Siemens Shared Services selects Oracle clustered database

Oracle has announced that Siemens Shared Services, a provider of payroll to human resources solutions, has deployed its clustered database environment to support services to more than 70,000 Siemens employees across the US.

Relying on Oracle Database, Oracle Real Application Clusters, Oracle Automatic Storage Management, Oracle Partitioning, and Oracle Enterprise Manager, Siemens Shared Services's clustered database environment is expected to deliver the performance, scalability, reliability, and flexibility required to support its Oracle's PeopleSoft Enterprise Human Capital Management applications and critical business processes, including payroll for all US-based employees.

Siemens Shared Services uses Oracle Partitioning to break payroll data information into manageable components. To monitor its clustered environment, the company uses the monitoring and diagnostic capabilities of Oracle Enterprise Manager.

In addition, Siemens Shared Services relies on Oracle Automatic Storage Management to automate and streamline storage performance and management and add additional storage capacity without disruption.

Steve Montgomerie, administrator of Oracle Database at Siemens Shared Services, said: "Oracle Real Application Clusters on Windows provides us with the continuous uptime we need to meet our critical business objectives, while easing the burden of our IT infrastructure to grow and scale with the business."

Source: www.cbronline.com

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Oracle creates Web 2.0 division

Oracle is building a global division to offer businesses products, services and best practices for Web 2.0 collaboration.

Charles Phillips, Oracle's president, speaking in London today (9 May), said Oracle would be forming a Web 2.0 organisation to provide businesses with Webcenter, a new platform for building wikis, blogs and content management for Web 2.0 collaboration. He said, "Over the next few years we will be building collaboration into our enterprise application products."

The process for approving expenses is one area such collaboration would work for business users, Phillips said. Web 2.0 collaboration technology could allow the manager to check a travel expense with the travel agent directly, compare travel costs against previous trips to the same destination and, if the person submitting the expense was online, obtain further clarification using instant messaging.

Phillips said Oracle was also developing a collaborative platform that would take users beyond the functionality provided by e-mail packages such as Lotus Notes and Microsoft Exchange. "The Beehive product we are developing we will be able to provide an e-mail [server] and a presence-aware environment," which would allow users to see who else was online.

Phillips said the product would remove the need for businesses to run large server farms to support their Microsoft Exchange infrastructure, as it would use computing grids instead of servers.

Separately, Oracle is also investigating how to make patches update automatically, without requiring enterprise application software to be restarted. Oracle's 11g product family has some of this functionality built-in, but, Phillips said, "It is way too hard to update enterprise application software."

If Oracle is able to crack this problem, Phillips hopes it would be able to offer users continuous releases of its software, which could simplify patch management and upgrading.

Author: Cliff Saran @ www.computerweekly.com

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A conversation with Charles Phillips, president Oracle

This morning I participated in a round table conversation with Charles Phillips, president of Oracle, discussing his take on Enterprise 2.0 technologies and how they apply to Oracle’s view of the enterprise applications space. While there was nothing earth shatteringly new in what he said, some nuggets emerged.

Later this year, Oracle will be launching its Enterprise 2.0 salesforce with WebCenter at the heart of what it offers. Despite the cheesy name: “If you can come up with a better one then I’d like to hear from you”, he quipped, Phillips is putting ‘Enterprise 2.0′ style thinking at the heart of how Oracle not only sells but trains its ecosystem of partners. “Training all or a handful of partners on a small part of what we offer is very expensivewhen you take travel etc into account. We want to move to a more collaborative environment for online training”

I was particularly interested in four areas:

Q: How does Oracle see the difference between external facing customer groups and internal collaboration from an Oracle E2.0 products perspective?

A: We think the concepts are the same though there may be differences such as the need for strong security for the internal collaborative communities. So for us it is the same product but with different emphases.

Q: Given that Oracle is developing new communities and tool, do you see the external work that people like Eddie Awad is doing becoming folded into these new initiatives?

A: I don’t want to pre-announce anything but you can expect to see us deliver some exciting developments in this area.

Q: You seem to be spending a lot of time asking customers questions about their readiness for Enterprise 2.0 style applications. Is this informing product development?

A: There’s always a balance to be struck between what customers want and what we can validate putting into development. Right now there is a demand but we’re also getting people to think more about presence as the form of environment in which they operate.

Q: What are your thoughts on embedding E2.0 style applications into business process?

A: We think there are three components: tasks that can be automated, data and collaboration so we’re working on bringing those together. You might want for example to ask questions about expenses incurred, compare it with other similar expenses or see if the cost is within budget. Enterprise 2.0 applications would help in those circumstances but you can explode that idea out to many other business processes.

Contrary to popular perception, Phillips argued that sales people do wish to collaborate but he agreed they don’t necessarily want C-level oversight. Oracle is hoping it can address efficiency among sales led organizations through the addition of social tools that help sale people easily discover content they can use and re-use in their presentations. “There’s a series of tags people can apply. People can look at past patterns of use, who’s used a particular presentation, share it and so on,” he said.

To the more general point about skepticism among business leaders around the value of Enterprise 2.0 approaches, Phillips agreed there is a significant education process to go through. “All businesses should want to find new pockets of demand but we need to show them what can be done. When we get that opportunity, people love what they see.”

Those of us used to Oracle are accustomed to seeing its executives in ebullient mood. I detected that Phillips was offering a pragmatic view of the world, not declaring victory and recognizing the real world challenges of collaborative environments. That’s to be welcomed. Right now I see a surfeit of applications coming to the E2.0 space and sense that business is in a period of both learning and digestion.

Source: Dennis Howlett @ http://blogs.zdnet.com

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