Melbourne Health tests Oracle 11g beta

Oracle yesterday heralded Melbourne Health as one of the first Australian customers for its 11g database, which is still a beta test version.

Melbourne Health is the first Oracle 10g user to upgrade to the latest version of its database software. Oracle hopes that over the next year, between of 15 and 30 percent of its 10g customers will follow, said Mark Townsend, Oracle's vice president of server technologies.

Melbourne Health has rolled out the new platform to five member institutions under the Bio21: Molecular Medicine Informatics Model (MMIM) project, which is a AU$16 million federal and Victorian government-funded initiative designed to help researchers and clinicians access and share information between institutions.

According to Naomi Rafael, senior database administrator at Melbourne Health, the updated database will help researchers make better use of the seven million MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) scans, which are currently stored on DAT tapes.

Rafael said the MRI scans are used to create huge 3D images that can help detect brain deformations associated with epilepsy."Someone came along and said, 'We've got 12 years worth of MRI images and we don't know how many gigabytes it is because they're distributed on a thousand DAT tapes. Do you think you could load that up onto a server for us?'"

Chuckling at the severe underestimation, she said the DAT tapes contained two terabytes of scan data.

Rafael's search for a new system covered PAC (picture archiving and communication) systems, file systems as well as outsourced PACs solutions, but it ended when Oracle got wind of the project and, as an existing 10g customer, proposed Melbourne Health join the 11g beta program.

Under the MMIM system, multiple local research repositories are connected via a virtual private network to a "federated data integrator" which contains the MMIM metadata scheme.

For the MRI scans to include Melbourne Health's metadata scheme, all the files have been converted to DICOM (Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine) files -- an open standard, similar to a ZIP file, which bundles JPEGs, video and other files into a single file and retains metadata used to identify and manage images.

Rafael said that combining the information in both databases was crucial.

"Our clinicians wanted to know if someone had diabetes in one database and the same person had choleric cancer in another institution's database. We wanted a way to find out what happened to that person in those two databases so we devised a way of identifying each person in the database -- patient name, date of birth, Medicare number, sex etc -- which is all stored in 11g."

Once stored in 11g, said Rafael, the system probabilistically matches information in it with other databases. If a match is found, it re-issues the same identification number that occurred in the first instance.

"They can do queries through the FDI (Federated Integration database) and can view data on various repositories," Rafael said.

Over the next 12 months Rafael expects the new system to be rolled out to research and health sites in regional Victoria, New South Wales, Canberra and Tasmania.

Author: Liam Tung

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What's in a Name? Oracle's Mixed Message With Siebel CRM On Demand

Oracle reverts to the Siebel moniker for the newest version of its CRM On Demand product, which features several usability, customization, and integration enhancements.

Oracle Corp. has made generally available the latest iteration of its acquired Siebel Systems on-demand product, an offering that revives the Siebel moniker despite Oracle's previously announced decision to rebrand the software as"Oracle CRM On Demand." The new edition, Siebel CRM On Demand Release 14, leverages Oracle Fusion Middleware technology; is the first major release of the software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering since Oracle finalized the acquisition of its former rival in January 2006; and is the first to run entirely on Oracle's infrastructure.

Many of the improvements fused into the product concentrate on strengthening usability and customization capabilities as well as tightening integration with other applications, such as Oracle E-Business Suite. The release draws on programming languages such as AJAX and technologies such as in-line edit to simplify user tasks. The release also introduces home-page customization functionality, such as the ability to arrange page elements such as lists, history, and favorites based on end-user preference.Release 14 also provides integration with other applications and systems at the process-, data-, and user-interface (UI) levels, according to the company. "The improvements in the UI and the customization capabilities are pretty big and are required to keep them competitive," says Rob Bois, a research director at AMR Research. "It seems like all the CRM vendors today are spending a lot of time and effort improving usability because they recognize that usability is still a big challenge."

Robert DeSisto, vice president of CRM at Gartner, takes a similar stance in a June 2007 research note entitled, "Oracle Has Renewed Its Focus on CRM on Demand," noting that the release improves usability and customization, Oracle E-Business Suite integration, and physical database separation. "It also leverages Oracle Fusion Middleware; however, it is limited when creating custom objects," he writes.

Release 14 also includes industry-specific editions; a built-in virtual call center; embedded analytics; and a prebuilt data warehouse for real-time decision-making. "We continue to see Siebel CRM On Demand really building in the analytics as a key differentiator, and we've seen a lot of customers get a lot of value out of the analytics piece of the solution," says Rebecca Wettemann, vice president of research at Nucleus Research, which has a "Siebel CRM On Demand Guidebook" available for download from Oracle's corporate Web site.

Interestingly enough, however, Oracle's on-demand positioning appears to contradict the company's previously announced roadmap, which seemed to include retiring the Siebel name in favor of an Oracle brand. (The April 17, 2007, press release announcing that Release 14 would be available "within 12 months" clearly labeled the product "Oracle CRM On Demand.")

Prior to the January 2006 Siebel acquisiton, Oracle CRM On Demand "was developing market momentum and becoming a formidable competitive threat to Salesforce.com," according to DeSisto's note. "However, since the acquisition, interest in Oracle CRM On Demand had diminished significantly in the market. Gartner has seen a reduction of nearly 75 percent in inquiries on competitive customer evaluations involving Oracle CRM On Demand," he writes. "Having acquired multiple large installed bases (such as Siebel On Premise, PeopleSoft and JD Edwards), Oracle's focus has been on such programs as Applications Unlimited and Oracle Fusion, rather than growing Oracle CRM On Demand."

Oracle executives were unavailable for comment by press time to discuss the release. But for Oracle's part, this new edition--the 14th release of the product in three-and-a-half years--marks the first formal announcement of the availability of a new Siebel CRM on Demand product since the April 2006 announcement of version 10, which was rebranded at the time as Oracle CRM On Demand. (As with Release 10, pricing for Siebel CRM On Demand Release 14 starts at $70 per user, per month.) In the intervening period, Oracle rolled out Releases 11, 12, and 13, but no formal press announcements were made; the naming convention and branding used for those release versions was not clear at press time, nor was the precise timing or rationale behind the reversion to the Siebel name.

The naming conventions can get somewhat convoluted because Oracle refers to the application service provider (ASP) part of its business--which includes a hosted version of the traditional Siebel application--as "on demand," although, according to Bois, Oracle's homegrown (pre-Siebel-acquisition) version lacks the bona fide multitenant SaaS functionality of Siebel CRM On Demand. "They use 'on demand' to describe the ASP model as well as the true SaaS version, so customers do tend to get a little bit confused. The more they can distinguish the true SaaS product from the traditional ASP version would certainly help." Oracle, Bois continues, "hasn't figured out how long and how firmly they want to hold on to the Siebel brand, but it clearly carries a lot of equity so they're trying to keep the Siebel brand in there as long as possible."

To that end, Wettemann contends that stamping the Siebel CRM On Demand with Oracle's name had confused customers, rather than clarifying and simplifying the brand. "Going back to Siebel is a good recognition of the strengths of that brand name," she says. "It's taking away that confusion because customers are clear that what they're getting is the Siebel product that was developed and not the Oracle CRM product."

Overall, Bois maintains that it's good to see Oracle continue to put an emphasis on the on-demand product. "SaaS is driving the future growth of the CRM space," he says. "When you have one of the biggest CRM vendors continuing to push that, it's good for the industry."

Author: Coreen Bailor

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Paetec uses Oracle SOA to automate ordering

Oracle and Paetec Communications today announced that Paetec has deployed Oracle’s Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) applications, enabling the competitive service provider to more efficiently automate the full service delivery process, from sales and contracts right through to provisioning the service.

By deploying Oracle systems throughout its back office, Paetec also has enabled more rapid and efficient integration of U.S. LEC, the competitive services provider with which it is merging, said Bob Moore, Paetec’s chief information officer. Using the Oracle E-Business Suite will enable the company to have a single, consolidated view of customers as it continues to work to consolidate databases and merger OSSs, he said.

While Paetec has used Oracle systems in the past, including Siebel order management and customer care products, Portal Software billing and revenue management and MetaSolv service fulfillment products, using SOA applications to tie everything together “supercharges our relationship with Oracle,” Moore said.And most importantly for Paetec, which differentiates itself in the competitive market by offering complex services tailored to enterprise needs, tying everything together enables rapid, paperless, automated ordering, Moore said.

“We have the sales force mechanized and the contract process mechanized, but then [the sale] goes to an order group, given how complex Paetec’s service line is, since we differentiate by being high-tech and high-touch,” Moore said. “The one piece that has been missing has been automated paperless ordering system. Generally how people do it is to pick your package, then someone in the back end takes it and connects the dots.”

Using Oracle SOA will also enable Paetec to continue its practice of providing profit assistance online, as that is integrated within the Oracle workflow of the sales process, Moore said.

“The sales reps take a building block approach from the ground up of what they are selling, and the costs are built into this,” he explained. “We do margin approvals based on that. What makes ours special, and one of the things that has always differentiated us, is the high-touch value collaborative sale. It enables us to keep really good margins and be good selling to the enterprises, which is one reason for churn that is industry low.”

By tying together systems using Oracle Fusion Middleware, account reps can sit down with customers and do point-and-click building blocks of service components to quickly process a completely customized contract, Moore said.

Paetec is rolling out these systems now and will connect them using the Oracle SOA applications by the first quarter of 2008. The company will be able to integrate U.S. LEC customers into the process, even before it moves billing data from the system that U.S. LEC used onto a different billing system that Paetec is using.

“The most disruptive thing you can do to a customer is change billing systems,” Moore said. “This way, the consolidated view of the customer lives within Oracle – all the workflow, ordering from business and systems perspective is all Oracle – things flowing in and out of billing system and in and out of the order system are all Oracle. That doesn’t mean we won’t consolidate our billing systems at some point, but we don’t have to do that right away.”

Author: Carol Wilson

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