Oracle Mobile Cloud Enterprise (MCe, for short) is a platform that helps you build engaging experiences across mobile, web, wearables, and chatbots, featuring analytics tools that provide deep insights into user adoption and behavior.

With MCe, you get:

• A platform for building chatbots and integrating them with the most popular messaging channels. The platform also includes a powerful AI engine, a sophisticated tool for building out your bot’s dialog, and a bots builder that brings everything together in a single user interface.
• A set of rich tools for analyzing, monitoring, and optimizing mobile, web apps, and intelligent bots. These tools provide up-to-the-minute, detailed insights into what users are doing—using actual behavioral data—to take the guesswork out of what’s working, and what isn’t. You can then take action based on these insights to optimize your solution.
• A platform for building native, hybrid or low-code mobile apps that includes:
  • Easy-to-use client SDKs for native Android, iOS, and Windows mobile apps, as well as a JavaScript SDK for hybrid mobile apps.
  • A low-code mobile app tool (Mobile Application Accelerator) that allows non-technical citizen developers to quickly compose on-device mobile apps.
  • A place to store mobile app data in the cloud - and/or in your enterprise IT systems, if you prefer.
  • Built-in data offline, so mobile users can use your app in a disconnected environment, then synchronize data later when Internet connection is re-established.
  • A simple way to create custom business logic with custom APIs, using industry standards such as Node.js, JavaScript and RAML.
  • Location Services that provide a 360-degree view of contextual location information, to enhance mobile user decision making and engagement.
  • Ability for mobile developers to mock data and continue with their apps while waiting for service developers to implement the final API in JavaScript.
• Enterprise-grade security. In Oracle Mobile Cloud Enterprise, all resources are secured and can only be accessed via API calls made by authenticated users that are authorized to access those resources. You can enable authentication through one or more of these methods:
  • OAuth Consumer
  • HTTP Basic
  • Enterprise Single Sign-On (SSO) (which includes variants for browser-based SSO and use of third-party tokens)
  • Facebook Login

After you enable one of these methods for a backend, you can associate the APIs that you want to use with that backend, then write app code using one of those authentication methods.

A chatbot is simply a computer program that conducts human-like conversations with a person, especially over the Internet. Bots use powerful Natural Language Processing (NLP) Machine Learning (ML) algorithms to understand the end user conversation, then process these conversations and integrate them with business data to respond back to the end user. Anyone who knows how to send a SMS message or use a channel like FB Messenger, WhatsApp, or Slack can interact with a bot without having to learn anything new.

• Fast channel integration.  Among popular channels like FB Messenger, WeChat, Skype, Line, Telegram, and so on, integration interfaces and requirements can vary widely. Different channels can handle things like queuing, routing, rate limits, fallbacks, retries, uptime, errors, exceptions, and so on, using profoundly different approaches. MCe abstracts these complexities for you, and provides out-of-the-box capabilities that make it much easier and faster for you to integrate your bot with your channel of choice.
• User-friendly user interface.  We've made it easy for you to focus on building your bot with a UI that helps you set up your intents, dialog, and entities—without having to worry about fine-tuning the algorithms that drive the Natural Language Processing occurring behind the scenes. Rest assured that our series of technologies, based on neural networks and spectral embedding, dramatically increases the accuracy of NLP from the end user.
• Continuous evolution.  We're continuously adding additional algorithms to simplify bot development, including algorithms to understand user sentiment, image analysis, language translation, self-learning, and behavioral analysis. You decide which algorithms you want to include in your bot simply by including them in your pipeline—without the headache of researching, developing, and testing the algorithms yourself.
• Enterprise integration.  At its core, the purpose of a bot is to surface data intelligently to the end user, which makes integration with enterprise and cloud data sources a critical component of any bot platform. With Oracle PaaS, you get a complete stack that includes Oracle Integration Cloud (OIC), which boasts integrations to over 75+ enterprise and non-enterprise backend systems; API Cloud Service, which makes it easy to design and mock up APIs, and to secure and configure API policies; and much more.

Yes. You can easily add chat functionality to any mobile app you developed using MCS. (If you wish to leverage push notifications in your bot, however, use MCe's push notification feature, rather than MCS's. Doing so allows you to more tightly integrate your bot with notifications in a single instance.) In addition, you can re-use any mobile API you developed in MCS to access enterprise data backends, simply by invoking the API from your MCe-hosted chatbot.

MCe Analytics supports multiple personae (developer, line of business, operations) with rich, easy-to-use analytics and highly customizable reports. In particular, line of business and operations personnel get a broad range of behavioral analytics via usage, conversion, and engagement metrics, while developers can take advantage of service-level analytics to detect execution anomalies, locate failed calls, and identify opportunities to enhance performance.

Mobile Application Accelerator (MAX) enables non-technical citizen developers (such as business analysts or power users) to quickly compose an on-device mobile application. It supports a browser-based development that allows you to edit, test, and publish mobile apps, all from a browser console. You can preview the application with live data using the browser console, without having to deploy to device simulators. There is absolutely no coding required, and deploying the application is as simple as scanning the QR code from your mobile device to trigger the application download process.

To help simplify mobile app development, MCe provides these built-in APIs:

• Push Notification
• Data Offline / Sync
• Mobile User Management
• Analytics
• Mobile Storage
• Device Management

You can call these APIs directly from your apps via straight REST calls, or with the help of MCe's SDKs for the iOS and Android platforms. MCe also provides a robust API Designer tool, so you can create your own custom APIs to go after the data you need. Or use the Express API Designer to quickly build APIs for rapid prototyping or low-code mobile apps.

MCe leverages common standards for defining and implementing APIs. RAML (REST API Markup Language) is used to describe the interface for your mobile API, and you can import and export RAML documents to make your move to MCe that much easier. When it comes time to implement the API, you create your custom code in Node.js-based JavaScript, shaping the data to maximize mobile app performance. You can also mash up data from many sources by leveraging JavaScript and connectors, which allow you to reach into the backend systems to deliver enterprise data securely.

If your client can invoke RESTful APIs, it's supported by MCe. In addition, MCe ships native SDKs for iOS, and Android, as well as for hybrid apps built on the Cordova framework. JavaScript SDK supports Oracle JavaScript Extension Toolkit (JET, which is included with MCe) as well as third party JavaScript Frameworks. Lastly, you can leverage Mobile Application Accelerator (MAX) to compose your mobile application, without writing a single line of code.

No. MCe can leverage and work with other Oracle Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions, but nothing is required for an MCe subscription.

MCe was designed with enterprise security baked right in. Mobile applications automatically have access to MCe security features through the backend, a logical grouping of resources for an app or group of apps. Among other things, the backend provides the gateway for your app to access MCe assets through basic auth and/or OAuth2.0. This means that all the resources provided by MCe are protected by default, such as storage in collections, custom API endpoints, and more. Permission must be granted to access these resources through role-based access (RBA). MCe propagates identity from the mobile user into backend enterprise systems, using standards such as Basic Auth, SAML 2.0, and UserName Token profiles. Finally, MCe can integrate with on-premise security infrastructure such as Oracle Access Manager or Active Directories, which allows mobile application to authenticate with enterprise SSO credentials.

You can learn more about MCe by checking out the Mobile Cloud eBook.  Or, if you're ready to try out MCe, use the free cloud credit offer through the Oracle Cloud Trial link.

You can then contact your Oracle Sales Representative if you're interested in subscribing, or simply convert your trial account to a paying account.

A full set of training videos, spanning a range of topics from overview through feature deep-dives, are available on Oracle Mobile Platform YouTube channel. You can subscribe to the channel by clicking this link.

You can ask questions in the Oracle Mobile and Intelligent Bot Community forum.