eHarmony Weds Oracle 10g

Oracle on Monday announced that eHarmony, a leading online dating and match-making service, is now using the Oracle 10g database to play Cupid to more than 17 million love-starved users.

While the actual transition from Microsoft's SQL Server database software only took an uneventful three hours, the planning, testing and installation took more than 14 months, according to Mark Douglas, eHarmony's vice president of technology.

But the days and weeks preceding those fateful three hours were every bit as nerve-wracking as those awkward, hesitant seconds leading up to a couple's first kiss.

"It went flawlessly, but a lot of our IT people were nervous," Douglas said in an interview with internetnews.com. "Some said they didn't know a lot about databases but it sounded risky. We’re a 24/7 business. We can't just shut our database down for the weekend."

To make it happen, Douglas and his five-person IT crew embarked on the tedious task of scripting custom code that would allow eHarmony to seamlessly transfer data from the SQL Server database to Oracle 10g without any downtime.

The eHarmony site handles more than 400 million page views a month and processes between 400 and 1,200 transactions per second. Douglas wouldn't comment on exactly how much revenue would be lost if the site went down but said it would "a lot more" than a $1,000 a minute.

"The analogy I like to use is that is was like transferring packages from one plane to another while both are in flight," he said. "We had to write a really significant amount of code."

eHarmony, along with competitors such as Yahoo Personals, Match.com, JDate and dozens of other more specialized sites, allows subscribers to build personal profiles, view other subscribers' profiles and access an array of dating services, including a match-making system that connects would-be lovers with others based on their dating preferences. eHarmony, based in Pasadena, Calif., charges $59 a month for the service but does offer long-term contracts at a lower monthly rate.

In the past year, eHarmony's registered user base has surged from around 11 million to more than 17 million, adding an average of 15,000 new daters each day. That kind of growth, Douglas said, couldn't be accommodated on SQL Server.

"There's nothing particularly wrong with SQL," he said. "We just needed functionality that Microsoft doesn't provide and didn't want to write it all ourselves."

Leading up to the live launch, eHarmony tested migrating more than five terabytes of its precious data every day for 100 days in a row. It uses more than 400 servers to process changes to customer profiles, queries for potential matches, searches and new customer orders.

Douglas said the total cost to move eHarmony to Oracle 10g was in the vicinity of $1.5 million. The site's perceived response time—essentially how fast individual pages load—has improved by about 30 percent and the IT department no longer has to schedule planned site outages to perform service operations on the system as it did with the SQL Server software.

According to a study conducted by the Online Publishers Association and comScore Networks, Americans in 2005 spent more than $500 million on online personals and dating sites.

For the record, Douglas is married, didn't meet his wife on eHarmony and said the company prohibits employees from using the service.

Author: Larry Barrett

Read more ...

eRewards Selects Oracle Database Infrastructure for Online Market Research

eRewards, Inc., a provider of online market research, has opted for Oracle Database infrastructure to conduct online market research. eRewards leverages a family of Oracle Database products as the basis for its online transaction processing (OLTP) and data warehouse systems.

eRewards makes use of Oracle Database 10g to power its program, which rewards members for the time they spend answering online surveys. Participating in the program, members earn e-Rewards currency, which can be redeemed for a variety of rewards including dining, entertainment, travel and retail rewards.

eRewards relies on Oracle Database 10g, Oracle Real Application Clusters, Oracle Automatic Storage Management, Oracle Data Guard and Oracle Warehouse Builder 10g to process the influx of data.

eRewards' Web site runs on OLTP system supported by Oracle Database 10g and Oracle Real Application Clusters that facilitate online interaction with eRewards members. The multi-terabyte data warehouse of eRewards also works on Oracle Database and Oracle Real Application Clusters. In addition, eRewards leverages the flexibility of Oracle Data Guard to keep its data warehouse up-to-date with the latest information captured by the OLTP system. eRewards has also deployed Oracle Warehouse Builder 10g to design its data warehouse and business intelligence systems.

"We evaluated competitive offerings and nothing could match the combination of functionality, performance, manageability and the cost structure offered by Oracle," said Joel Davis, Senior Vice President of Technology, eRewards. "Near real-time synchronization of our data warehouse with our OLTP system enables eRewards to more effectively scale our environment to meet the needs of members, clients, and employees."

Author: Niladri Sekhar Nath @ TMCnet

Read more ...

Who Will Win The SAP vs Oracle Battle?

When it comes to the business of selling technology, two immutable facts emerge: Past is prologue; and it's always personal.

Just ask Larry Ellison and Henning Kagermann, the stars of the latest and, some might say, most vicious revival of an age-old tale that's been told and re-told throughout the history of American commerce.

This time it's SAP and Oracle.

Before that it was Microsoft and Yahoo for search. And quite some time ago, it was Apple and IBM for PCs. The names change but the storyline remains largely the same: No. 1 and No. 2 channel all their rage and resources toward destroying each other, oblivious or indifferent to an emerging competitor that's soon to kill them both.

And while SAP and Oracle continue to slug it out for the lion's share of the estimated $30 billion-plus that companies spend for business applications and services each year, Salesforce.com's software-as-a-service (SaaS) model is propelling the company to record sales and earnings.

Worse for SAP and Oracle, the on-demand applications provider is not just winning in the small- to mid-sized market, but it's also winning contracts for large installations in head-to-head battles with both rivals and, in some cases, landing subscription deals with some of their largest and most lucrative clients.

"The competition continues to struggle with how to build, sell and deploy multi-tenant shared solutions," Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff said during an Aug. 15 conference call announcing the company's second-quarter results. "The appeal to customers is undeniable. But for entrenched legacy vendors like SAP, Oracle and Microsoft, to truly adopt this model is unthinkable."

Benioff, who might be even better at needling competitors than his former boss, Ellison, said Siemens, SAP's largest European customer, chose to go with his company for its customer relationship management (CRM) software in the second quarter and added "of course, we already have their largest global customer, Dupont. That's amazing."

He said Salesforce.com landed the largest customer account in its history -- a yet undisclosed international financial services firm with more than 35,000 subscribers -- at the expense of Oracle. It also doubled its subscriber deployment at Cisco Systems, a legacy Siebel account, and beat out Oracle for a "large opportunity" at American Express.

An Oracle spokeswoman declined to comment on Salesforce.com's customer wins in the second quarter. In an e-mail to internetnews.com, SAP spokeswoman Lindsey Held wrote "we are focused on our customers, not competitive claims."

The strong second quarter and impressive customer wins aside, Salesforce.com still casts a relatively small shadow over SAP and Oracle. In the quarter, it earned $3.7 million on sales of $176.5 million. It's now projecting sales of between $727 million and $732 million for the fiscal year. Meanwhile, SAP pocketed $2.5 billion on sales of more than $12.4 billion in its most recent fiscal year while Oracle earned $4.3 billion on sales of $18 billion.

While neither SAP nor Oracle is saying much about Salesforce.com or its rapidly expanding subscriber base, both companies say they recognize the importance of the SaaS market. SAP plans to unveil A1S, its twice-delayed SaaS offering geared for the SMB market later this year. Meanwhile, Oracle's Siebel CRM OnDemand service lags far behind Salesforce.com.

"Salesforce is leaps and bounds ahead of Oracle right now," Gartner analyst Sharon Mertz told internetnews.com. "Salesforce has somewhere between $400 million and $500 million in on-demand sales compared to between $50 million and $100 million for Siebel OnDemand."

Mertz said Microsoft looms as a potential threat to Salesforce.com down the road. It will be releasing the latest version of its Dynamics CRM Live service in the first quarter of 2008. She said Microsoft is already bringing in between $175 million and $200 million from its CRM Live offering.

"I don't believe Salesforce's success is necessarily due to the fixation Oracle and SAP have with each other," she said. "They have a good alternative to on-premise solutions for a wide range of company sizes. Now they're making more headway into the larger companies, selling into SAP and Oracle strongholds."

Analysts say the growing popularity of SaaS with companies large and small represents a significant growth opportunity for vendors who can branch out from traditional SaaS applications for CRM and human resources to more business-critical applications such as procurement and compliance management.

In March, Gartner reported worldwide SaaS sales surged to more than $6.3 billion in 2006 and predicts the market will blossom to more than $19.3 billion by 2011.

While Salesforce.com keeps adding subscribers, Oracle and SAP continue to trade punches.

In March, Oracle filed a lawsuit alleging SAP engaged in "corporate theft on a grand scale" by engaging "systematic, illegal access to -- and taking from -- Oracle's computerized customer support systems."

Last month, Kagermann conceded that its subsidiary, TomorrowNow, engaged in "inappropriate" downloads of Oracle support materials but said SAP did not access any of Oracle's intellectual property.

SAP claims the "majority" of the 150-plus complaints in the Oracle lawsuit are "unfounded" and Kagermann said he was "surprised and disappointed" that Oracle did not personally contact him when it discovered the downloads. He also acknowledged the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) has requested some of SAP's internal documents for its investigation.

Oracle contends TomorrowNow employees downloaded thousands of mission-critical items from Oracle's knowledge bases used to service its customers.

Both CEOs have shown an affinity for mocking one another and their companies in the press, particularly in the months leading up to and immediately following Oracle's hostile takeover of PeopleSoft in January 2004.

Kagermann, in a July 2004 interview with Business 2.0, said he wasn't too concerned about Oracle's $10.3 billion purchase.

"Larry claims that he will overtake SAP," he said. "But just look at the facts. Who's gaining market share? It's all bullsh**."

Ellison enjoys mocking his chief competitor by calling it "sap" and damn SAP with faint praise with quotes such as "[SAP] has good industry knowledge and products in some industries, like oil and gas, but they lack industry-specific knowledge and products in most other industries."

Denis Pombriant, an analyst at Stoughton, Mass.-based Beagle Research Group, said the ongoing war between SAP and Oracle is playing a role in distracting both companies from the threat Salesforce.com presents.

"Salesforce started as an insurgent in a corner of the market that Oracle and SAP didn't want to play in," he said. "They're both making half-hearted efforts to develop an on-demand strategy. But they're more focused on attracting customers with on-demand and then switching them to on-premise solutions with bigger price tags and profits."

Author: Larry Barrett

Read more ...