As Published In May/June 2004

Getting Good Directions
By Jeff Spicer

Oracle unveils a comprehensive plan for enterprise IT.

I like maps—in particular, city and highway maps. I like the mysteries they unravel, the possibilities they present, and the logic and simplicity they bring to situations that could otherwise be unpredictable and complex. When I travel to a city for the first time, I buy a map of the area and study it before venturing forth. Even if I plan to wander through the streets and alleys of a new city for an afternoon, I examine the map first and devise a wandering plan—call it guided wandering—that takes me where I want to go.

Most things in life, of course, don't come with a relevant map, a set of directions, an architecture, or even a broad plan. So when confronted with new questions and challenges, we improvise, make educated guesses, rely on time-tested tools, and sometimes take gigantic leaps based on intuition. If we're right, we have an enormous sense of accomplishment, and if we're wrong there may be unfortunate consequences.

One might think that something as complex as an IT infrastructure would come with a map. Or better yet, a map that comes with tools that help us link and understand our existing systems, or even guidelines that help us expand our IT infrastructure in a sensible, standards-based way. Until now, that hasn't been the case, but it's just these sorts of challenges that Oracle confronts with its new Oracle Information Architecture, a simple model—or a map—that explains how Oracle's products work together to create a real-time enterprise (an enterprise capable of using the most up-to-date information available to perform its most critical business processes).

Rather than describe the faculties of each Oracle product in a vacuum, Oracle Information Architecture presents all of enterprise IT as abstracted layers of functionality, and then assigns products to appropriate layers, describing how these various products and technologies interact within and between these layers.

The layers of Oracle Information Architecture are sensible and readily understood. A real-time enterprise must have access to highly available computing and data resources, therefore the foundation of Oracle Information Architecture is the grid infrastructure, the combination of Oracle's new grid technologies that provide automatic computing resource and data allocation. Atop that foundation are enterprise data hubs to store metadata for the business. Next is a business-process layer comprising business applications and integration services, and on top of that an information access layer that represents all collaboration, decision support, and transactional applications. All of the products and technologies in these layers are managed by Oracle Enterprise Manager, and custom application development is done using Oracle JDeveloper and Oracle Application Development Framework.

A key ingredient of Oracle Information Architecture, the enterprise data hub, represents a new set of products for Oracle that address a critical problem in enterprise IT: data fragmented across multiple, heterogeneous systems. The first data hub released by Oracle is the Customer Data Hub. Using the Oracle Customer Data Hub, you can consolidate customer data from disparate systems, use the tools in the hub to cleanse that data, and then make it available to all spoke applications. By keeping this data cleansed and synchronized, the Oracle Customer Data Hub gives you a complete, immediate, and accurate view of your customers.

Next Steps LEARN more about enterprise data hubs from Oracle

In this issue of Oracle Magazine, author David Kelly examines the new Oracle Information Architecture and related data hubs. He explains the significance of each layer of the architecture and describes how Oracle's products work within each layer. To bring this architecture to life, Kelly profiles companies using multiple Oracle products, examining how they use these technologies together and illustrating the benefits derived from such standardization. As you'll gather from Kelly's article, Oracle Information Architecture isn't a static document; it's a dynamic, ground-breaking blueprint for enterprise IT. I encourage you to stay tuned to Oracle.com and the Oracle Technology Network (otn.oracle.com) in the coming months to learn more about Oracle Information Architecture and innovative new products coming from Oracle for creating a real-time enterprise.