Running business operations in the face of the information revolution presents several challenges to enterprise organizations. It is this problem that organizations seek to address with the deployment of robust IT infrastructure with investments into high capacity storage systems and data-processing applications which should convert this information into measurable business value.
Trends such as cloud computing, social apps, analytics and the adoption of mobile devices introduce new business problems to the enterprise. Social apps provide instant feedback to a customer’s immediate network, this includes the customer’s experience (negative or positive) of a certain product. Businesses should be able to capture these sentiments and analyze them, if they are to gain any actionable insight from their market.
Various business applications are run across the enterprise and these are tied into different processes including financial reporting, payroll,
customer databases. The amount of computing power required to get insight from this information sometimes transforms the processing of this information into batch operations.
“When you look at the number of events handled in a Finance Department alone, financial planning and reporting, acquisitions, compliance reporting, a single department produces so much data in one day. Getting management insight from this data however takes too long because present IT infrastructure cannot produce such insight on demand,” says Carlo Vaiti from Oracle Systems, “Application Engineered Systems provides highly available resources from which transform batch operations to on-demand processes.”
Carlo gives an example of Equity Bank who made a massive investment into application-engineered systems. On the previous Oracle M8000 system, Equity utilized 80% of their system, sometimes maxing out the memory or the processing resources. After upgrading to the Oracle Supercluster, the bank utilizes less than 5% of the system. This is achieved despite multiple tasks running on the same platform.
Oracle’s application-engineered system (AES) is built as a multi-tenancy platform such that various application can be deployed on it without introducing any conflict. The average return on investment on the AES is between 9 and 12 months. Several options are also included for running Oracle applications on the system, with the company offering in-memory modules for most of its application – E-Business Suite, Siebel, PeopleSoft, Exadata, Exalytics.
