VOICECON - Oracle sees gold in unified communications

Unified communications has helped Oracle integrate its many acquisitions, its CIO said. Oracle has almost three years of experience with unified communications technology that some enterprises are just starting to consider, and it says the deployment has been well worth the time and expense.

Standardizing and centralizing its communications systems has helped the software giant integrate the more than 30 acquisitions it's made over the past three years, including Siebel and PeopleSoft, said CIO Mark Sunday in a keynote speech at VoiceCon.

Unified communications has also saved the company millions of dollars and let it support a growing workforce while actually cutting its voice and data team by 6 percent, he said. The new technology also means better support for users of its Oracle On Demand services, Sunday told attendees at the San Francisco conference.

Although there are still some legacy phone systems Oracle hasn't replaced with VOIP (voice over Internet Protocol) because it doesn't yet pay to do so, the company's general strategy has been one of diving in. Some IT managers at VoiceCon aren't yet so sure about unified communications, but Oracle's Sunday is sold. "The return from deploying this has real, hard savings that more than justifies it," Sunday said.

Nearly 75 percent of Oracle's facilities have migrated to VOIP, Sunday said. Those are spread over 120 countries but are all controlled by six Cisco Systems CallManager systems, and the company wants to end up with just one large CallManager cluster, Sunday said. "Triple redundancy" keeps the phones alive in emergencies, he said. Equipping a new office or consolidating sites, as Oracle has done many times as it bought companies, is much easier than before.

"Effectively, we just plug in the phones," Sunday said. "This is a tremendous enabler for acquiring companies."

Combining voice, video, e-mail and text messaging with presence has saved employees millions of hours, according to Oracle. It also helps developers come together quickly on projects and lets customers quickly reach Oracle and have what Sunday called "rich interaction," beyond voice and e-mail, to solve problems.

The new technologies are also finding their way into Oracle's own products. The company is building communications capabilities into every aspect of its middleware and putting tools such as Oracle Communicator and Oracle Communications Suite on the surface of all its applications, he said.

Matt Drage, an IT director at a manufacturing company, heard Oracle's presentation and wondered whether things have worked as smoothly as described. Drage is getting ready to replace four traditional phone systems and wants something more than just VOIP phones, so he's looking into unified communications at the show.

"I'm hearing that UC is the Holy Grail, but I'm not sure the products are quite ready yet," Drage said. The main thing he hopes it can fix is the array of different things clamoring for employees' attention: desk phones, cell phones, notebooks and technical workstations. Employees tell him they like to travel just because it simplifies their lives down to a cell phone and notebook, he said.

A telecommunications manager at a midwestern university medical center, who asked not to be named, thinks one size may not fit all parts of his organization. He'll leave the choice to departments and then put together a system that makes sense for each. For example, some researchers may have no use for unified communications at all, while a call center for clinic patients might be able to offer better service if operators automatically had information about callers presented to them, he said.

Author: Stephen Lawson @ IDG News Service

Read more ...

ADFD adopts Oracle solution

The Abu Dhabi Fund for Development (ADFD) is set to empower its management and drive workforce efficiency backed by Oracle’s soluiton.

As well as being the first implementation of its kind in the region, the Oracle’s Human Resources Management System (HRMS) solution was implemented in a record 30 days.

The fund’s main activity is to provide economic assistance in the form of confessional loans, grants or contributions to projects capitals.

With more than 240 projects in 55 countries, the fund owns equities in more than 11 organisations in Egypt, Morocco, Oman, Tunisia, and Bangladesh.

"ADFD, which provides conventional development aid to Arab, African, and Asian countries, has provided over $5.7 billion in aid to over 240 projects,” said Ahmed Sari Al Mazrouei, general manager, Abu Dhabi Fund for Development.

“We make a real contribution to the development of infrastructure in some of the world's poorest nations. With our global workforce, it is imperative that we have a reliable and robust human resources management system in place to support all our endeavors. By implementing the Oracle solution, we were able to strengthen the fund inside out & align workforce with the strategic objectives.”

The components of Oracle’s HRMS include Oracle Payroll, Oracle HR Self Service, and Oracle BI Enterprise Publisher (Fusion). By installing Oracle HRMS, Abu Dhabi Fund for Development has increased its operational efficiency.

“The fact that this implementation was complete in a record 30 days will drive ADFD to align its workforce with its business objectives, control and lower employee and administration related costs, manage workforce risk and manage its globally integrated workforce. The systems will also empower managers through its decentralised decision making, and automate all HR and Payroll processes leading to a paper-less organization, ” said Hussam Dajani, senior vice president, Oracle Middle East and Africa.

Oracle’s implementation partner Appslink provided turnkey solutions from consultation to delivery and implementation. “We adapted the system to integrate with Oracle Financials and billing applications with zero customization,” said Mohamed Mowafaq, consulting manager for AppsLink. The web-based Oracle HR Self Service will boost productivity and allow users faster online access to HR data and update their own profiles, thereby lowering costs and increasing reliability of records. This web-based solution is less costly to maintain and suffers fewer breakdowns. With better access to information ADFD will make better use of its workforce and find new opportunities to manage operations more effectively.”

With Oracle HRMS, the fund can now rapidly collect and analyse detailed information about its business and assess the capabilities to improve services by placing the right people with the right skills.

The fund will also be able to trim down costs associated with employee absence, and turnover. Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher will enable ADFD to produce a wide array of documents and reports such as financial statements, high-fidelity reports, invoices, labels, and more, using a variety of familiar applications for layout such as Adobe Acrobat and Microsoft Word.

Author: Abu Dhabi

Read more ...

Sympathy for the Oracle

I used to envy Larry Ellison. But then I had lunch with one of his senior minions, and now I feel a little sympathy. Just a little. :-)

It was actually very educational, because it reinforced for me the power of an open-source sales model, and how it could help Oracle. Oracle kicks tail with sub-$1 billion companies, selling a feature/function value model often winning these deals from SAP. But in the biggest companies, Oracle often loses, and not because it's technology is worse.

No, according to this Oracle executive, it's because SAP builds relationships with executive management at target customers and these CxOs decide for SAP, even when it's the wrong technical decision. Time after time, he talks with the IT executive responsible for the decision after Oracle has lost the sale, and finds out that he was selling to the wrong person.

But surely Oracle could outdo SAP on the executive meet-ups?

Oddly, no, he suggested, because SAP's management exudes thought leadership, whereas Oracle's is more about execution. The prospects want to connect with these SAP executives. As a result, SAP's sales model starts with its thought leadership and ends with a product sale (whereas Oracle takes the inverse approach).

I have no way of knowing how true this is but, if true, an open-source model offers a ray of hope (though surely not the only one, or even the easiest one). Why? Because open source makes it easier to win the bottom-up war. Once one gets to the stage of Red Hat, perhaps it helps to win the top-down war, too (albeit slightly different? Alan Cox exuding technical leadership to the IT staff rather than the CFO/CIO).
Oracle already makes most of its profit on maintenance revenues and, as my friend reminded me, breaks even or loses money quite often on these initial big license sales (because upwards of 100 people can get involved in closing a $1 million deal with a multibillion dollar prospect). So, a low-cost sales model that gets it in the door and sets it up for downstream maintenance revenues sounds ideal.

Is open source a panacea? Of course not. But it sure sounded like a good idea in light of how Oracle prefers to sell and the costs associated with that preference. If only Oracle could adopt the model before it starts getting bumped and scraped by open-source applications and databases. It's nowhere near hurting today, but it could start putting a serious dent on SAP and Microsoft by going on the offensive with open source.

And then we'd no longer need to sing (from The Rolling Stones, "Sympathy for the Devil")...

Please allow me to introduce myself
I'm a man of wealth and taste
I've been around for a long, long years
Stole many a man's soul and faith...
So if you meet me
Have some courtesy
Have some sympathy, and some taste
Use all your well-learned politesse
Or I'll lay your soul to waste.

No, we'd have real sympathy.

Author: Matt Asay

Read more ...