As Published In January/February 2005

Information Is Your Business
By Jeff Spicer

What it means to be an information-driven company

Imagine you're watching a relatively current feature film when a character, needing to make a telephone call, pulls out a mobile phone the size of a paperback book. Suddenly the film seems dated. You then consider the number of times in recent years that you've changed mobiles phones, upgraded service plans, or perhaps migrated to a more integrated personal communication device that's fully voice activated and automatically synchronizes with your computer, and the idea that the technologies we use in our business and personal lives are changing at an ever-increasing rate becomes very personal.

Now, consider your worklife and how advances in technology have affected your daily activities and responsibilities in just the past few years. If you're a corporate buyer, for example, certain aspects of procurement may be completely online or even automated. If you're an application developer, new tools allow you to assemble applications from components and services created by other developers half a world away. If you're a database administrator, new diagnostics tools can alert you to problems instantaneously no matter where you are. If you're an executive, sophisticated reports with complex analysis might show up on your desktop reflecting business transactions completed only moments before.

The obvious irony inherent in most enterprise IT advances is that while they improve system or user performance on one level (a newer, faster, data analytics system, for example) they have the potential to create complexity on another (application, system, and data integration challenges; performance and scalability issues; and so on).

Oracle has been a leader in recognizing the challenges and causes of IT complexity and offering relevant technical solutions and best practices. To help you better understand its role in reducing IT complexity and how your enterprise can expand the use of information, Oracle last year introduced an "information architecture," a model—or blueprint if you will—for building a standards-based IT infrastructure that is highly available, scales quickly and in a cost-effective manner, automates repetitive processes, offers unparalleled system performance, and helps you simplify your IT infrastructure.

Oracle is committed to helping businesses exploit and protect their information, a point recently underscored at Oracle's annual conference, Oracle OpenWorld, at which "information" took center stage. Many conference sessions and keynotes dealt with the process of turning your business into an information-driven company: an enterprise that understands the value of its information, protects it, makes it readily accessible to all authorized users, and analyzes and leverages it in real time.

Naturally, you might ask, what has Oracle done to exemplify an information company that is dedicated to reducing complexity? Apart from the obvious (a company whose first product was a relational database must know a little something about the importance of information), Oracle, with its long history of running its business on its own software and following its own best practices, has over time implemented or adhered to its own information architecture.

For example, a key aspect of the Oracle Information Architecture is that data should be held in a single repository where it is immediately accessible to the entire enterprise. If you've listened to Oracle CEO Larry Ellison speak in recent years, you know that Oracle has implemented its own products to create such a repository (a global single instance) against which all company applications run.

Oracle's Information Architecture also states that the foundation of a real-time enterprise is a grid infrastructure running on commodity servers with technologies that automatically balance and allocate data and resources. Again, if you've been watching Oracle, you know that the company has implemented its own enterprise grids—Oracle's entire On Demand program of outsourced business applications, for example, runs on a grid of low-cost hardware employing Oracle's grid technologies such as Oracle Real Application Clusters and Oracle Grid Control in our Austin Data Center. Technologies such as these automate routine tasks (helping reduce complexity) while at the same time simplifying tasks that require active management.

To help you better understand what it means to become an information-driven company, we'll present articles in this and future issues that explain the concepts, technologies, and practices involved. In this issue, we're introducing a column by George Demarest, Information Matters, and in the next issue, we'll profile the Austin Data Center. If you're in the process of becoming an information-driven company, write us and tell us about it. There is no such thing as too much information.