For 36 years, Manquehue Hotels has been delighting guests with unique properties and top-notch service. When the group looked to expand its footprint in Chile with three new hotels, they turned to Oracle Hospitality to help support this rapid growth. With Oracle, Manquehue was able to efficiently establish internal operations at the new hotels and enhance the overall guest experience for its customers.

“As we continue to grow our hotels and chain, we need a system in place that provides us with standardized, timely and online information to better serve our customers,” said Abner Cayul, Hotel Manquehue corporate general manager. “Oracle Hospitality was the only solution that could help us expand to be one of the most prominent hotel chains in Chile. We look forward to utilizing their offerings to fuel our continued growth.”

Oracle Hospitality OPERA Property features a range of innovations, including deeper customer insights and comprehensive functionality for all areas of hotel management. With it, Hotel Manquehue can create in-depth customer profiles to tailor experiences to each customer’s specific preferences, such as suggesting certain dining venues and luxury items. A personal touch that has helped the group increase customer loyalty. Hotel Manquehue also relies on OPERA for improved internal operations for employees, offering them immediate access to 24/7 support and connection to electronic invoices for easy back-office reporting.

The chain also uses the Oracle MICROS Simphony Cloud Point of Sale system to support a wide range of food and beverage operations within the hotel, including restaurant and room service amenities. Not only does MICROS Simphony streamline employee ordering and delivery, it also provides key data on what items are most popular and when. Conversely, it provides insight into which items are not selling, providing more informed decisions on menu planning to better serve guests while improving inventory management and reducing waste.

With hoteliers increasingly focusing on restaurant operations for revenue growth, it’s imperative for them to tap the advantages of an integrated property management and point-of-sale platform. The combination of OPERA and MICROS Simphony provide hoteliers with a comprehensive view of all their operations – including food and beverage – and insightful analysis of the contributions of each. Such integration also yields one-stop access to 360-degree guest profiles, giving staff detailed information about guests’ preferences and behavior anywhere on property.

“From their favorite dining options to customized rooms, today’s guests want an unprecedented level of personalization when enjoying their visit,” said David Meltzer, Group Vice President, Oracle Hospitality. “Hotel Manquehue understands this and uses the latest technology to better understand and serve the needs and desires of their customers every step of the way. As they expand throughout Chile, Oracle will continue to provide the intelligence and tools both management and front-line employees will need to ensure seamless, unforgettable guest experiences that create loyalty and bring guests back to their properties.”

Watch the Manquehue Hotels Video

In this video, Abner Cayul, corporate general manager of Manquehue Hotels shares how Oracle Hospitality Solutions is helping to support the hotel chain’s strategic growth.

As we move into the third decade of cloud computing, it’s important to remember that not all clouds are alike.

Back in, say 2006, cloud computing services were a revelation to software developers. These rentable storage and compute services provided a handy virtual holding cell that developers could use for designing and prototyping new applications without breaking the bank, or requiring scarce cooperation from in-house resources. And that was all well and good for that time.

Fast forward more than a decade and the status quo is a lot more complicated. As businesses of all sizes weigh the use of cloud platforms to run their critical applications, one part of the equation is that these applications cannot fail without serious financial and reputational consequences. Put it this way: If a computer game glitches, your point total may take a hit. If your manufacturing system hiccups, you can lose real money. And/or your job, depending on your role at the company.

For these types of workloads, businesses require highly secure cloud services that can work in tandem with other cloud services, with services that remain on-premise, and are modern enough for emerging competitive and technological needs.

Wanted:  Gen 2 Cloud

This shift in how companies look at cloud services affects tech suppliers and their customers alike, said Edward Screven, Oracle’s chief corporate architect, in an address earlier this month to Oracle customers attending Oracle Cloud Day in New York City .

“Gen 1 clouds are not good enough for many uses,” he said. Oracle built its Gen 2 cloud to support its cloud business applications, and for its business customers. “Your critical apps drove how we built our cloud,” Screven said.

Early clouds were built so that processors were shared by many customers. The advantage was cost efficiency; the downside was that customer code can, in some circumstances, access the very computers that are used to run the cloud service. In this case, if that customer code were to be infected by malware, the threat may not be contained to that customer’s workload, and can spread.

Oracle’s Gen 2 cloud, by contrast, isolates customer code so it cannot access the cloud’s control computers—or vice versa. A separate processor, which Screven called a perimeter control computer, filters incoming network packets to prevent bad code from entering the customer’s work zone. Isolating the controls of the cloud operations from customer’s tasks helps ensure better security all around.

Gen 2 cloud also utilizes autonomous technology to patch, update, and configure cloud resources without human intervention. In complex environments, it is expensive and time consuming for human administrators to keep up with the latest security threats or configuration wrinkles—provided you can even find them in a tight labor market.

Oracle’s Gen 2 cloud supports online patching. During the Spectre /Meltdown bugs that afflicted Intel processors, online patching averted downtime for Oracle customers by applying 150 million fixes across 1.5 million computer cores. That massive operation took just four hours, Screven said. Perhaps more impressively, online patching -- based on Oracle’s K-splice technology—meant no servers had to be rebooted at all. “Our customers didn’t realize we’d even done it,” Screven said.

Autonomous capabilities give Oracle’s Gen 2 cloud 99.995% availability—which nets out to less than 2.5 minutes of downtime per month.

Bolstering Hybrid

While it is true that many business workloads are moving to outside public cloud infrastructure, it is also true that most businesses will keep running some mission-critical applications on premise.

According to Forrester VP and principal analyst James Staten, a healthy 74% of businesses surveyed describe their IT strategy as hybrid, meaning they use cloud in parallel with non-cloud technologies.

Those companies need a comprehensive way to manage their data and applications across deployment models. 

Oracle’s latest release of Enterprise Manager is intended to help companies migrate workloads to Oracle’s Gen 2 cloud—as well as manage their databases from a single dashboard, whether they are running on premise or in the cloud.

New World Order

Businesses are quickly learning that Gen 1 clouds relying on commodity hardware and software, and a patchwork quilt of disparate services, are not up to the mission-critical task of running their most important applications and safeguarding their data in a secure, scalable, reliable way.

Most likely they will want to avail themselves of a Gen 2 cloud built from its foundations to handle important business applications.

To help customers easily move Oracle Databases to the cloud and simplify management of hybrid cloud environments, Oracle announced significant enhancements to its enterprise management platform, Oracle Enterprise Manager. The new release adds functionality that automates database migration and provides a single dashboard that improves visibility, control, and management for hybrid IT environments. 

Oracle Enterprise Manager’s migration capabilities provide unprecedented flexibility and ease of use to accelerate and simplify the transition to the cloud. Since most large organizations have to move multiple databases to the cloud over an extended period of time, it’s critical to have a cloud migration solution that eliminates the timing and pricing pressures typical with other vendor’s rigid migration solutions.

“As organizations move to the cloud, they are faced with complex, time-consuming, manual, error-prone migration tasks,” said Wim Coekaerts, senior vice president, Software Development, Oracle. “Only Oracle provides Autonomous Cloud services, as well as the tools and migration services to help customers easily move to the cloud. Oracle Enterprise Manager removes the complexity with highly automated, guided migrations and provides a single dashboard for easily managing hybrid cloud environments.”

“IDC’s research shows that well over 90 percent of major enterprises rely on a mix of on-premises IT, dedicated cloud environments and public cloud services, and are seeking efficient ways to onboard, monitor, and manage across these hybrid environments,” said Mary Johnston Turner, IDC Research vice president for Cloud Management. “Enterprise cloud management leaders tell us that analytics is their number one priority, since the scale and complexity of hybrid and multi-cloud operations requires robust automation that is informed by deep performance and optimization intelligence.”

Built for Hybrid Environments

Oracle Enterprise Manager provides enhancements in three key areas to help enterprises more easily manage hybrid database environments, including:

• Intelligent Analytics: New intelligent analytics provided by the Exadata Warehouse enable users to maximize performance and utilization of Oracle Database and Exadata environments on-premises or in the cloud via improved capacity planning and forecasting. Additionally, the new version improves visibility of the entire hybrid estate through comprehensive monitoring and management for Oracle’s latest technology, including Autonomous Database and Exadata Cloud Service.

• Comprehensive Lifecycle Automation and Control: Advancements in lifecycle automation and control enable enterprises to easily adopt Autonomous Database and Exadata Cloud Service and improve their security posture.

• Mobility and Security: New comprehensive security controls include fleet maintenance support for Transparent Data Encryption, improved compliance monitoring, fine-grained control of on-premises fleets, and new security standards for Oracle Database 18c and 19c.  The new functionality also provides access to a new mobile app and new Grafana plug-in for rich visualization of Oracle Enterprise Manager data.

Additionally, Oracle is expanding deployment and access choices for Oracle Enterprise Manager. DBAs can now deploy Oracle Enterprise Manager on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure using Oracle best-practices for high availability, capitalizing on Oracle Enterprise Manager features while enjoying the benefits of a cloud deployment.

In addition, Oracle announced today that Oracle Enterprise Manager has been certified by the Center for Internet Security Benchmarks to compare the configuration status of Oracle Databases against the consensus-based best practice standards contained in the Oracle 12c Benchmark v2.1.0, Level 1- RDBMS. Organizations that use Oracle Enterprise Manager can now ensure that the configurations of their critical assets align with the CIS Benchmarks consensus-based practice standards.

Organizations Benefit from Highly Automated Capabilities, Easy Migration to Cloud

“We depend on Oracle Enterprise Manager to optimize our Oracle Database and Exadata fleet, which provides a mission-critical shared service for all of our most important business functions,” said Jones John, Database Services Manager, Technology and Innovation Division at Link Group. “The latest release of Oracle Enterprise Manager allows us to adopt the newest Exadata X8 environments without delay, and to continue to use Oracle Enterprise Manager’s comprehensive management automation capabilities across our entire hybrid database fleet.”

“Our key public sector and commercial customers and our own experts use Oracle Enterprise Manager every day to manage their Oracle Database and Exadata fleet,” said Erik Benner, Vice President, Transformation at Mythics, an Oracle Cloud partner. “The new Oracle Enterprise Manager functionality to ease migration to Autonomous Database and to apply machine learning analytics to their Oracle Enterprise Manager data is precisely what is needed to help ensure they can continue to operate seamlessly across their entire Database fleet.”

Popular Russian footwear chain, ZENDEN Group, deployed Oracle Retail to drive inventory productivity and elevate the customer experience with better inventory placement. Today, ZENDEN leads the Russian footwear market on profit per square meter, engaging about 3 million loyalty cardholders and having more than 74.4 million people visiting its stores. In the last five years, ZENDEN has sold 42 million pairs of shoes. With Oracle Retail, ZENDEN Group shifted from a manual planning process to adopt automated demand-driven assortment planning. The new process helps to ensure the right shoes are always in stock for its customers.

“With the rapid growth of the brand, we required a modern solution that could optimize the process, of forecasting and planning assortment. For us, those were the most important factors which have influenced our decision. The new Oracle Retail solution provides the common environment for all participants of the process and also allows us to make the top-down and bottom-up plans,” said Vitaly Fomin, project director, ZENDEN Group. “Due to high accuracy and the new forecasting tool which uses machine learning, we can more effectively meet consumer demand in our stores by providing better assortment availability. In the long-term this helps to reduce the volume of clearances and to increase the overall margin of the business.”

“Before the implementation, our team was responsible for shipments into over 400 stores that we managed through a highly manual and time-consuming process with using big and unsynchronized spreadsheets. Now we have a universal solution with a single user interface and seamless automation of our best practices, which gives us the capacity to think more strategically,” said Victoria Rakhimzhanova, planning department director, ZENDEN Group.

With Oracle Retail, the teams have standardized 90 percent of the planning process in one central system. ZENDEN Group implemented assortment planning solution, Oracle Retail Assortment Planning; demand forecasting solution, Oracle Retail Demand Forecasting; and Veltio’s new Product Forecasting on the Oracle Retail Predictive Application Server platform. Veltio, a Gold level member of Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN), provided Implementation services on the project.

“In our recent global consumer research showed that it’s no longer good enough for retailers to simply sell products. Retailers need to get better at acquiring the right customers and placing assortment and inventory where the customer expects to engage with the brand,” said Mike Webster, senior vice president, and general manager, Oracle Retail. “By leveraging the machine learning embedded in our Planning and Optimization solutions, ZENDEN gains a single view of the assortment and can now orchestrate the supply chain to continue to drive margin and reduce costs.”

An increasingly fierce retail market requires new approaches to engaging customers and satisfying their demands with efficiency and elegance. Retailers need the transparency and flexibility to shift with the needs of their customers and business—whether those interactions are happening online, in-store or in the spaces in-between, such as buying online and picking up in-store (BOPIS).

Everything from inventory to experiences must live in harmony and that requires brands to innovate faster, have intelligence at the tips of their fingers, and use data science to put customers at the center of decision making. Yesterday’s cloud infrastructure can’t meet the demands of today’s customers. Providing retailers the modern platform they need to deliver on their brand promises, Oracle’s core retail operations portfolio is now powered by Oracle's Gen 2 cloud.

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is a purpose-built, best-in-class platform for running the most important enterprise applications with unmatched performance, security, and cost. Only Oracle’s Gen 2 Cloud runs Oracle Autonomous Database, the industry's first and only self-driving database. Oracle Cloud provides a comprehensive cloud computing portfolio, from application development and business analytics to data management, integration, security, artificial intelligence (AI), and blockchain.

“The retail enterprise is becoming increasingly complex with a slim margin for error when it comes to maintaining customer loyalty,” said Jeff Warren, vice president, Oracle Retail. “It’s more critical than ever that retailers can operate with agility and next-level intelligence on everything from planning to inventory management to customer acquisition. This can only be achieved with a next-level cloud platform, like Oracle CIoud Infrastructure.”

Customers are already seeing the advantages. For example, Gap Inc. partnered with Oracle to deploy Oracle Retail Merchandising Cloud Service and Oracle Retail Integration Cloud Service, powered by Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, to drive operational agility and furnish the Banana Republic business teams with better intelligence.

Oracle Retail applications leverage Oracle Cloud’s highly fault-tolerant regions to protect customers from unexpected outages. Oracle’s cloud applications can tolerate network, power, or hardware outages and continue to provide service without missing a beat. Additionally, the applications are architected with redundancy at all levels. If a particular component fails, another is there to take its place without disruption to the services. Oracle’s focus on continuous service versus eventual recovery help reduce the risk and magnitude of lost business and customers.

Home Choice, one of South Africa’s largest home shopping retailers and financing providers, has deployed Oracle Retail Cloud in just 12 weeks to deliver the products and offers that turn browsers into buyers. Shoppers look to Home Choice to discover name-brand furniture, electronics, and appliances at competitive prices. Offering a wide range of easy finance options, the retailer engages customers in finding and purchasing housewares via its website, catalog, and call centers. With Oracle Retail, the Home Choice team is shifting from legacy, manual processes to a best in class planning and optimization solution that unifies processes and integrates data science into decision making to drive more sales and better customer satisfaction.  

“Home Choice is focused on delivering a compelling assortment of products that meets market demand across multiple geographies. The Oracle Retail Cloud Services allow us to adopt a more scientific approach to planning and markdowns quickly,” said Dirk Oberholster, chief information officer, Home Choice. “The flexibility of the solution also enables us to configure and extend capabilities to meet business requirements without touching the base code.”

In  Oracle’s “Setting the Bar: Global Customer Experience Trends 2019”, nearly 16,000 global consumers surveyed are seeking preferential treatment based on their relationship with  brand. Roughly half (48 percent) say that offers or discounts which are better than what anyone else can get based on their loyalty to that retailer are ‘absolutely essential’. With a single view of inventory, Home Choice will be able to understand how customers interact with the brand to make better buying decisions and deliver relevant offers that compel a passive shopper to purchase.

“Oracle Retail is empowering the Home Choice team to deliver the right products to the right location and channels at a compelling price using science and optimization,” said Mike Webster, senior vice president and general manager, Oracle Retail. “As Home Choice places the customer at the center of the value chain, Oracle will enable them to interact with customers on a more personalized level.”

Home Choice is adopting Oracle Retail Merchandise Financial Planning Cloud Service, Oracle Customer Experience (CX) Commerce, Oracle Retail Assortment Planning Cloud Service, Oracle Retail Science Platform Cloud Service, and Oracle Retail Offer Optimization Cloud Service. Home Choice is centralizing its planning process by adopting the best practices built into Oracle Retail Merchandise Financial Planning to drive inventory productivity and profit. Additionally, the modern architecture of Oracle CX Commerce leverages the power of data to curate engaging experiences that drive online conversion rates and in-store traffic.

In the first phase, the team deployed Oracle Retail Merchandise Financial Planning Cloud Service with support from Cognira, a Gold level member of Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN). Simultaneously, Oracle Retail Consulting worked to finalize the implementation of Oracle CX Commerce. The company evaluated competing products and selected Oracle based on its deep retail functionality, cloud offerings, and proven ability to support growing businesses.

Oracle is helping retailers find their top future customers using data science. A new offering from Oracle Retail, Consumer Insights aids retailers in understanding the characteristics of their best customers then extends those traits to find similar potential customers among the petabytes of third-party consumer data in Oracle Data Cloud. This enables retailers to optimize customer acquisition campaigns with more relevant, targeted products and offers. 

Gaining new customers is a top priority for retail marketers, with the cost growing every year. In the recent holiday season, a new survey showed that 77 percent of retailers planned to increase their spend in this area. But are they reaching the right prospective buyers?

With Oracle Retail Consumer Insights, retailers can achieve a deep understanding of their existing customers through enriched attributes and advanced data science. For example, do the most profitable athletic gear customers also purchase particular brands of soft drinks or deodorant or snack foods? Is there a common denominator in the type of vehicle they drive or restaurants they frequent or vacations they take?

By enriching first-party data retailers have on their existing customers with purchase data and other characteristics that happen outside the retailer’s vantage point, Consumer Insights can cluster together attributes and actions and identify new segments that would be otherwise unknown. Retailers can then use this information to find similar buyers to target with offers that are highly relevant to their lifestyle and tastes.

The data in Oracle Data Cloud represents profile-linked transaction-level sales data and a rich set of other demographic, geographic, and interest attributes from Oracle Data Cloud. Through this new solution, that third-party data can now be coupled with first-party data retailers have on customers, omnichannel touch-points, inventory movements, promotional response, and much more. 

“The value of data can’t be found in zeros and ones, but in human connections to the interests, experiences, and behavior of current and potential customers,” said Cecilia Mao, vice president of product, Oracle Data Cloud. “When you know that your customers are also more likely to buy at the grocery store, brand affinity and hobbies, you can build more accurate models to find your best potential customers, then use multiple channels to reach them at scale.”

Applying predictive and prescriptive analytics to this data, retailers can connect, analyze, experiment, and explore new customer segments, knowing that advanced decision science is under the hood. Consumer Insights evaluates “what if” analysis and explores and finds prospects in a continuously iterative process to get the criteria right and identify the most appropriate customer segment. Once correctly identified, retailers can take action by launching campaigns, promotions, or advertising, with the option to activate using Oracle Data Cloud’s industry-wide connections.

“When it comes to grabbing the attention of potential customers, every second and moment matters,” said Jeff Warren, vice president, Oracle Retail. “Armed with intelligent data based on real customer attributes and behaviors, retailers will truly be able to put the needs and likes of shoppers at the center of their new customer acquisition strategy.”

Visit Oracle (booth #4837) at NRF 2020 Vision Retail’s Big Show (January 12-14) at Jacob K. Javits Convention Center, New York City, to see Oracle Retail Consumer Insights live. While in the booth, see the full Oracle Retail Insights Suite and demo the new Retail Home dashboards to see why Oracle is the modern platform for retail.

Blue Nile, a leading online diamond jeweler, has chosen Oracle Cloud Applications to support its commitment to providing customers with more choices, straightforward information, and legendary service. With Oracle, Blue Nile has been able to streamline financial operations and delight customers by providing an experience as personal as the diamond they’re purchasing.

Founded in 1999 with the idea that the diamond and engagement ring business was ready for innovation, Blue Nile is now the #1 online diamond jeweler in the world for engagement and wedding rings, boasting an inventory of over 200,000 diamonds. To maintain its tradition of innovation and constantly provide new ways for customers to create the perfect pieces for every occasion, Blue Nile needed an integrated suite of applications that would help it personalize customer experiences at scale and improve operational efficiency. After careful evaluation, Blue Nile selected Oracle.

“At Blue Nile, everything we do is dictated by our customer-first philosophy and that includes the technology we select to run our business,” said Andre Woolery, senior director of brand marketing, Blue Nile. “To preserve our focus on exceptional customer service as our business continues to grow, we needed to be able to seamlessly connect all parts of our organization. Oracle Cloud Applications is not only helping us bring all our teams together, but just as importantly, it is helping us really use data to our advantage. This will make a huge difference to both the experience we offer customers and the efficiency of our core business processes.”

With Oracle Customer Experience (CX) and Oracle Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) Cloud, Blue Nile is now nimbler and more precise with its marketing tactics, and is able to drive accurate and agile financial and operational planning across the entire organization. Oracle Responsys, part of Oracle CX, has helped Blue Nile hone its marketing program to be more personalized and timelier for each customer interaction across online and traditional channels including its website, call center, and showroom. In addition, Oracle EPM Cloud has helped Blue Nile make its planning and budgeting process more efficient by seamlessly integrating data and processes with Blue Nile’s core ERP and operational systems.

“Just like diamonds, every customer is unique and this means brands need to take a data-first approach to managing each customer interaction in order to truly personalize the experience,” said Rob Tarkoff, executive vice president, Oracle CX and Oracle Data Cloud. “Blue Nile is a perfect example of a retail brand that has taken advantage of technology to rethink a traditional industry, and the results it has achieved speak for themselves. We look forward to working closely with the Blue Nile team to help them continue to put the customer first.”

Oracle CX empowers organizations to take a smarter approach to customer experience management and business transformation initiatives. By providing a trusted business platform that connects data, experiences, and outcomes, Oracle CX helps customers reduce IT complexity, deliver innovative customer experiences, and achieve predictable and tangible business results. Oracle EPM Cloud is the only complete and connected cloud EPM solution that gives customers the agility needed to outperform in today’s constantly evolving business landscape.

Be sure to visit Oracle’s booth #4837 at the NRF Big Show, January 12-14, 2020.

The 2019 holiday season saw a rush of consumers taking advantage of new, more convenient options such as checking out via mobile tablets or buying-online and picking up in-store or curbside (BOPIS). But what happens when those items aren’t ready as promised? Sixty-three percent of consumers will walk away from a brand forever or at a minimum consider an alternative. Enhancements in the Oracle Retail platform allow store associates to stay informed and ready to help customers anywhere in the store and inventory is easily tracked and ready for distribution, so pick-up promises are met. The result—happy customers, staff and increased same-store sales. 

“The future [of retail] belongs to visionary leaders and forward-thinking organizations that are able to break the shackles of legacy systems and accelerate mastering digital-first strategies,” commented Leslie Hand, vice president, IDC Retail Insights. “The strongest businesses will be truly customer focused, with big shifts in internal culture that prioritize data-driven decisions and personalized approaches to experiential retail. In-store mobility and inventory accuracy across the shopping experience—from research and discovery to selection and fulfillment—are essential to empowering consumers and associates alike.”

Delivered in the cloud, key enhancements to the Oracle Retail Platform help retailers deliver on the modern, seamless in-store experiences customers are demanding. With these tools, every stakeholder in the retail enterprise is empowered to serve customers and can quickly access and action inventory through:

• Mobilization - As the retail environment pivots towards a customer-centric model, the focus is to bring the associate out from behind the cash wrap to engage earlier in the customer shopping process. Mobility is a key enabler, putting associates where customers are, anywhere in the store, and removing the need for traditional register hardware platforms. The latest release of Oracle Retail Xstore POS enables retailers to deliver a fully mobile store with all features and functions required to manage that environment being available on a Tablet or Thin Client.
• Accelerated Implementation - Oracle Retail Xstore Office Cloud Service centralizes all back-office elements of store operations, eliminating the need for data center investment. This provides a faster implementation timeline and creates a more responsive business model attuned to shifts in consumer preferences.
• RFID-enabled inventory and efficient customer order fulfilment - Oracle Retail Store Inventory Operations Cloud Services provide accurate, real-time visibility into discrete store inventory positions, which is critical to deliver great customer service and capitalize on selling opportunities. Depending on the unique customer journey, inventory for customer orders is seamlessly picked, packed and made available for customer pick up or shipped from the store.

“Despite the headlines, the majority of sales are still happening in-store, so every moment a customer interacts with that location matters,” said Jeff Warren, vice president of solution management, Oracle Retail. “Whether it’s arming a store associate with the right knowledge and tools to deliver a positive customer experience or ensuring pre-ordered merchandise is ready without a wait, retailers need to put customers at the center of all their business processes and decisions to continue to move the needle on in-store sales.”

To see the latest in Modern Retail, visit Oracle at NRF2020, Booth 4837. Learn more about the Oracle Retail NRF2020 experience or Request a demo now.

Queensland Country Bank Stadium, Australia’s newest multipurpose venue, has selected Oracle’s industry leading food and beverage technologies to deliver speedy service and payment options to sports fans and concertgoers when the venue opens in February 2020. 

Queensland Country Bank Stadium will become home to the NRL’s North Queensland Cowboys in their next season, and fans have made it clear they don’t want to miss any of the action. An Oracle study of more than 2,000 global sports fans revealed that nearly all–94 percent–buy food and beverages while at sporting events, and 58 percent said they would buy more if they didn’t have to wait in lines. 

Oracle MICROS Simphony Cloud Point of Sale (POS) systems will be employed to help Queensland Country Bank Stadium provide a top-end fan experience and meet the demand for quick service. Systems will include 164 Oracle MICROS workstations and 15 Oracle MICROS tablets that will be used in the venues’ three corporate experience bars, 40 general admission food and beverage outlets and additional stations, as required for special events. Digital menu boards will display the concession choices, and selections can easily be changed to meet the preferred dining options of diverse audiences.

“No matter whether they are attending a sporting event or concert, fan expectations of venues have evolved greatly in recent years, and venues must maximize their use of emerging technology platforms to meet these demands, improve the experience and keep fans coming back,” said Simon de Montfort Walker, senior vice president and general manager, Oracle Food and Beverage. “Oracle MICROS Simphony POS systems are designed to easily integrate with other systems so they can meet guests’ evolving entertainment needs as the stadium and surrounding area grow.”

The newly constructed venue in Townsville, Queensland, Australia, has a seating capacity of 25,000 with the ability to accommodate up to 40,000 attendees for concerts. The stadium’s design embraces the project’s vision to attract visitors and investment, celebrate the local climate, value the water edge environment, provide high quality public spaces and support urban regeneration.

Learn more about Oracle’s Food and Beverage Solutions here.

Today, we are announcing the continued expansion of our cloud interoperability partnership with Microsoft to help joint customers worldwide run their mission-critical workloads across Oracle Cloud and Microsoft Azure. Our new interconnect location means enterprises can now build workloads that seamlessly interoperate between Microsoft and Oracle cloud regions in Canada. This interconnect builds on an existing partnership announced in June of 2019.

The partnership has received a huge amount of interest, as 80 percent of enterprises use a combination of Microsoft and Oracle software to run their businesses. As cloud computing becomes ubiquitous, and businesses rely on multiple cloud providers, the partnership makes managing companies’ most important cloud workloads significantly easier. These workloads include financial planning, inventory, sales applications – and their underlying databases.

The expansion will give more customers direct, fast and highly reliable network connectivity between Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud, while providing first-class customer service and support that enterprises have come to expect from the two companies. This unique multi-cloud solution delivers the performance, easy integration, rigorous service level agreements, and collaborative enterprise support that they need to simplify their operations. 

Simply put, the Oracle-Microsoft partnership means cloud services run by the two providers will interoperate as if they were part of a single cloud, making it easier for customers to run their mission-critical workloads across the two clouds.

“The global demand for running applications and databases in multi-cloud environments continues to accelerate,” said Clay Magouyrk, senior vice president of engineering, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.  “With the new interconnect, our Canadian customers can now take advantage of a nearly seamless cloud integration between the world's largest enterprise cloud providers, Microsoft and Oracle.”

More Regions to Reach More Customers

The two companies are putting customers first by enabling them to run full-stack applications side-by-side across clouds, or one part of a workload within Azure and another part of the same workload within Oracle Cloud. For example, using the interconnect makes it possible to connect Azure services like analytics and AI to Oracle Cloud services like Autonomous Database. Together, Azure and Oracle Cloud offer customers a one-stop shop for all the cloud services and applications they need to run their entire business.

From a technical perspective, the interconnect means less latency or delay, which enables better data transfer and application interaction between clouds. It also supports a broader spectrum of workloads, using resources available on both sides. Accenture recently performed testing on the performance of the interconnect and confirmed that the solution offers customers low latency and high ease of use.

Microsoft and Oracle plan to make the direct interconnect available in additional regions, including on the US West Coast, in a US Government specific region, in Asia, and in the European Union.

Earlier this year, Oracle and Microsoft created an interconnect in Ashburn (North America), Azure US East, and in London (United Kingdom).

For the fourth consecutive year, Oracle Financial Services has been ranked in the top three of the annual Chartis RiskTech100®. Compiled by industry research group Chartis Research, RiskTech100® ranks the world’s top 100 providers of risk management and compliance technology solutions that meet the needs of both financial and non-financial organizations.

Oracle ranked first in the categories of Core Technology, which looks at a vendor’s overall technology stack by benchmarking it against the latest best practices, and Data Integrity and Control, which reviews a vendor’s ability to maintain data quality, a key differentiator for Oracle. Oracle also received an honorable mention in the categories of asset and liability management (ALM), financial crime/anti-money laundering (AML), risk and finance integration, and risk data aggregation and reporting.

This announcement comes after Oracle was ranked as a category leader in the Chartis RiskTech Quadrant® for AML/watchlist monitoring solutions earlier this year.

“Each year our research highlights how vendors’ strategies are changing to address ongoing developments in RiskTech,” said Rob Stubbs, Head of Research at Chartis. “Oracle’s top three placing, and its two award wins this year, reflect its continued commitment to the market.”

A pioneer in modern risk and finance, Oracle Financial Services Analytical Applications product suite is used by many Global Systemically Important Financial Institutions (SIFI).

In September 2019, AsiaRisk (owned by Infopro Digital SAS) ranked Oracle’s ALM solution as Product of the Year for its value add to end users from an innovation and risk perspective. AsiaRisk specifically noted its ability to help bank officers across the organization gain a better understanding of the risks they have assumed and sensitivity in economic conditions.

“Today’s financial institutions are grappling with how to leverage new technology, manage an enormous amount of data, and meet increasingly complex regulatory and compliance requirements,” said Sonny Singh, senior vice president and general manager, Oracle Financial Services. “Our ranking re-affirms our strategy and vision to help organizations adapt, and we remain committed to continuously strengthening our capabilities.”

Now in its 14^th year, RiskTech100^® is a comprehensive independent study of the world’s major players in risk and compliance technology, and it serves as a valuable assessment and benchmarking tool for all participants in risk technology markets. The rankings in the report reflect Chartis analysts’ expert opinions, along with research into market trends, participants, expenditure patterns and best practices. The analysis is validated through several phases of independent verification.

More information and a copy of the full report can be found on Chartis’ website here.

Following closely on the heels of Oracle achieving FedRAMP authorization, Oracle today announced three new government regions: Ashburn, Virginia; Phoenix, Arizona; and Chicago, Illinois. These regions have achieved DISA Impact Level 5 provisional authorization (IL5 PATO), providing a cloud environment where U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) and other Federal customers can harness the power of Oracle Cloud to unlock innovation, improve mission performance, and enhance service delivery.  

This is an important milestone in Oracle’s journey to deliver innovative cloud services with consistent high performance and exceptional security to the entire U.S. government. In 2020, Oracle plans to bring additional full-scale Gen 2 Cloud Regions online to support the classified missions of the US Government.

“U.S. DoD and other Federal customers are continually looking for new, secure ways to improve citizen services and keep our nation safe,” said Don Johnson, executive vice president, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. “Oracle’s Generation 2 Cloud was engineered to deliver highly secure, high-performance, cost effective infrastructure that helps government organizations address the needs of the nation today and tomorrow.” 

Oracle has been a long-standing strategic technology partner of the U.S. government. Today, more than 500 government organizations take advantage of Oracle’s industry-leading technologies and superior performance. State, local, and federal government customers using Oracle to modernize their technology include Defense Manpower Data Center (DMDC) and the U.S. Air Force.

The Department of Defense recently awarded a contract to Oracle for its Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to support a large portion of the enterprise human resource portfolio. The award modernizes existing infrastructure and will assist the Defense Manpower Data Center in providing necessary human resource services and capabilities to its military members, veterans and their families.

With Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, customers benefit from best-in-class security, consistent high performance, simple predictable pricing, and the tools and expertise needed to bring enterprise workloads to cloud quickly and efficiently. In addition, Oracle now provides organizations with a complete set of solutions for any high performance computing (HPC) workload, enabling businesses to capitalize on the benefits of modern cloud computing while enjoying performance comparable to on-premises at a lower cost.

“Oracle Cloud Infrastructure brings incredible performance, flexibility, security, and cost-savings benefits to our federal civilian, commercial and higher education customers,” said Paul Seifert, Federal Sector President, Mythics, Inc. “Mythics’ DoD customers will now be able to leverage Oracle Cloud to better serve the unique requirements of the DoD at home and abroad.”

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure has achieved certifications and attestations for key security standards and compliance mandates. These independent third-party assurance programs demonstrate Oracle’s commitment to security and to meeting the needs of the public sector. These IL5 PATO government regions will launch with initial Oracle services including VM and Bare Metal Compute (CPU and GPU), Storage (including archive, block, and object storage), Database, Identity and Access Management, Key Management Service, Load Balancer, and Exadata Cloud Service.

“We’re excited to see the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure achieve DISA Impact Level 5 provisional authorization, as it provides additional options that our federal government clients—especially those seeking to migrate large and complex Oracle-based solutions to the cloud—can leverage,” said Anthony Flake, managing director of Accenture Federal Services’ Oracle practice.

Oracle SCM Cloud provides end-to-end technology that takes customers beyond supply chain operations and into integrated business planning.

Oracle has been named a Leader in Gartner’s 2019 “Magic Quadrant for Manufacturing Execution Systems¹” report. Out of 16 companies evaluated, Oracle is positioned as a Leader based on its completeness of vision and ability to execute for its Oracle Manufacturing Cloud–part of Oracle Supply Chain Management (SCM) Cloud. A complimentary copy of the report is available here.

“Manufacturing organizations are increasingly seeking solutions that extract additional value from manufacturing operations through increased efficiency and reduced costs,” said Andy Binsley, vice president, Manufacturing and ALM Strategy, Oracle. “They would also like to do that on the Cloud. To help our customers achieve these twin goals, we have integrated artificial intelligence, machine learning and Internet of Things capabilities within Oracle Supply Chain Management Cloud. We are pleased to be acknowledged as a Leader for manufacturing execution systems (MES) by Gartner, and see this recognition as a testament to our success in delivering business value to manufacturing organizations, and doing so on the Cloud.”

Gartner estimates that “By 2024, 50% of MES solutions will include industrial IoT (IIoT) platforms synchronized with microservices-based manufacturing operations management (MOM) apps, providing near-real-time transaction management, control, data collection and analytics.”

With Oracle SCM Cloud, Oracle provides a suite of supply chain cloud applications that enable businesses, including manufacturers, to manage their supply chains with the scale, security, innovation, and agility that today’s markets require. Oracle SCM Cloud provides end-to-end technology that takes customers beyond supply chain operations and into integrated business planning.

Oracle SCM Cloud has garnered consistent industry recognition. Oracle was recently named a Leader in both Gartner’s “Magic Quadrant for Warehouse Management Systems²,” and Gartner’s “Magic Quadrant for Transportation Management Systems³.”

1 Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Manufacturing Execution Systems, Rick Franzosa, 29 October 2019
2 Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Warehouse Management Systems, C. Klappich, Simon Tunstall, 8 May 2019
3 Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Transportation Management Systems, Bart De Muynck, Brock Johns, Oscar Sanchez Duran, 27 March 2019

Gartner Disclaimer
Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

Additional Information
For additional information on Oracle Supply Chain Management (SCM) Cloud, visit Facebook, Twitter or the Oracle SCM blog.

Baltimore Gas & Electric (BGE) has launched a digital experience pilot for thousands of Baltimore residents who pay on and off peak rates for electricity. BGE is using Oracle Utilities Opower Behavioral Load Shaping Cloud Service to engage customers with a proactive, personalized experience designed to help them save on their utility bills. The new service encourages customers to shift their biggest everyday energy loads, such as running energy-intensive appliances and electric vehicle charging, to off peak times. With these tips, BGE customers can save money while helping reduce daily peak energy demand and supporting a cleaner, healthier grid.

“We know on peak and off peak rates can seem complex, and we have a responsibility to offer excellent service to customers who choose them,” commented Mark Case, VP of regulatory policy and strategy at BGE. “With this new service from Opower, we can deliver a better experience for these customers by helping them shift their energy load for improved power affordability and reliability, all while reducing emissions.”

Learn more about the new Opower Behavioral Load Shaping Service here.

Peak pricing programs have not traditionally provided the ongoing, personalized outreach customers need to help them shift their energy use and benefit from lower off-peak rates. Years of public evaluation data show programs that offered some outreach only left customers wanting more. With machine learning, user experience design, and customer engagement automation, Opower is reshaping this equation.

With Opower, BGE is providing residents new insight into how small behavior changes can create significant bill savings. Enrolled customers began receiving weekly digital communications that help them understand how their on and off peak rates work. Each customer receives continually evolving content like week-over-week spending comparisons, personalized information about their on and off peak spending, and adaptive, intelligent recommendations for shifting their largest energy loads in order to save money.

“On and off peak rates are nothing new—our industry has been implementing them for decades. Program evaluators have found again and again that customers with peak pricing are eager for better insights into their energy usage and their bills,” noted Dr. Ahmad Faruqui, principal and energy economist with The Brattle Group. “What’s new and different is the way in which enabling technologies boost customer awareness and price responsiveness. BGE and Opower are putting those learnings into practice and employing a smart experimental design that will expand our industry’s body of knowledge.”

BGE and Opower are running the program as a randomized control trial in order to yield novel, statistically significant peak pricing pilot results. Throughout the trial, BGE and Opower will be isolating and measuring the impact of the customer experience itself—discretely from the peak price signal—on bill savings, customer satisfaction, peak demand, and adoption of BGE programs and products that can help customers save even more. The trial started in Summer 2019. 

Several additional utilities in the U.S. are running the Opower Behavioral Load Shaping service this year. This is the fourth new product released by Opower recently, in addition to hundreds of new customer engagement features for utilities and their customers. Opower is the world’s most widely deployed utility customer engagement platform, providing energy data analytics on over two trillion meter reads and powering the utility customer experience for more than 60 million households.

The Oracle Challenger Series today announced its return to Southern California for two events in early 2020. The third stop of the 2019-2020 series takes place at the Newport Beach Tennis Club on January 27 – February 2. The Indian Wells Tennis Garden hosts the final tournament on March 2-8.

Now in its third year, the Oracle Challenger Series helps up-and-coming American players secure both ranking points and prize money in the United States. The two American men and two American women who accumulate the most points over the course of the Challenger Series receive wild cards into the singles main draws at the BNP Paribas Open in Indian Wells. As part of the Oracle Challenger Series’ mission to grow the sport and make professional tennis events more accessible, each tournament is free and open to the public.

The Newport Beach and Indian Wells events will conclude the 2019-2020 Road to Indian Wells and are instrumental in determining which American players receive wild card berths at the 2020 BNP Paribas Open. At the halfway point of the Challenger Series, Houston champion Marcos Giron holds the top spot for the men. Usue Arconada is in first place for the women following an impressive showing in New Haven with finals appearances in both singles and doubles. Trailing just behind them are Tommy Paul, the men’s champion in New Haven, and CoCo Vandeweghe, the women’s runner-up in Houston.

The Newport Beach event has propelled its champions to career-defining seasons over the previous two years. Americans Taylor Fritz and Danielle Collins began their steady climb up the world rankings by capturing the titles at the 2018 inaugural event. Bianca Andreescu’s 2019 title marked the beginning of her meteoric rise to WTA stardom. Likewise, the Indian Wells event has featured some of the Challenger Series’ strongest player fields and produced champions Martin Klizan, Sara Errani, Kyle Edmund and Viktorija Golubic.

The Newport Beach tournament will also feature the Oracle Champions Cup which takes place on Saturday, February 1. Former World No. 1 and 2003 US Open Champion Andy Roddick; 10-time ATP Tour titlist and former World No. 4 James Blake; 2004 Olympic silver medalist and 6-time ATP Tour singles winner Mardy Fish; and 2005 US Open semifinalist Robby Ginepri headline the one-night tournament. The event consists of two one-set semifinals with the winners meeting in a one-set championship match.

Tickets to the Oracle Champions Cup go on-sale to the general public on Tuesday, December 17. Special VIP packages including play with the pros, special back-stage access and an exclusive player party are also available.

For more information about the Oracle Challenger Series visit oraclechallengerseries.com, and be sure to follow @OracleChallngrs on Twitter and @OracleChallengers on Instagram. To inquire about volunteer opportunities, including becoming a ball kid, please email oraclechallengerseries@desertchampions.com.

Oracle (NYSE: ORCL) today announced that Dr. Vishal Sikka, founder and CEO of the AI company Vianai Systems, has been named to Oracle’s Board of Directors.  Before starting Vianai, Vishal was a top executive at SAP and the CEO of Infosys.

“The digital transformation of an enterprise is enabled by the rapid adoption of modern cloud applications and technologies,” said Oracle CEO Safra Catz. “Vishal clearly understands how Oracle’s Gen2 Cloud Infrastructure, Autonomous Database and Applications come together in the Oracle Cloud to help our customers drive business value and adapt to change. I am very happy that he will be joining the Oracle Board.”

“For years, the Oracle Database has been the heartbeat and life-blood of every large and significant organization in the world,” said Dr. Vishal Sikka. “Today, Oracle is the only one of the big four cloud companies that offers both Enterprise Application Suites and Secure Infrastructure technologies in a single unified cloud. Oracle’s unique position in both applications and infrastructure paves the way for enormous innovation and growth in the times ahead. I am excited to have the opportunity to join the Oracle Board, and be part of this journey.”

“Vishal is one the world’s leading experts in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning,” said Oracle Chairman and CTO Larry Ellison. “These AI technologies are key foundational elements of the Oracle Cloud’s Autonomous Infrastructure and Intelligent Applications. Vishal’s expertise and experience makes him ideally suited to provide strategic vision and expert advice to our company and to our customers. He is a most welcome addition to the Oracle Board.”

Clinical trials are an essential gateway for getting new cures to market. However, many patients struggle to find the right trials that meet their unique medical requirements. To explore better ways to match patients with the right trials, Oracle Health Sciences is once again participating in The Opportunity Project (TOP) Technology Sprint: Creating the Future of Health.

This year’s entry joins Oracle technology with de-identified precision oncology open data sets from the United States Department of Veterans Affairs and the National Cancer Institute. The demo will highlight how Artificial Intelligence (AI) and customer experience solutions could be used to connect cancer patients with available clinical trials and experimental therapies.

“It is paramount that we collaborate with our peers within the federal government and technology communities to collectively evaluate what innovative opportunities exist and to explore the potential applications AI and machine learning can offer to fight deadly diseases such as cancer,” said Steve Rosenberg, senior vice president and general manager, Oracle Health Sciences. “The opportunity to participate in the TOP challenge lets us apply Oracle solutions in new ways while also harnessing the learnings to benefit the lives of patients who need treatment in the future.”

Connecting Patients with Critical Trials

This year Oracle’s entry builds on the last technology sprint by leveraging open datasets to explore more deeply the applications of machine learning (ML) and AI. In addition, it demonstrates how features for prospective trial recruitment will work with appropriate identity protection.

Oracle’s submission uses a combination of Oracle Healthcare Foundation, Oracle CX Service, Oracle Policy Automation, Oracle Digital Assistant and Oracle Labs PGX: Parallel Graph AnalytiX solutions to create a demonstration that in the future might enable connecting patients and clinical staff through intuitive interfaces that provide data at the point of care. A graphical interface would allow physicians to track a patient’s care journey and would indicate which clinical trial options are available. It applies AI to standardize data from clinical trial requirement forms to specify eligibility criteria. The result can be a more simplified and personalized experience to help determine the best treatment for patients. Patients can also keep their identifying information from being shared, while allowing only their de-identified clinical data to be made available so they can receive information about new programs, clinical studies or therapies that may be of value to their care.

TOP is a 12-week technology development sprint that brings together technology developers, communities, and government to solve real-world problems using open data. TOP will host its Demo Day 2019 on December 10, 2019 at the U.S. Census Bureau in Suitland, MD.