 21-person team representing hundreds of users from different business units and geographic areas selected Oracle CRM. "The team was happy to see the CRM solution from Oracle and how easy it is, for example, to create a contact or search for opportunities or contacts," says Juergen Weiland, director of E-Business Applications at Freudenberg-Simrit.

A key part of building a successful solution and letting users view important customer data from multiple enterprise applications is to integrate the customer data from those different applications at the different divisions and companies into the new CRM system. This was especially important, because FDS's strategy was not to dictate which applications each group would use, and thus the company needed to be able to integrate at least three application platforms, including SAP, with the CRM system. "We used Oracle Interconnect [part of the Oracle Application Server] to integrate these ERP systems," says Weiland.

Using Oracle's CRM FastForward Flows method, FDS was able to roll out an initial implementation of its new CRM deployment in 90 days, with additional phases and functionality coming over the subsequent seven months. The solution was built by Oracle Consulting and hosted by Siemens Business Systems, which also delivers second-level support.

The data collected by the ERP and CRM systems is stored in an Oracle database. For example, the basic customer data, such as company name and address, may come from an SAP or other enterprise application, but the rest of the information that's important in the context of a customer interaction is only in the CRM database. FDS also used Oracle Interconnect software to integrate workflows from internet applications, such as user registration, with the CRM system. "It's important for us to connect these different systems to our CRM system, because in the CRM system, we collect all the data from the systems and present it to the salesperson," says Weiland.

Being able to deploy Oracle's CRM application atop the Oracle Application Server and Oracle Database made a big difference for FDS. "It's much easier for us to implement and deploy the CRM application, since it was integrated with the Oracle infrastructure," says Weiland. "Having it all come from one vendor also makes it easier to administer."

Driving Efficiency Through Integration

Although CRM implementations such as Freudenberg's can help companies know their customers better and enable them to sell the right product at the right time, making sure your employees have the right information at the right time and in the right format can be an important success factor. Unocal, with its implementation of Oracle Application Server Portal and Oracle's integrated infrastructure, is a good example.

Founded as the Union Oil Company of California years before gasoline cars became popular, Unocal has always been an innovator. It has also grown to become one of the leading independent natural gas and crude oil exploration and production companies in the world, with 2003 revenues of US$6.5 billion.

That innovation extends to Unocal's IT infrastructure and the manner in which Unocal provides application access to its employees. "For many of our 6,800 users, one advantage of Unocal's implementation of Oracle Application Server Portal, called myUnocal, is the portal's ability to store user preferences," says John Doran, technical service team manager at Unocal. Via the portal, users have personalized desktops where they can selectively place portlets (portal applications) specific to their job function. The myUnocal portal acts as the gateway through which employees can access a wide variety of business information. The portal also gives them access to information for doing their job. Since Unocal outsourced most of its domestic business applications (including Oracle Financials 11i) and hardware infrastructure to Oracle E-Business Suite On Demand, in 2003, the myUnocal portal has become the exclusive mechanism for accessing business-critical back-office applications.

An important enterprise resource behind the portal is Unocal's on-demand implementation of the Oracle E-Business Suite and industry-specific energy applications. But on demand doesn't mean isolated. Unocal has used Oracle's integration technology to provide an efficient means of integrating external systems. "We're using Oracle to integrate external data and applications that need to connect with our suite of enterprise applications," says Greg Arwine, customer service team manager. "We have business requirements for which B2B applications and some of the systems that remain at Unocal need to interact with our hosted applications, so using a transaction hub such as Oracle was a good solution."

Snapshots Freudenberg-Simrit Business Goal: Centralize sales and implement new-customer retention programs Location: Weinheim, Germany Business: €1 billion-per-year international manufacturing company Selected Oracle Products Used: Oracle Database, Application Server, Interconnect, E-Business Suite, FastForward Flows Master Lock Business Goal: Standardization to reduce costs and resource requirements Location: Milwaukee, Wisconsin Business: World's largest padlock manufacturer Selected Oracle Products Used: Oracle Database, Application Server, Application Server Portal, Forms, Discoverer, E-Business Suite MBF Business Goal: Integrating acquisitions rapidly Location: Sydney, Australia Business: Largest privately managed health insurer in Australia, with AUS$1.2 billion in revenues Selected Oracle Products Used: Oracle Database, Application Server, Real Application Clusters, E-Business Suite Financials Network Appliance, Inc. Business Goal: Single view of customer Location: Sunnyvale, California Business: World leader in unified storage solutions (FY03 revenues of US$892 million) Selected Oracle Products Used: Oracle Database, E-Business Suite On Demand, E-Business Suite Financials, Customer Data Hub Unocal Location: El Segundo, California Business Goal: Increased efficiency Business: Oil and gas exploration and production, with 2003 revenues of US$6.5 billion Selected Oracle Products Used: Oracle Database, Application Server, Application Server Portal, JDeveloper, Discoverer, E-Business Suite On Demand

The consistent architecture of Oracle products, designed to work together, makes it easier for the Unocal IT department to deliver and manage applications. "A key advantage to using a platform such as the Oracle Application Server is that all the components we need are integrated in one place," says Doran.

Locking Down Costs Through Standardization

While Unocal has been leveraging the capabilities of Oracle's integrated architecture to increase efficiency and reduce costs, other organizations are using it to eliminate the hidden resource costs of maintaining multiple platforms.

"We are a cost-driven organization, and that's one reason we've standardized on an Oracle infrastructure," says Jim Johnson, director of corporate information services for Master Lock. "With Oracle we can maximize our skills and consistently get more value for our IT investment."

Talk about return on investment. Since 2001 Master Lock has been moving its business systems infrastructure to a single system—Oracle E-Business Suite applications. Since standardizing on Oracle applications and the associated Oracle infrastructure, Master Lock has had a 40 percent reduction in software and hardware maintenance costs, a 70 percent reduction in work in process, a one-to-two-week reduction in product delivery time, and a two-day reduction in its financial close cycle.

Although consolidating on Oracle products may not by itself generate this type of return, it has been an important element of Master Lock's business strategy. Master Lock has standardized on Oracle products, including the database, application server, and E-Business Suite. "The vast majority of our key business systems run on Oracle applications. Those that do not must run on an Oracle database," says Johnson. Any custom development at Master Lock involves Oracle technologies such as Oracle Application Server Portal, Forms, and Database.

"Master Lock has standardized on Oracle because we do not want the costs associated with managing the administration, training, and everything else that goes along with disparate systems," says Johnson.

Although standardization is desirable for a midsize company such as Master Lock, will it lock you into products that are related but don't perform as well? Not according to Johnson. "We like the ability to flex and scale," he says. "We want our systems to be able to adapt and react to changes in the business, which might include acquiring a company with additional users. If that happened, Master Lock's goal would be to transition them to our single instance of Oracle applications as quickly and cost-effectively as possible," Johnson says. "Oracle 10g is interesting to us, because it corresponds with what we want to achieve: high availability with load balancing and cost savings."

Master Lock's 275 users in its five North American locations are served by applications running on Intel servers running Microsoft Windows NT/2000 in the middle tier, and the company's database server runs HP OpenVMS.

"We've seen some hard savings," says Rick Kolaczewski, Master Lock's CFO. "We're doing more with fewer people in IT, and I don't have to add fixed-cost investments in customer service, IT, or finance as our business grows, even given expansion to more locations." In fact, Master Lock went from a single site to six without any noticeable fixed-cost increase.

Key to that dramatic service expansion without any correlated increase in costs was the consolidation of various systems into an Oracle-centric architecture. "We had 100-plus databases and interfaces, and that's gone away," says Kolaczewski. Today Master Lock makes and ships an order in four days, instead of weeks.

Insuring a Timely Solution to Business Needs

Timing is everything. No matter how great a solution is, if it can't be deployed in time to meet business needs, it will fail and the business will suffer. MBF, one of the largest privately managed health insurers in Australia, with more than 1,100 employees operating in all states and AUS$1.2 billion in annual revenue, knows that problem all too well. MBF had a strong desire to diversify and acquire related health industry companies, but its IT infrastructure prevented that.

"One of the key inhibitors to a quick transition period when acquiring a new business was our financial system," says Kevin Keane, MBF financial controller. "We had old COBOL-based financial systems running on a Fujitsu mainframe; they were very inflexible, and it would have taken months to rewrite programs for even the most basic consolidations." The faster MBF could get its IT applications and systems to match its business requirements, the more competitive it could be.

Last year, to solve its problem, MBF implemented Oracle E-Business Suite running on Oracle9i Database and Oracle9i Application Server. "With Oracle Financials, we have the agility to do acquisitions fairly easily," says Paul Murphy, database administrator at MBF. "Moving to an Oracle architecture was good for us," adds Keane. "With the first of our acquisitions, we fully integrated the financial systems, which were on an SAP platform, within about five weeks after the finalization of the deal, and we're planning the same type of time frame for the latest acquisition."

Next Steps READ more about Oracle applications architecture LEARN more about the Oracle Customer Data Hub DOWNLOAD Oracle 10g products

With Oracle Consulting's help, even the initial implementation didn't take that long. After evaluating numerous options, MBF chose the Oracle infrastructure and started implementation in January 2003, going live in July. "We felt that our ability to go live so quickly with that many new applications and technologies was a testament to Oracle Consulting's ability," says Keane.

Because MBF was on an aggressive timetable with the initial rollout, involving Oracle Consulting and using the Oracle stack for running the applications was particularly important whenever problems arose. "Oracle owned those issues and resolved them for us, which was one reason we achieved the implementation within the five and a half months," says Keane.

The solution components included Oracle9i Database, Oracle9i Application Server, and Oracle E-Business Suite, including General Ledger, Payables, Purchasing, Internet Procurement, Internet Expenses, and Cash Management. The solution runs on four Sun V480 servers in two clusters, the first running the database server on Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) for high availability and the second cluster of two application servers built to provide failover capabilities. Additionally, MBF is in the process of implementing a disaster recovery site at an office in Brisbane, Australia, and has identified Oracle Data Guard as the prime candidate for remote database synchronization to that site.

As important as the Oracle financial applications are for MBF, they're not an island—they also need to "play well" with other MBF infrastructure components and applications. For example, because Oracle E-Business Suite includes support for standards such as LDAP, MBF will be able to use its third-party LDAP server and applications to enable enterprise-wide single sign-on.

Oracle Information Architecture

MBF's Oracle RAC implementation also lets the company perform online configuration changes. This is especially important as the company moves from a mainframe environment with a standard daytime mode and nighttime maintenance mode to a full-fledged 24/7 environment. "The ability to configure your instances online or take one of them out without affecting the application is a big benefit," says Murphy. It's also a big win for the support team. "If our users aren't seeing disconnect problems, it greatly reduces our help desk calls."

Now, with its Oracle-powered infrastructure and 24/7 enterprise components such as Oracle RAC, MBF has the flexibility to meet new business needs as they arise and has achieved consistency within its IT architecture that lets it deploy timely solutions.

Benefits of a Well-Designed Architecture

Companies around the world are using Oracle products and technologies to integrate disparate application and data, tackle complexity challenges, consolidate and standardize systems, and get maximum efficiency out of existing applications.

And now, new products such as the Oracle Customer Data Hub give organizations further advantages—even if they are using non-Oracle enterprise applications—for streamlining information flow and optimizing business processes. The Oracle Information Architecture provides real guidance on how to fit technologies together to create a real-time enterprise in which computing resources are automatically distributed to where they're needed; one in which data from heterogeneous sources is validated and corrected almost instantly, creating a single source of truth; where custom applications are efficiently assembled from tested services; and where information is instantly and contextually available.

Oracle Information Architecture Most organizations are confronting the same critical challenges: improving information quality, optimizing business processes, and delivering the right information at the right time. To meet these challenges, many Oracle customers are taking a look at adopting Oracle's entire product family, paying close attention not just to the comprehensiveness of the software but also to its open and integration-ready design. "Oracle has the world's most comprehensive infrastructure software and business applications for enterprise IT," explains Robert Shimp, vice president of Oracle Technology Marketing. "To fully describe the scope of our technical vision, we've developed a model called the Oracle Information Architecture, which describes how our products can be used to create a modern real-time enterprise." Shimp says the foundation for the Oracle Information Architecture is a grid computing infrastructure that can reliably deliver computing power on demand for your applications and data at the lowest cost. Atop that foundation is an enterprise data hub that serves as a repository for metadata about the enterprise, defining key business objects such as customers, products, and employees. The third component is real-time business processing based on services-oriented applications and integration services. The final component is the enterprise information access. Supporting these runtime elements are a development framework for building the associated applications and enterprise management for administering them. The Foundation: Grid Computing A key aspect of the new Oracle 10g infrastructure software is support for enterprise grid computing—the virtualization of enterprise computing resources, for dynamic reallocation. As the foundation for the Oracle Information Architecture, this grid infrastructure serves as the engine for the remaining elements of the architecture, by dynamically provisioning processing power and storage to keep applications running smoothly, without interruption. "It's many servers and storage systems acting as one large virtual computer to run all your applications," explains Shimp. "You can scale up by incrementally adding capacity, and it's fully redundant, and therefore highly reliable." Oracle Database 10g, Oracle Application Server 10g, and Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g have been significantly enhanced to support system and resource management in this new paradigm. Oracle Database 10g. Building on previous clustering technology introduced with Oracle9i Real Application Clusters (RAC), Oracle Database 10g and RAC 10g provide a host of new grid-related functionality for keeping data synchronized across clusters, automatically managing storage, and automating many administrative tasks. To ensure that the database remains open, it's built according to industry standards and integrates with the upper levels of the stack, says Ken Jacobs, Oracle's vice president of Product Strategy. "We share a methodology for building the product; common test suites; and conformance to industry standards for XML, Java, and other components." Oracle Application Server 10g. The new application server contains services that support enterprise grid computing, by providing the ability to pool or consolidate the middle tier into one virtual system, allocate resources dynamically across the middle tier, automate system configuration and installation and user provisioning, establish rules-based workload schedules, and monitor and analyze system and application performance. "The application server—including many features for running Java applications, integration, business process management, portals, business intelligence, and more—is like an enterprise operating system on which customers build their applications," says Vijay Tella, vice president and chief strategy officer for Oracle Application Server. Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g. The new version of Enterprise Manager automates many tasks associated with installing, configuring, provisioning, and managing servers in a computing grid. OEM ships with Grid Control, a system management console for administering grid resources; Grid Repository, for storing computing-grid resources; and agents that monitor performance of all devices and applications of a computing grid. Enterprise Data Hub: The Single Source of Truth The success of all business processes depends on the availability of accurate master data. An enterprise data hub is a centralized repository that keeps key information continuously synchronized throughout the enterprise. Although data may be stored in many application-specific databases, a data hub provides one place to go to find all this information. This enables you to create and maintain accurate, consistent master data about your customers, products, and inventory. The enterprise data hub schema supports all applications, from supply chain management to enterprise resource planning, to customer relationship management. The schema is delivered with a full set of public interfaces to enable operations in heterogeneous IT environments. The enterprise data hub allows you to extend the schema to reflect business information that is unique to your organization's operations. In addition to the central data store, the hub contains librarian functions for data quality, real-time integration features, prebuilt analytics, a platform for building custom applications, bulk load capabilities, security features, and the ability to leverage external data. Oracle Customer Data Hub. Oracle offers several ways to implement an enterprise data hub. Any customer that implements Oracle E-Business Suite gets a data hub as part of that system. In January 2004, Oracle announced that it is also making available a Customer Data Hub product that provides the ability to centrally manage customer data. Even if a customer does not have any Oracle E-Business Suite applications, the Oracle Customer Data Hub can be used to create a single source of truth about customer information from many disparate systems. Lack of a single view of customer data is a problem faced by almost every enterprise in the world, according to Peter Heller, senior director of Oracle Applications Architecture. "Any company that's selected best-of-breed applications, gone through a merger or acquisition, built data warehouses, or created multiple data stores for different departments is currently facing the problem of siloed customer data stores," explains Heller. "The trick is to consolidate customer data from all of these heterogeneous systems, clean it up, and then share it with the source applications." The hub's data model is extremely configurable and designed for records of customers who are either businesses or consumers. When duplicate records are identified, the hub publishes corrections immediately. Oracle's Customer Data Hub also provides a set of standards-based APIs and Web services to merge customer records and manage customer hierarchies. On top of the data, a 360-degree viewer provides a view of all data from contributing source applications while leaving that data in its place. It's this breadth of functionality that caught the eye of Forrester Research's Erin Kinikin. In her February 2004 report*, Kinikin writes that Oracle has assembled the broadest set of components, from data quality, to matching, to customer key management, to process integration, to ongoing monitoring and management. Heller points out that although the Customer Data Hub is a separate product and based on industry standards, it can benefit from other Oracle technologies. Oracle's enterprise grid computing technologies, for example, extend the reach of highly available systems to businesses of all sizes, and a highly available platform is necessary for a data hub to be successful in providing real-time service. "And it's only natural that our Customer Data Hub would leverage our database and integration strengths in the area of data collection and cleansing," explains Heller. Although the Customer Data Hub doesn't require Oracle E-Business Suite, connecting the two is simple. The customer tables of the Customer Data Hub are the same as the native application tables in Oracle E-Business Suite. Real-Time Business Processing: Integration and Applications The Oracle Information Architecture's real-time business processing component uses services-oriented applications to run all business processes—transaction processing, decision support, and collaboration—faster and more flexibly. Standard interfaces enable you to more easily integrate all your applications as well as external customer and supplier applications. Real-time business processing provides global visibility, intelligence, and optimization based on real-time events as well as enterprise information. You can monitor and optimize the performance of your business processes, manage compliance, and maintain service-level agreements with your customers, suppliers, and partners. Real-time business processing combines traditional business intelligence, real-time business intelligence, content management, business process management, and more into a single, integrated system. Oracle Application Server 10g. Oracle has a wide array of core infrastructure components, such as Oracle Application Server 10g and its related integration and process management technologies, to simplify integration to and from legacy applications and business-to-business applications and to extend the E-Business Suite. In addition, there are new high-velocity edge computing technologies such as RFID tags and telematics that Oracle can integrate into business processes. "We address integration at all levels, including integrating data between different databases and systems, integrating applications, integrating business processes, and integrating people through portals and collaborative technologies," says Oracle's Vijay Tella. Oracle E-Business Suite. Oracle E-Business Suite provides a wide range of business applications. Although the E-Business Suite provides comprehensive support for everything from Financials and HR to Supply Chain and CRM, not everyone can adopt it immediately, and some organizations need the ability to deploy the E-Business Suite with other enterprise applications in a modular way. Over the years, Oracle has provided numerous facilities as entry points into the E-Business Suite, including such capabilities as open-interface tables, PL/SQL APIs, EDI, and XML interfaces. The E-Business Suite also supports a variety of pre-built adapters, such as OAGIS XML transactions, Web services, XML, RosettaNet, and many others. But the future holds even more options. Starting with the 11.5.10 release, Oracle will be providing an integration repository for the E-Business Suite. The repository will not only be an active catalog of all integration points and integration methods but it will also be an active facility that enables users to identify the integration points, find the ones appropriate to extend a business process from outside Oracle (or within Oracle) to other applications or business partners, and actively manage those integration points. "Regardless of the integration method, you will have to deal with only one facility," says Arthur Kruk, vice president of research and technology in Oracle's Applications Division. "Having a single focal point for B2B and applications integration will not only make it easier for many of our users but will also open their eyes to the possibilities." Information Access Oracle offers the ability to define the way in which most users will access various systems and applications. Leveraging unique Oracle capabilities, organizations can synthesize all transactional, decision support, and collaboration applications into one contextual user experience. Utilizing Oracle Portal, Oracle Collaboration Suite, and Oracle Business Intelligence, applications can be built that merge all computing and communication systems into one infrastructure. Communication tools such as telephony and e-mail and business intelligence tools such as ad hoc query tools can use the same computing infrastructure as enterprise applications. In this environment, all analysis and communication can occur in a natural application context. For instance, if you have a problem with a supply chain transaction, you can contact the appropriate business process owner from within the supply chain application, ensuring higher productivity and better auditing. Oracle Collaboration Suite. An integrated suite of applications that work together to solve an organization's toughest collaboration problems, Oracle Collaboration Suite integrates messaging, secure content sharing, real-time communications, wireless access, calendar and time management, and voice mail and fax services on an enterprise-class infrastructure, meeting the reliability requirements of even the largest organizations. Oracle Business Intelligence. Oracle provides enterprise applications with embedded business intelligence and an integrated set of tools that deliver enterprisewide access to actionable information. Knowledge workers need rapid access to specific information to plan, execute, and measure the effectiveness of business operations. Oracle Business Intelligence products provide comprehensive reporting, query, and analysis. Oracle Application Server Portal. With Oracle Application Server Portal, you can increase productivity through efficient access to content and applications, share information and collaborate more effectively, and streamline business processes. Development Framework If the previous components of the Oracle Information Architecture are the runtime environment for all your business processes, then think of Oracle JDeveloper as the design-time environment. Oracle JDeveloper 10g, the newest version of Oracle's Java, XML, and PL/SQL development environment, provides an innovative "productivity layer" called Oracle Application Development Framework (ADF) that simplifies application development and enables developers of all skill levels to create J2EE applications and Web services. Oracle JDeveloper 10g and Oracle ADF help developers take advantage of the latest service-oriented development methodologies to quickly assemble applications from a set of shared, reusable business services (such as user authentication or order status) optimized for deployment to enterprise grids. With Oracle JDeveloper 10g, developers can create more-flexible applications that seamlessly evolve with changing business requirements, for example, integrating systems after an acquisition, customizing hosted applications for a new client, or expanding data collection and analysis across several strategic partners. In addition to providing productivity, Oracle ADF supports open industry standards, minimizing technology risk. "By building our own E-Business Suite on JDeveloper and J2EE, we're ensuring that Oracle E-Business Suite customers can use standard tools and technologies to extend Oracle applications," says Regis Louis, product management director for Oracle ADF. Productivity requirements from Oracle's applications group have also contributed to other features of Oracle ADF. "Both the applications group and external customers have been asking for a framework that gives developers built-in J2EE best practices and design consistency, to let developers focus on business logic and ensure a certain look and feel across packaged and custom applications," says Louis. "Oracle ADF provides a variety of additional capabilities, such as declarative business logic, translation, and user interface consistency, to increase developer productivity." Enterprise Management Once a company deploys great applications, those applications need to be managed. Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g. "The major value businesses get by using OEM is that it automates and streamlines the management process and reduces the labor cost for managing the Oracle environment in the data center," says Moe Fardoost, product marketing director, Technology Marketing at Oracle. Although being able to manage individual products is important, being able to manage end-to-end processes is becoming more important, especially as organizations roll out grid infrastructures. "OEM's most exciting new feature, called Grid Control, lets you examine the health of your enterprise from a service and application point of view, tracking end user performance and individual system performance," says Fardoost. OEM is also integrated directly into Oracle's online support service, MetaLink, letting organizations ensure that each Oracle product is automatically kept current, with the right level of patches or updates. Because OEM stores all configuration information about Oracle products, the administrator knows exactly which patches are needed.