oracle fast data customer reference booklet, october 2013

INFORMATION FOR SUCCESSOracle Fast Data Customer Reference Booklet October 2013

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To understand fast data, one must first look at one of the most compelling new breakthroughs in data management: big data. Oracle believes that big data solutions address the challenge today’s businesses are facing when it comes to managing the increasing volume, velocity, variety of all data - not just data within the organization but also about the organization. Velocity is about the ability to process large volumes of data in real-time and make decisions in a more rapid fashion to create value from highly-perishable, high-volumes of data in business operations.

This is where fast data comes in. Fast data is a term that was coined recently by Ovum’s Tony Baer who wrote, “Fast data, the velocity side of big data, is not new, but technology price/performance trends are making fast data applications more widely available”. Fast data is a complimentary approach to big data for managing large quantities of “in-flight” data that helps organizations get a jump on those business-critical decisions. Fast data is the continuous access and processing of events and data in real-time for the purposes of gaining instant awareness and instant action.

Every business wants to be smarter about how they do business. Velocity is a critical component to achieving this end goal. By capturing data faster and moving it faster means being able to analyze it and act on it faster. Today more and more organizations are demanding the elimination of event-to-action latency as part of solving a business problem. In today’s fast paced world, data loses value at a faster rate and consequently the value you get from your data diminishes when you don’t tap into it soon enough.

While the term Fast data might be new; it’s a set of mature ideas and technologies around the rapid processing of events and high volumes of data for improved analytical insights. It’s recently been impacted by the explosion in volume and variety of data [big data]; the ubiquitous nature of devices and internet of things, and ultimately the heightened expectations of customers. No longer do we see fast data in only financial stock exchanges or limited to Hadoop based deployments; but it’s becoming more and more pervasive across industries as companies are recognizing the need to run their businesses in real-time. The following customers in this whitepaper cover a range of industries across: Financial Services, Telecommunications, High Tech, Manufacturing, Media and Entertainment, Travel and Transportation, Retail, Professional Services, and finally Public Sector.

Each of these Oracle’s customers are using the combination of Oracle technologies: Oracle Event Processing, Oracle Data Integration, Oracle Business Analytics together with Oracle Engineered systems to deliver fast data value for their organizations.

For more information, go to Oracle.com/fastdata

Demed L’her VP of Product Management Service-Oriented Architecture and Fast Data Oracle

http://www.oracle.com/us/solutions/fastdata/index.html

Table of Contents

Page Customer Name Country

Telecommunications

7 BT United Kingdom

9 Tata Sky Ltd. India

11 Türk Telekom Turkey

13 Turkcell iletisim Hizmetleri A.S. Turkey

Financial Services

16 Woori Bank South Korea

18 Zagrebacka banka d.d. Croatia

High Technology and Manufacturing

21 Neuralitic Systems Inc. Canada

Media and Entertainment

24 Passoker United Kingdom

Travel and Transportation

28 Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, Inc. United States

30 Globalia Corporación Empresarial S.A. Spain

32 Sabre Holdings United States

39 thetrainline.com United Kingdom

42 Europe Airpost France

44 Hong Kong Air Cargo Terminals Ltd. (Hactl) Hong Kong

Retail

50 Starbucks Coffee Company United States

52 Ace Hardware United States

54 Wm Morrison Supermarkets PLC United Kingdom

Professional Services

57 Immonet GmbH Germany

59 Sterci S.A. Switzerland

61 Targetbase United States

63 EngineON United States

65 ProveIT Ltd United Kingdom

67 ON24 United States

69 Sodexo United States

72 Epsilon United States

Public Sector

76 Companhia Imobiliária de Brasília (Terracap) Brazil

TELECOMMUNICATIONS

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BT Increases Sales and Customer Retention with Real-Time Decision-Making Tool for Customer Advisors

Oracle Customer:

BT

London, United Kingdom

www.bt.com

Industry: Communications

Annual Revenue: Over US$5 Billion

Employees: 92,600

Oracle Products & Services:

• Oracle Real-Time Decisions

• Oracle Consulting

BT Group plc is one of the world’s leading communications solutions and services providers, with operations in 170 countries. It delivers fixed-line, broadband, and mobile services, as well as TV products and networked IT services. As part of BT Group Plc, BT Retail provides communication products and services, including broadband, telephony, television, and mobile services to the consumer and small to medium enterprise (SME) markets.

With 20 million customers, BT Retail receives up to 32,000 in-bound calls per day. In addition, specialist teams of 400 advisors handle up to 16,000 calls a day while approximately 50 outbound sales advisors make up to 5,000 calls a day. To provide customers with more appropriate offers and improve sales and subscriber retention, BT wanted to provide its customer advisors with more sophisticated information about individual customers at the point of contact.

BT chose Oracle Real-Time Decisions to deliver real-time information and recommendations to its customer advisors. Since implementing, BT has significantly increased sales conversion rates and value, and reduced customer churn.

“With Oracle Real-Time Decisions, we are already reaping the rewards of improved sales conversions and reduced customer churn. The project was delivered on time, and we are all very proud of this achievement.” –– Alistair Dixon, Head of Delivery, Retail Business Intelligence, BT

• Increased sales conversion rate and value of offers sold as a direct result of individually-targeted recommendations provided by Oracle Real-Time Decisions

• Prevented loss of market share by retaining customers with targeted offers

• Increased customer retention and cross- and up-selling initiatives by providing more than 800 customer advisors with real-time and individually targeted sales recommendations for broadband, television, and telephony services

• Improved execution of “sales-through-service” initiatives by providing customer service team members with the information they need to successfully sell additional communication services to customers during service calls

• Improve up-selling and cross-selling opportunities at the point of customer contact to increase sales of broadband, telephony, television and mobile services during 32,000 calls per day

• Expand customer service representatives’ sales and marketing expertise to increase up-selling and customer retention

• Approach customers with precisely targeted offers to increase sales effectiveness and value, while reducing customer churn

• Replace a simplistic, in-house, tactical decisioning tool with targeted recommendations delivered to customer operatives to drive sales

Challenges

Solutions

BT

8

• Worked with Oracle Consulting to provide the experience, technical skill, and product knowledge needed to replace the in-house decisioning tool with Oracle Real-Time Decisions delivered on-time and under budget

Why Oracle

“We spent more than six months evaluating the products on the market and discounted Chordiant, Unica, and Teradata during the process. We are confident that we made the right choice with Oracle Real-Time Decisions, which is both sophisticated and easy to maintain,” said Alistair Dixon, Head of Delivery, Retail Business Intelligence, BT.

After evaluating a number of products on the market, BT chose Oracle Real-Time Decisions for its flexible decision engine which can be used for a variety of purposes, such as tighter targeting in batch marketing systems, its self-learning capability that enables the engine to draw decisions from previous customer interactions, and its real-time recommendations.

“The number one strength of Oracle Real-Time Decisions is that it truly does make its decisions in real-time. Therefore, it is able to take into account any contextual data that occurs in the interaction with the customer, which is exceedingly valuable. We found on closer examination that many other decisioning engines on the market do not have this level of sophistication,” Dixon said.

Implementation Process

BT worked with Oracle Consulting to implement Oracle Real-Time Decisions within tight time-scales and a pre-defined delivery schedule. Oracle Consulting worked closely with the business to ensure that Oracle Real-Time Decisions would help BT to achieve its business objectives and now provides on-going support to ensure the solution is used to optimal business benefit.

Oracle Consulting provided the technical lead and was responsible for configuring the Real-Time Decisions functions. It also advised on the infrastructure design for the technical architecture and helped to train BT’s internal resources. Oracle University delivered training through instructor-led and classroom-based courses, supplemented with one-to-one coaching by Oracle Consulting to ensure full knowledge transfer.

The initial stages of the project went live in September 2011 and further phases are being rolled out to multiple channels during 2012 and 2013, including an on-line customer self-service operation, outbound sales teams, a specialist customer retention team, and an outbound direct marketing group.

BT

9

Tata Sky Ltd. Processes 1 Million Customer Requests per Day, Resolves Queries 25% Faster

Oracle Customer:

Tata Sky Ltd.

Mumbai, India

www.tatasky.com


Annual Revenue: US$500 Million to US$1 Billion

Employees: 1,200


• Oracle GoldenGate

• Oracle Business Intelligence

Standard Edition

• OSPARC T4-2

• OSPARC Enterprise M9000

• Oracle Solaris 10

Oracle Partner:

Tata Consultancy Services Ltd.

www.tcs.com

Tata Sky Ltd. is a leading, national direct-to-home (DTH) satellite broadcasting television service provider in India. The company provides and installs set-top boxes offering picture, sound, and interactive services for television, as well as high-definition content channels and recorders, and video on demand.

Tata Sky operates an extensive customer-service network to support its more than 7 million national customers. The network includes service installations; a 24-hour call center service; and multilingual customer service staff. Incorporated in 2004, the company is a joint venture between Tata Group and STAR India, and currently holds the largest market share in the national DTH, business-to-customer market. It has 25 offices across the country.

To remain India’s satellite television service provider of choice, Tata Sky wanted to improve its internal, customer-order management system, so it could respond to a growing number of customer phone queries and requests for its satellite broadcasting television services. The company implemented Oracle GoldenGate to provide real-time data integration and Oracle Business Intelligence Standard Edition for reporting and analytics. It is running the applications on SPARC T4-2 and SPARC M9000 servers.

The Oracle solutions enabled Tata Sky’s customer service staff to access, retrieve, and update customer queries and process requests and payments in real time. Tata Sky can now resolve customer phone queries in less than three minutes on average, compared to four minutes previously; process 1 million requests each day, compared to 100,000 previously; and provide more accurate customer service and assistance over the phone, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

“We have used Oracle’s world class products from the start to help us become a leader in India’s direct-to-home market and to support our business growth. We can now process 1 million customer requests per day and resolve queries 25% faster.” –– N. Ravishanker, Chief Information Officer, Tata Sky Ltd.

• Improve its customer call center services by enabling staff to respond to more calls per day and reduce average call-handling time

• Upgrade the customer-order management system to enable staff to access, retrieve, and update customer data faster and in real time, and provide customer service assistance 24 hours a day, seven days a week

• Reduce time to process customer requests and payments for new channels, plans, or packages, to deliver new services to customers immediately

Challenges

• Processed 1 million customer requests made daily by phone, compared to 100,000 previously

• Resolved customer queries 25% faster—in less than three minutes on average compared to four minutes previously—by updating customer profiles and processing requests in real time

• Accelerated the system reboot process and improved patch management using Solaris 10

Solutions

TATA SKY LTD.

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• Improved, by 20%, the tracking and recording of customer complaints made over the phone, by automating its interactive voice response database to record calls in real time

• Provided more responsive customer service over the phone, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, by moving data to a reporting database to provide staff with accurate, up-to-date customer information in real time

• Enabled customers to access new services or re-activate service payments in real time

• Reduced data processing speeds and system downtime to deliver customer-service assistance around the clock. Ensured the customer-order management platform could scale to meet the increasing number of customers and up to two million orders a day

• Generated approximately 700 new marketing and services analytics reports, which weren’t available previously, using Oracle Business Intelligence Standard Edition

Tata Sky has been using Oracle products since its inception. The company is running an IT infrastructure that is almost 100% based on Oracle.

“We chose Oracle for our IT infrastructure, as its products are world class and optimized to handle large numbers of transactions,” said N. Ravishanker, chief information officer, Tata Sky Ltd. “Oracle can deliver the scalability and performance we need to integrate and upgrade our systems and applications to meet our growing business and customer needs.

“With Oracle, we have grown to become India’s leading, national, satellite broadcasting television service provider. We will definitely continue use Oracle products in the future to help us meet our goal of processing 3 million requests per day.”

Why Oracle

Tata Sky engaged Oracle Diamond Partner Tata Consultancy Services Ltd. (TCS) to implement Oracle GoldenGate, Oracle Business Intelligence Standard Edition, and the SPARC T4-2 servers. The implementation of Oracle GoldenGate and the SPARC T4-2 servers took three months to complete—both went live in July 2012. The implementation of Oracle Business Intelligence Standard Edition took nine months, going live in June 2012.

TCS customized aspects of Oracle GoldenGate and Oracle Business Intelligence. The project was delivered on time and on budget.


TCS provided Tata Sky with complete system integration services, including testing, consultation, implementation, customization, training, and post-implementation support. The company has been Tata Sky’s system integrator for the past seven years.

“We have worked with TCS on a number of IT projects over the years and the team is experienced in implementing large-scale Oracle solutions in the DTH space,” Ravishanker said. “We are happy with the service they’ve provided and will continue to partner with them in future.”

Partner

TATA SKY LTD.

11

Türk Telekom Significantly Improves Performance with Turkey’s First Asynchronous, Real-Time Archiving Solution

Oracle Customer:

Türk Telekom

Istanbul, Turkey

www.turktelekom.com.tr

Industry: Communication

Employees: More than 24,000


• Oracle \ 11g

• Oracle Management Pack for

Oracle GoldenGate

• Oracle GoldenGate Veridata

Oracle Partner:

Asseco SEE

www.asseco.com

Türk Telekom, a leading communication and convergence technology company in Turkey and the country’s most valuable brand for the last four years according to Brand Finance, provides fixed line communications and broadband internet services. The company, which was founded in 1994 by separating from Posta ve Telgraf Teskilatı, the national post and telegraph directorate of Turkey, owns more than 14.5 million fixed access lines—nearly all fixed access lines in Turkey—and 7 million asymmetric, digital subscriber lines.

Türk Telekom required faster development of telecommunications operation, sales, and marketing reports to be derived from approximately 20 terabytes of data collected from mission-critical applications, like billing and customer relationship management (CRM) systems. The company also needed to ensure replication in a hybrid environment with source systems and target systems from different manufacturers in two geographical locations. To meet these goals, Türk Telekom established the first and only asynchronous, real-time archiving solution in Turkey with Oracle GoldenGate to facilitate real-time data warehousing with hybrid online replication from 16 different source systems to one target data warehouse with near-zero latency. Thanks to the new solution, the company was able to eliminate 30 hours of database downtime, reduce costs, and save approximately US$22 million.

“By using Oracle GoldenGate 11g, we have drastically improved performance and access to real-time data and eliminated many downtime hours. With almost zero-downtime migrations reaching the desired high availability ratios and flexible online replication, we reduced operational costs and saved approximately US$22 million.” –– Serkan Karatas, Database Division Manager, Türk Telekom

• Enable faster reporting on approximately 20 terabytes of data collected from mission-critical applications, such as billing and CRM systems, to support management decision-making

• Reduce source system overhead, development and maintenance costs, and transaction time with an alternate approach to the company’s extract-transform-load process—to move data from online transaction processing (OLTP) systems to online analytical processing systems

• Facilitate replication in a hybrid environment with source and target systems from different manufacturers located 450 kilometers apart

Challenges

• Established the first asynchronous, real-time archiving solution in Turkey with Oracle GoldenGate, which moves 250 gigabytes of daily modified data in real-time from a huge OLTP database to an archive database, achieving an important increase of OLTP query performance to enable fast operational, sales, and marketing reports

• Archived historical data to save valuable disk space, decrease storage and backup costs, and lower management and maintenance costs of the production OLTP database

Solutions

TÜRK TELEKOM

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• Facilitated real-time data warehousing with hybrid online replication from 16 different source systems to one target data warehouse with Oracle GoldenGate, achieving online replication with near-zero latency and enabling the company to handle data operations in shrinking batch windows

• Supported key applications—such as business analytics, campaign management, and churn prevention—and facilitated live reporting from a dozen source systems located in Ankara to four target reporting platforms located in Istanbul without requiring any source systems modifications

• Reduced overhead costs on central processing units (CPUs) and source systems, as Oracle GoldenGate captures data from transaction logs (not the database itself) and does not interfere with source data

• Used Oracle GoldenGate for bidirectional (active-active) migrations and upgrades of three database platforms, with almost no-downtime eliminating 30 hours of previous downtime and saving approximately US$22 million

• Minimized risks by backing up all data from the new site to the old site with Oracle GoldenGate’s reverse direction replication to achieve zero downtime rollback if the new system should fail

• Ensured the right data is sent to target systems in all archiving, migration, and replication projects by comparing the source data with the replicated target data quickly and easily with Oracle GoldenGate Veridata

“When we decided to find a replication tool, we evaluated some competing products. When we saw the results delivered by Oracle GoldenGate, our choice was clear,” said Serkan Karatas, database division manager, Türk Telekom. “Oracle GoldenGate offers more advanced replication features, lower maintenance costs, and more flexible configuration options than its competitors. In addition, Oracle GoldenGate produces much less overhead for source systems.”

Why Oracle

Türk Telekom acquired GoldenGate licenses from Asseco SEE, which was GoldenGate’s distributor in Turkey. The implementation was performed by Türk Telekom’s internal teams while Asseco SEE provided consultancy services to resolve operational issues that needed specialized experience.

Partner

TÜRK TELEKOM

13

Turkcell iletisim Hizmetleri A.S. Uses Engineered System to Analyze 10 Billion Daily, Call-Data Records and Service Logs and to Generate 100,000 Monthly Reports

Oracle Customer:

Turkcell iletisim Hizmetleri A.S.

Istanbul, Turkey

www.turkcell.com.tr



Employees: 3,583


• Oracle Exadata Database Machine


“Oracle Exadata was not a choice for us, but a necessity. How do you process 10 billion daily, call-data records and logs of value-added services to extract valuable information? With Oracle Exadata Database Machine, queries are so fast that we can continuously increase the number of data warehouse users to extract more value-added service information from vast volumes of data.” –– Ferhat Sengönül, Data Warehouse Specialist, Turkcell iletisim Hizmetleri A.S.

Turkcell iletisim Hizmetleri A.S. (Turkcell) is a leading provider of mobile communications in Turkey, with more than 34 million subscribers. Established in 1994, Turkcell created the first global system for a mobile communications network in Turkey, and it was the first Turkish company to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange.

Turkcell needed to process up to 10 billion daily, call-data records (CDRs) and value-added service logs for billing and to ensure continuously accelerated development of 4,000 distinct reports containing critical business data. The company combined two Oracle Exadata Database Machine X2-2 HP Full Racks to reduce the size of the company’s data warehouse from 600 TB compressed to 60 TB and enable more than 500 data warehouse users to generate more than 100,000 reports per month—twice as many reports as with the deployment on its previous, single Exadata machine. Turkcell also shortened project execution times substantially and future-proofed its storage capabilities, thanks to Oracle Exadata Database Machine’s effortless scalability.

Working with Oracle Consulting, Turkcell implemented 16 nodes on two Oracle Exadata Database Machine X2-2 HP Full Racks in just five days, without any interface changes.

• Manage one petabyte of uncompressed telecommunication data, including CDRs and value-added service logs, in an enterprise data warehouse that includes more than 500 Oracle databases, online transaction processing, and a data warehouse

• Ensure continuous, accelerated development of 4,000 distinct reports containing critical business data, such as regulatory and management financial reports, with 100,000 monthly report runs requested by hundreds of data warehouse users

• Support analysis of up to 10 billion daily, call-data records and logs of value-added services, records that are needed to bill for services—such as subscriptions for weather and sport services, and more

• Ensure scalability and business continuity in the telecommunication sector where data volumes double annually

Challenges

• Combined two Oracle Exadata Database Machine X2-2 HP Full Racks (16 nodes) to simplify system architecture and reduce the size of the company’s data warehouse from 600 TB compressed to 60 TB

Solutions

TURKCELL ILETISIM HIZMETLERI A.S.

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• Enabled Turkcell, with Oracle Exadata’s unmatched data warehouse performance, to double the number to more than 500 data warehouse users who extract new information from the wealth of data collected by the company to offer the best telecommunication products and services to its customer base and to generate more than 100,000 reports per month—twice as many reports as with the deployment on its previous single Exadata machine

• Enabled Turkcell to thoroughly analyze up to 10 billion daily, call-data records and value-added service logs—such as for subscriptions to news services, stock market updates, and more—to offer the appropriate products and services ahead of the competition

• Improved and shortened the design of reporting projects substantially—such as for management’s revenue reporting or data mining for churn analysis— as Oracle Exadata makes it possible to access raw data without summarized tables, processes queries faster than any other machine, and consequently optimizes and shortens the design phase for each project

• Future-proofed the company’s storage capabilities, thanks to the effortless scalability of Oracle Exadata Database Machine, enabling the company to scale linearly by simply adding racks

• Worked with Oracle Consulting to implement 16 nodes on two Oracle Exadata Database Machines X2-2 HP Full Rack in just five days, without any interface changes

• Moved 40 terabytes of data from an Oracle Exadata Database Machine V2 to SATA storage to keep infrequently used data available at a low cost

Why Oracle

“We did not ask any other vendor for a proof of concept because it would require them to work on a migration project that would last one or two years, and it is difficult to see the end for such a project. With Oracle Exadata, we migrated without any design change or development change, simply plugging in the new technology,” said Ferhat Sengönül, data warehouse specialist, Turkcell iletisim Hizmetleri A.S.


“With assistance from Oracle Consulting, we implemented 16 nodes of two Oracle Exadata Database Machines X2-2 HP Full Rack in just five days, without any interface changes,” Sengönül said. “Oracle Consulting was also very fast in resolving issues that we faced during the post-implementation phase. With the excellent support from Oracle Consulting, all issues were resolved quickly.”

TURKCELL ILETISIM HIZMETLERI A.S.

FINANCIAL SERVICES

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Woori Bank Cuts Customer Credit Rating Assessments from Three Hours to 15 Minutes, Generates Management Reports in 10 Minutes Instead of Five Hours

Oracle Customer:

Woori Bank

Seoul, Republic of Korea

www.wooribank.com

Industry: Financial Services


Employees: 14,363




Woori Bank is the flagship unit of Woori Financial, the Republic of Korea’s largest financial group. The bank’s credit card division wanted to shorten the time it took to load online transaction processing (OLTP) data from the accounts system—which processes and stores real-time credit card transactions—into an analysis database. Woori’s staff uses the analysis database to do customer credit rating assessments, run management reports, and generate the intelligence needed to develop effective marketing and promotional campaigns.

Due to rapid growth in the credit card business, the bank needed a stable, scalable, and highly available database platform that could process large volumes of transactional data very quickly. The ability to access credit card data on the day the transaction occurred—rather than a day later—would help the bank develop effective business strategies, such as creating targeted promotions to increase chances of product take-up. The bank also wanted to minimize the cost, time, and effort of transferring existing databases to a new data processing platform, and it needed to ensure efficient storage of up to 1 TB of new data a month.

After implementing Oracle Exadata Database Machine and Oracle GoldenGate on Oracle’s Sun Fire X4170 M2 and Sun Fire X4270 M2 servers, the bank can now load OLTP data in real time, compared to one day in the past. As a result, customer credit-rating assessment tasks can be completed in 15 minutes, instead of three hours; daily marketing target selections can be made in less than 30 minutes, instead of 3.5 hours; and targeted data for business management reports can be generated in less than 10 minutes, instead of five hours. The faster OLTP loading time has significantly increased work productivity of business users and IT administrators.

Faster reporting means 120 power users in the marketing and other divisions can go beyond standardized queries to generate personalized queries in the data mart access layer, using the results to create effective and timely promotional campaigns. In the past, it had been difficult for them to revise and incorporate changes to marketing campaigns in real time because they were working with the previous day’s data. Now, users can immediately access and analyze transactions for specific trends in the data mart access layer and adjust campaigns and strategies accordingly. Woori Bank can also send tailored offers to customers. For example, if someone applies for a credit card, the bank can follow up with an offer for a personal loan on the same day.

Woori Bank used the Hybrid Columnar Compression feature in Oracle Exadata to compress analytical and historical data, shrinking 78 TB of data down to 42 TB and reducing data storage costs by 46%. The bank also deployed Oracle’s StorageTek SL500 modular library system to efficiently store corporate data. The Oracle infrastructure can be expanded without extensive configuration or installation, simply by adding new racks to easily support the bank’s future growth.

WOORI BANK

17

Why Oracle

In December 2010, Woori Bank’s credit card division and Woori FIS (Woori Financial Group’s IT services business) ran a series of benchmark tests of integrated OLTP/OLAP solutions from four vendors. The solutions were assessed on their performance, based on queries and reports that the bank regularly generates.

The results showed Oracle Exadata offered the fastest performance and the best database integration capabilities. The platform was also optimized for loading and analyzing accounts data in real time. In addition, Oracle Exadata simplified data verification. In the past, verifying the integrity of accounts data was a load-intensive process that could take three days to complete. With Oracle Exadata, verification of all account data takes just two hours.

Oracle Exadata’s Hybrid Columnar Compression feature—which can compress data by up to 10x—was another attractive feature, as it could provide efficient storage and support the expected growth in Woori Bank’s credit card business and data volumes.

Finally, Oracle offered an architecture that can process large data volumes, is easy to scale, and provides quick and stable migration, due to the use of identical databases. This would enable service continuity during the migration process and lower deployment costs.


In May 2012, Woori Bank transferred 7.5 TB of credit card transaction data from the accounts system to the Oracle Exadata platform, completing the task in just 1.5 hours. The arrangement time needed to optimize Oracle Exadata was reduced from an expected 22 hours to 7 hours.

The Oracle Exadata platform is performing stably after the bank set the data compression range and optimized application performance.

WOORI BANK

18

Zagrebacka banka d.d. Reduces Complex Calculations from Hours to Minutes with Engineered Business Intelligence

Oracle Customer:

Zagrebacka banka d.d.

Zagreb, Croatia

www.zaba.hr

Industry: Financial Services

Annual Revenue: US$100 to US$500 Million

Employees: 4,500


• Exalytics In-Memory Machine X2-4

• Oracle TimesTen In-Memory

Database for Exalytics


Foundation Suite


• Oracle Essbase

Zagrebacka banka d.d., part of Italian Unicredit Group, is the biggest bank in Croatia and one of the country’s largest employers. Through its 130 branches, the bank serves 80,000 corporate customers and more than 1.1 million private customers nationwide—making one in four citizens a Zagrebacka banka customer. Zagrebacka banka accounts for 25% of the total assets of the Croatian banking sector, controlling 35% of Croatia’s investment funds, 41% of obligatory pension funds, and 30% of specialized savings accounts for real estate purchases transacted through its subsidiaries. The publications Euro money and Global Finance named Zagrebacka banka Croatia’s best bank in 2011.

“We deployed Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine, Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Database for Exalytics, and Oracle Business Intelligence Foundation Suite to establish the most advanced business intelligence environment available on the market today. From complex forecasts, to ad-hoc analyses with detailed drill-downs—the information is readily available. We have seen remarkable gains in job performance and the ability to support more concurrent users, compared to our legacy platform, and we have substantially improved our analytical capabilities to optimize decision-making at every level of the bank.” –– Mirko Talajic, Business Intelligence Director, Zagrebacka banka d.d.

• Deployed Exalytics In-Memory Machine X2-4 to operate the fastest business intelligence and online analytical processing (OLAP) platform available today, for a system that is tightly connected to the bank’s data warehouse on Oracle Exadata Database Machine with unmatched analytics speed and rich visualization

• Retrieved data in profitability cubes via Oracle Essbase Smart View within three seconds instead of 30 seconds, as before, while Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher performs up to 4x faster on Exalytics In-Memory Machine

• Deliver dynamic business intelligence reports, such as ad-hoc profitability analyses of banking products within specific customer scenarios, periods, and regions to increase insight and facilitate better decisions

• Enhance the user experience for the bank’s Oracle Business Intelligence users, as the legacy platform could no longer meet the increasing performance requirements for numerous ad-hoc analyses and reports

• Shorten the refresh period for planning and forecasting information by shortening the time for complex calculations from days to hours

• Establish a consolidated business intelligence platform with superior performance, building on the value already gained from using Oracle Business Intelligence, Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher, and Oracle Essbase

Challenges

Solutions

ZAGREBACKA BANKA D.D.

19

• Reduced the execution time for complex calculations from hours to minutes, enabling better insight into critical financial information, such as profitability, through the ability to drill-down from business unit levels to customer and account levels

• Generated Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher reports within seconds instead of minutes when opened through Oracle Essbase Smart View, substantially improving operational efficiency across the organization when delivering 100 new management reports on a monthly basis

• Enabled 300 concurrent users to generate key performance indicators (KPI’s) up to 10x faster at the customer and contract levels—including economic value added and return on assets—substantially enhancing insight and decision-making capabilities and reducing risk associated with loss-generating customers

• Enabled sales representatives to decide immediately whether a financial product, such as a mortgage, should be offered to a specific customer or not, based on improved KPI generation

• Provided account managers with accurate, dynamic, drill-down reports to help manage banking customers more efficiently—as all customer information is kept in one cube and loaded instantly when required

• Loaded the planning cube almost 2x faster and performed complex forecasting calculations up to 8x faster, reducing data preparation efforts from one day to one hour and enabling staff to spend more time on data analysis

• Used Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Database for Exalytics to build an Oracle Essbase Aggregate Storage Option reporting cube with 10 million members, from 285 gigabytes of relational financial data—a task that could not have been achieved with the previously used platform—enabling the bank to analyze three years of banking history for enterprisewide consumption

Why Oracle

“Our long-standing experience with Oracle Business Intelligence and Oracle Exadata has been excellent. To take full advantage of the integrated management and extreme performance of Oracle’s Engineered Systems, we decided to deploy Exalytics In-Memory Machine X2-4 and Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Database for Exalytics as the industry-leading foundation for high-speed analytics,” said Mirko Talajic, business intelligence director, Zagrebacka banka d.d.

ZAGREBACKA BANKA D.D.

HIGH TECHNOLOGY AND MANUFACTURING

21

Neuralitic Systems Inc. Improves Customers’ Marketing Initiatives Using Engineered Data Warehouse to Deliver Mobile Data Intelligence

Oracle Customer:

Neuralitic Systems Inc.

Montreal, Canada

www.neuralitic.com

Industry: High Technology

Employees: 35



• Oracle Exastack Labs

Founded in 2007 and backed by well-known venture capital firms, Neuralitic Systems Inc. is a leading provider of mobile data intelligence solutions that help mobile operators unlock the value of their data to understand subscriber behaviors that influence data service adoption. SevenFlow, Neuralitic’s flagship product, turns massive amounts of unstructured data into compact and usable data sets, ready for use by multiple applications. The company draws its expertise from employees in a variety of fields related to its core business, including IP infrastructure, business intelligence, high-throughput databases, dimensional data modeling, mathematics, and wireless network engineering.

“Oracle Exadata Database Machine enables us to keep up with the constant growth in data volume in the largest mobile networks in the world, which is very important for our continued business development.” –– Louis Brun, Chief Operating Officer and Founder, Neuralitic Systems Inc.

Challenges and Solutions

Mobile operators are experiencing phenomenal growth in data traffic, including Neuralitic’s customers who report that their traffic is tripling every year. To meet existing and future customer requirements for processing increased mobile data volume, Neuralitic deployed Oracle Exadata Database Machine X2-8 Full Rack to support its SevenFlow solution, where data is collected and continuously batch loaded every 15 minutes and then aggregated nightly, according to several different dimensions.

Oracle Exadata Database Machine enabled SevenFlow to gain 3-times faster processing time performance and also significantly improve its compression rate and scalability by 10 times. With the flexible and scalable Oracle Exadata platform, Neuralitic improved both its solution and its business model as the engineered system has enabled it to focus on developing its application, accelerating revenues, and reducing key development cost components thus, enabling a faster time to market.

With Oracle Exadata Database Machine, Neuralitic met and exceeded extract, transform, and load (ETL) scalability requirements by a factor of 1 to 3 times, and decreased the data aggregation batch window by a factor of 1.5 to 2.5 times, enabling SevenFlow customers to access information more rapidly. Moreover, the Exadata platform enabled Neuralitic to reduce the time needed to produce summary data usage and mobile activity reports by 1.3 to 2.4 times, allowing customers to meet the scaling demands of increased data and to gain deeper insight.

The positive impact for Neuralitic’s customers translates into the ability to support more subscribers and do more with data, and to have a longer retention period. The combination of Oracle Exadata and the SevenFlow application captures 100% of subscribers’ data and enables mobile operators to access detailed information about subscriber behavior. SevenFlow enriches extracted data with labeling elements, such as device name, location name, and customer relationship management information––keeping the focus on delivering meaningful information that can improve marketing effectiveness and the customer experience.

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With Oracle Exadata Database Machine, Neuralitic now has a complete range of solutions, enabling it to support any operator, no matter the size. Furthermore, with Oracle Exadata, Neuralitic can halve the time it takes to deploy SevenFlow at customer sites, enabling customers to realize its benefits more quickly and helping Neuralitic to significantly shorten its order-to-revenue cycle.

Why Oracle

“Oracle can see the long-term potential of a relationship, which is a very positive thing when you are a startup like we are, with big ideas and an ambitious plan. Oracle has given us great support in terms of access to the technology through its Oracle Exastack Labs program, so we could perform initial testing and benchmarking. For a young company, such as Neuralitic, it is nice to see Oracle embracing the independent software vendor community with the same focus it dedicates to its resellers,” said Louis Brun, chief operating officer and founder, Neuralitic Systems.

“By using the Oracle Exadata platform, we gain a clear competitive advantage. Where most of our competitors have to spend part of their research and development budget on developing the optimal system for their application, we can focus on our core business: developing the best mobile data intelligence solution for mobile operators,” Brun said.

Neuralitic’s SevenFlow has achieved Oracle Exadata Optimized Status through the Oracle PartnerNetwork. In achieving this status, the application has been fully tested and is certified as supported on Oracle Exadata Database Machine.

NEURALITIC SYSTEMS INC.

MEDIA AND ENTERTAINMENT

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Passoker Optimizes Online Betting with Reduced Testing and Development Times and the Ability to Better Assimilate High-Volume, Real-time Data

Oracle Customer:

Passoker

Stockton on Tees, United Kingdom

www.passoker.com

Industry: Media and Entertainment


• Oracle NoSQL Database,

Enterprise Edition

• MySQL Database

• Oracle Glassfish Server

• Oracle Linux

• My Oracle Support

Oracle Partner:

e-DBA

www.e-dba.com

Passoker was founded by Stuart Carr and former England soccer international player Viv Anderson to capitalize on the growing, international, in-play, betting market. Passoker delivers an innovative, multiplatform gaming solution that allows players to place bets on the results of sporting and other events. Players place their bets during the event, not before, as is customary with the traditional, sports-gambling model.

Players can place bets on what they believe will happen next in a wide range of live sporting events. They also can lay wagers on plot developments in television programs, such as soaps and reality shows, as well as on political debates and election results.

Passoker partners with a sports data provider that archives and distributes historical information, critical to gamers’ abilities to instantly assess events. The partner collects, packages, and distributes information on some 60,000 events each year, from more than 30 different sports in approximately 70 countries. The incoming data from this service is used to determine the options available for each of the many events tracked on Passoker’s betting platform, enabling bettors to wager on eventualities, such as the next goal, free kick, or penalty in a particular soccer match.

The size of the global sports betting market––between US$350 billion and US$400 billion per year––illustrates the need for database technology that can cope with exceptionally high volumes of data, providing for high availability, rapid scaling, and guaranteed ordering of events. The partnership allows Passoker to cover a wide variety of sports, receiving in-play and real-time XML database feeds to drive players’ gaming experiences.

“Passoker needed a database technology that could rapidly receive the XML files on which its gaming platform relies, and then quickly process those files for relevance. Also essential were high availability, rapid scaling, and guaranteed ordering of events, all which Oracle NoSQL Database delivered.” –– James Anthony, Chief Technology Officer, Passoker

• Provide a platform for real-time, sports-data feeds to support the company’s rapidly expansion of in-play, betting offerings

• Deploy a scalable, efficient, and highly resilient way of dealing with a stream of incoming data on upcoming and in-progress sports matches and other events

• Enable the platform to receive XML-format, sports-data feeds and rapidly process them for relevance

• Reduce development times and simplify day-to-day administration for the data infrastructure that support in-play betting operations

• Scale-out the platform as demand grows and players take up gaming in greater numbers

Challenges

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The Oracle solutions’ easy integration, compatibility with existing skill sets, and key-value data model allowed Passoker to rapidly process data for consistency, relevance, and accuracy. Passoker considered open source solutions, such as Voldemort, but chose Oracle NoSQL, in part, because it was integrated with Oracle Linux, Oracle’s MySQL, and Oracle Glassfish Server, which were already in place in Passoker’s environment. In addition, the solution offered professional support instead of having to rely on internet searches to find answers.

Why Oracle

• Deployed Oracle NoSQL Database as the new platform supporting the company’s gaming solutions, reducing development and implementation times by 75% (saving 30 to 50 days) over other database options, due to Oracle NoSQL’s built-in, configurable replication capabilities

• Enabled Passoker to deploy sports-data feeds sooner than expected, thanks to the 75% time savings on development and implementation, allowing more time for functional testing and data-quality assurance

• Allowed more time for application development and integration, without worries of basic technological issues

• Simplified day-to-day administration through a graphical-user/command-line interface, which is essential for the small team administering a complex product, based on high volumes of unpredictable real-time events

• Simplified rapid correlation between in-progress events and gaming options on the platform, due to the system’s higher efficiency and performance, as compared to relational database management solutions

• Accelerated adoption of standards-based IT, since Passoker could add off-the-shelf equipment that supports standards, such as Java, to the existing architecture with minimal adaptation needed

• Improved operational efficiency, due to ongoing commercial support, so that instead of relying on open source documentation for support, Passoker can log service requests for problem resolution into the My Oracle Support system

• Eliminated daily maintenance related to single-node points-of-failure by moving to Oracle NoSQL Database, which is designed to be resilient and hands-off, thus minimizing IT support costs

• Used the new system’s compatibility with the existing Oracle MySQL Database environment to enable cross-referencing with existing data on discrete keys and ensure continuous data streams for the betting platform

• Accelerated time to market for the company’s betting platforms, due to faster-than-anticipated integration

Solutions

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Partner

e-DBA, an Oracle Platinum Partner and expert in Oracle technology, led the implementation of and provides ongoing support for Passoker’s Oracle NoSQL Database solution. e-DBA scoped Passoker’s requirements, taking account of the unusually high volumes of real-time data that it must assimilate to provide users with the best possible online betting experience.

Oracle NoSQL Database’s scalability as demand grows is also essential, as is high availability and performance to support 24/7 gaming operations.

Oracle NoSQL provided the performance and scalability required to meet the company’s extreme requirements. For example, on the last day of the Premiership soccer season, 20 teams were playing 10 simultaneous matches, as well as all the other leagues which Passoker tracks in real time. Each match would have 400 or more events (where events were individual actions during the match that could shape the result) and Passoker would need to identify and track a specific 35 to 45 of these events, based on the different bets being placed in the system at any moment. Oracle NoSQL Database scaled out to handle all these events according to demand.

“Moving to Oracle NoSQL Database allowed us to easily replicate, scale, and manage our data infrastructure, significantly reducing our development and testing times,” said James Anthony, chief technology officer, Passoker.

PASSOKER

TRAVEL AND TRANSPORTATION

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Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, Inc. Manages Hotel Profitability, Worldwide, with Near-Real-Time Reporting on Engineered Data Warehouse System

Oracle Customer:

Starwood Hotels & Resorts

Worldwide, Inc.

Stamford, Connecticut

www.starwoodhotels.com

Industry: Travel and Transportation


Employees: 154,000




• Oracle Linux

• Oracle Advanced Customer Support

Services

• Oracle Solution Support Center

• Oracle Advanced Monitoring

“Oracle Exadata Database Machine enables us to move forward with an environment that provides our hotel managers and corporate executives with near-real-time information to make optimal business decisions and provide ideal amenities for our guests.” –– Gordon Light, Business Relationship Manager, Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, Inc.

Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, Inc. is one of the leading hotel and leisure companies in the world with 1,112 properties in nearly 100 countries and 154,000 employees at its owned and managed properties. Starwood is a fully integrated owner, operator and franchisor of hotels, resorts and residences with the following internationally renowned brands: St. Regis®, The Luxury Collection®, W®, Westin®, Le Méridien®, Sheraton®, Four Points® by Sheraton, Aloft®, and ElementSM. The Company boasts one of the industry’s leading loyalty programs, Starwood Preferred Guest (SPG), allowing members to earn and redeem points for room stays, room upgrades and flights, with no blackout dates. Starwood also owns Starwood Vacation Ownership Inc., a premier provider of world-class vacation experiences through villa-style resorts and privileged access to Starwood brands.

Starwood Hotels has significantly increased the number of hotels it operates over the past few years through global corporate expansion, particularly in the Asia Pacific region. This has resulted in a dramatic rise in the need for business critical information about Starwood’s hotels and customers. All Starwood hotels globally use a single enterprise data warehouse to retrieve information critical to efficient hotel management, such an that regarding revenue, central reservations, and rate plan reports. In addition, Starwood Hotels’ management runs important daily operating reports from the data warehouse for a wide range of business functions. Starwood’s enterprise data warehouse spans almost all areas within the company, so it is essential not only for central-reservation and consumption information, but also to Starwood’s loyalty program, which relies on all guest information, sales information, corporate sales information, customer service and other data that managers, analysts, and that executives depend on to make operational decisions.

The company is committed to knowing and servicing its guests, yet, “as data growth and demands grew too great for the company’s legacy system, it was falling short in delivering the information hotel managers and administrators required on a daily basis, since central reservation system (CRS) reports could take as long as 18 hours,” said Richard Chung, Starwood Hotels’ director of data integration.

Chung added that hotel managers would receive the transient pace report—which presents market-segmented information on reservations—five hours later than it was needed. Such delays prevented managers from adjusting rates appropriately, which could result in lost revenue. After reviewing several vendor offerings, Starwood Hotels selected Oracle Exadata Database Machine X2-2 HC Full Rack and Oracle Exadata Database Machine X2-2 HP Full Rack, running on Oracle Linux.

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“With the implementation of Exadata, Starwood Hotels can complete extract, transform, and load (ETL) operations for operational reports in 4 to 6 hours, as opposed to 18 to 24 hours previously, a six-fold improvement,” Chung said. Real-time feeds, which were not possible before, now allow transactions to be posted immediately to the data warehouse, and users can access the changes in 5 to 10 minutes instead of 24 hours, making the process up to 288-times faster.

Accelerated data access allows all Starwood properties to get the same, up-to-date data needed for their reports, globally. Previously, hotel managers in some areas could not do same-day or next-day analyses. There were some locations that got fresh data and others that got older data. Hotel managers, worldwide, now have up-to-date data for their hotels, increasing efficiency and profitability, improving customer service by making sure rooms are available for premier customers, and improving the company’s ability to manage room occupancy rates. Additional reporting tools, such as those used for CRM and sales and catering also benefited from the improved processing. Other critical reporting has benefited as well.

Marketing campaign management is also more efficient now that managers can analyze results in days or weeks instead of months.

In addition, the company is using Oracle GoldenGate to feed data from central reservations systems, other OLTP applications and external vendors, improving ETL times, sometimes making them as much as 100% faster. Moving forward, Starwood plans to use GoldenGate to help the company achieve near-real-time reporting.

Starwood Hotels chose Oracle Advanced Customer Support Services to deliver Oracle Solution Support Center, which provides a technical account manager and a dedicated team of advanced support engineers that work closely with the Starwood team to provide 24/7, personalized support. Finally, Oracle Advanced Monitoring maximizes availability of the company’s database products by continually monitoring and tuning Starwood’s enterprise data warehouse solution.

Why Oracle

“We reviewed a number of vendors, but only one worked best with our architecture. Our data analysis environment requires many complex calculations, with multiple data layers. Oracle Exadata processes the information efficiently, and we have been impressed with the performance improvements. We have used Oracle products for a long time, and choosing Oracle Exadata enables us to preserve existing IT and human capital investments, particularly in our data warehouse infrastructure” said Marcello Iannuzzi, project manager, Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, Inc.


The first phase of the implementation involved moving data from the legacy warehouse to Oracle Exadata and involved migrating 26 terabytes of data—which equates to hundreds of billions of rows and approximately 1,500 tables from the previous environment.

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Globalia Corporación Empresarial S.A. Accelerates Hotel Bookings, Boosts Sales by 40% with In-Memory Data Grid Solution

Globalia Corporación Empresarial S.A. (Globalia), founded in 1997, is a leading tourism group in Spain, based on revenue and number of employees. Globalia is a collection of independent companies, such as tour operators, travel agencies, hotels, an airline, cruise lines, and an airport management company.

“From the outset, Oracle Coherence exceeded our high expectations. It enabled us to reengineer our core system for hotel bookings and deliver quotes that are innovative and pioneering for the Spanish tourism industry. Our return on investment was immediate—since we saved money immediately after go-live and delivered a highly successful summer campaign with strong sales growth. We have already started to redesign additional systems that will leverage Oracle Coherence technology.” –– Vicente Guerola Molina, Director, Business Development, Globalia Corporación Empresarial S.A.

Oracle Customer:

Globalia Corporación Empresarial S.A.

Llucmajor, Spain

www.globalia-corp.com


Annual Revenue: US$1 to US$5 Billion

Employees: 12,000


• Oracle Coherence

• Oracle Management Pack for

Oracle Coherence

• Oracle JRockit

• Oracle WebLogic Server

• Oracle Service Bus

• Oracle Database


• Oracle Java Mission Control

• Meet increasing, ever-changing, tourism-sector business demands with agile IT systems that can manage tourism revenue accounting and customer interactions from business-to-consumer (B2C) or business-to-business (B2B) channels

• Provide availability, response times, and scalability to meet specific tourism and leisure industry demands—such as activity peaks during the summer season, Christmas, and long weekends that generate 80% of annual revenue, and complex hotel sales promotion systems that put a huge burden on underlying IT infrastructures

• Support a new business unit designed to expand Globalia’s business to the worldwide tourism and leisure market by establishing front- and back-end IT systems that can sustain business growth with ambitious service-level agreements (SLA’s)

• Optimize response times to meet group and third-party SLA’s for Welcome, the company’s proprietary, hotel-booking system, so that it serves 95% of requests in less than 700 milliseconds—ensuring that users don’t abandon searches not answered within 2 seconds

Challenges

• Deployed Oracle Coherence, Oracle JRockit, and Oracle WebLogic Server to move business logic from database to middleware tier, reducing IT costs and enabling new business models, based on expanded system capabilities—such as Globalia’s powerful, proprietary B2C and B2B channel for selling hotel rooms

• Used Oracle Coherence to reengineer proprietary hotel booking platforms, responsible for daily revenue of up to US$1.35 million, with a year-on-year growth rate of 100%

• Introduced a data grid that supports highly complex business rules for sales promotion, which boosted sales by 40% for the 2012 summer campaign, compared to the previous year’s seasonal sales

Solutions

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• Established a future-proof system that is dimensioned to support 2.5 million B2C and B2B requests per day—such as bookings, confirmations, and cancellations for air and ground travel, hotel rooms, and more—and provide linear scalability for expected growth, while the previous systems were limited to 100,000 requests per day

• Guaranteed low latency for B2C and B2B counterparts—who will reject Globalia’s product offerings if they do not receive an immediate response to requests—providing an average response of 100 milliseconds for a request involving 80 hotels, while the old system required up to 30 seconds to process requests during peak hours

• Eliminated database outages due to system changes—such as updates for improved promotions—and reduced database usage by 40%, enabling database utilization for other purposes, such as administering data for the group’s tour operators Travel plan and MK Travelplán, which meet tourism demands in Spain and North America

• Made it easier to roll out new promotions with Oracle Coherence’s ability to make modifications while the cluster is in production mode, reducing time-to-market for new products and services from days to minutes

• Used Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control’s Grid Control feature with Oracle Management Pack for Oracle Coherence to manage and monitor the entire system—nine physical servers, with four dedicated to the company’s proprietary hotel booking platform, that host 28 Oracle Coherence nodes for 30 gigabytes of live data—which has been configured with customized alerts to detect potential problems, such as low cache hit rates

• Used Oracle Database as the main source of information, with efficient data loading when a cluster needs to be initialized from scratch, as well as data synchronization to update information when the cluster is running

• Worked with Oracle Consulting to achieve a successful go-live within four months in June 2011, in time to deal with summer tourism

Why Oracle

“We trust in Oracle for mission-critical systems and considered Oracle Coherence to be the best approach. The data grid, aligned with our strategy to move business logic from the database to the middleware tier, offers all the features that we need to meet our technical and business requirements. Oracle executed a 15-day, proof of concept that demonstrated Oracle Coherence’s ability to meet and exceed our requirements,” said Vicente Guerola Molina, director, business development, Globalia Corporación Empresarial S.A.

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Sabre Holdings Processes More than 200 Million Daily Transactions, Integrates Over 50 Data Sources, and Accelerates Platform Migrations

Oracle Customer:

Sabre Holdings

Southlake, Texas

www.sabre.com



Employees: Approximately 10,000



• Oracle Data Integrator

• Oracle Database 11g

• Oracle Real Application Clusters

Oracle Partner:

HP

www.hp.com

Sabre Holdings is a global travel technology company serving the world’s largest industry—travel and tourism. The company provides software to travel agencies, corporations, travelers, airlines, hotels, car, rail, cruise, and tour operator companies through four businesses: Sabre Travel Network, Sabre Airline Solutions, Sabre Hospitality Solutions, and Travelocity.

More than 1 billion people worldwide use Sabre’s innovative technology to plan, book, and get to their destination at a time and price that is right for them. As the company captures an extremely high volume of transactional data in its reservations, booking, and ticketing systems—among others—it depends on a comprehensive, enterprisewide data warehouse to store, manage, and analyze this information. Sabre also offers a broad range of business intelligence products—that utilize the data warehouse—to provide its customers with the true business intelligence they need to improve their operations, performance, and customer service.

Sabre is focused on innovation and uses leading-edge and flexible technologies—like Oracle Data Integrator and Oracle GoldenGate—for migrations to new systems and with its data warehouse and business intelligence solutions, all which contribute to the company’s success in providing its travel industry customers with the best possible service and information to drive their businesses.

“The unique thing about Sabre Holdings is that we use Oracle technologies to offer products to our customers as well as using them internally to help Sabre run our business more effectively and understand trends and dynamics in the travel industry.” –– Jessica Thorud, Director, Sabre Holdings

Accelerating Integration as Data Sources and Volumes Expand

Sabre invested in developing data warehousing and business intelligence solutions to meet customer needs that provide timely marketplace and customer insights. These solutions have provided value-added offerings beyond Sabre’s traditional products, enabling the company to retain and grow its customer base while enabling its customers to improve their service offerings.

Sabre launched its data warehouse in early 2003, with four source systems for input. Sabre was using highly customized shell scripting in UNIX to load data into the warehouse and as the number of data sources continued to grow, this process was labor intensive and did not provide reusability for future products.

As the number of data sources and customers grew, managing data integration timelines and reporting schedules for internal and external customers became more challenging. Sabre decided it needed a consolidated platform to quickly bring many new data sources into the warehouse—without requiring the technical know-how for each unique data source format. After evaluating several options, Sabre selected Oracle Data Integrator to meet this need.

When Sabre first implemented Oracle Data Integrator, there were approximately 7 data sources being integrated into the warehouse.

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Today, the number of data sources stands at 53, which includes core transactional sets like travel booking and ticketing data, as well as controlled data, like airport latitude/longitude, carrier operational data, customer check-in information, and traveler profile data. The frequency of loading inbound source systems into the data warehouse ranges from trickle feeds to batch files, which vary from every 15 minutes to daily, weekly and monthly. Sabre also uses Oracle Data Integrator for outbound scheduling of data extracts to customers.

“When we first started using Oracle Data Integrator, we had 3 applications, which has grown to 172 applications with more than 3,000 applications executions each day,” said Jessica Thorud, director, Sabre Holdings. “Our job executions vary in frequency, from every three minutes to monthly, and when you multiply that number by the number of applications and customers, our schedule is saturated. That’s all managed by ODI now, which has allowed Sabre to increase productivity and efficiency in development and time to market for enhancements and new solutions.”

Today, Sabre processes approximately 200 million transactions each day through Oracle Data Integrator and approximately 48 million daily transactions through Oracle GoldenGate. The company’s data warehouse environment holds 25 terabytes of data.

Sabre offers a diverse range of data and business intelligence products, from dashboards enabling airlines to measure performance against key performance indicators (KPIs), to a series of prepackaged reports designed for business users, to structured data extracts for customers wanting to run and create their own data warehouses.

Use of Oracle Data Integrator’s scheduling capability improved reliability in customer data extract deliveries through automation and monitoring of the scheduled executions. Sabre also uses Oracle GoldenGate to replicate eight sources directly from source systems on a real-time basis. The only latency in this process is network latency—less than one-300th of a second.

“The unique thing about Sabre is that we use Oracle technologies to offer hosted products to our customers as well as using them internally, to help Sabre run our businesses more effectively and understand trends and dynamics within the travel industry,” Thorud said.

While the number of data sources was increasing, Sabre was also expanding its development centers globally, first from Southlake, Texas to Krakow, Poland, and then adding a center in Bangalore, India. As the development teams expanded globally, Sabre needed to standardize the development process for integrating data. When Sabre started using Oracle Data Integrator, it built standardization into the ODI, providing the framework to better control the development process, worldwide. In addition, Sabre used the product’s framework to plug data quality checks into new projects efficiently.

“Oracle Data Integrator helped us build the framework and then provide that framework to development teams across multiple development centers to help build products,” said Amjad Saeed, development and operations manager, Sabre Holdings.

Expanding to New Development Centers

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“With this framework, we have been able to introduce new development resources, who have been able to quickly become productive without requiring in-depth knowledge of the source system technologies.”

With Oracle Data Integrator, operational efficiency has significantly improved, as Sabre operations personnel are able to view code in a graphical fashion and optimize it very quickly. Since it started using Oracle Data Integrator, Sabre has added 12 developers in three countries to its team, which has successfully developed and delivered the introduction of more than 50 new data sources into the data warehouse since 2003, supporting multiple business intelligence and customer-data applications.

“Oracle enabled us to become a 24/7 shop—when our US developers leave, someone in Poland or India can pick up code development. This flexibility allowed us to reduce development effort and improve time to market for new products,” Saeed said. “With Oracle Data Integrator, we have improved efficiency in development and seen a 30% to 40% reduction in the time required to bring in a new data source into the data warehouse.”

Bringing Data to the Forefront

Oracle Data Integrator and Oracle GoldenGate are key data integration platforms within Sabre’s data warehouse environment that have enabled Sabre to deliver innovative new data and business intelligence products to customers.

“In the development of dashboards with our customers, we often find that analysts say, ‘You just saved me my entire morning’s work, because in the past I would have to go to into various systems to get this information, and now it’s all pulled into an interface that I can actually use immediately to understand current performance of my airline,’” said Jeff Barnhart, product manager, Sabre Holdings “Carriers, travel agencies, and even Sabre are all faced with that same problem—how to deal with huge data volumes and make sense of them. We provide a real value with our intelligence products.”

Oracle Data Integrator also makes it easy to translate business rules—that help developers make sense of the data—into code. The solution helps Sabre’s developers with its drag-and-drop capability and the built-in transformation functions. The faster rules-to-code time also helps Sabre reduce development effort and, in turn, decrease time to market.

Sabre has also been able to reuse code to streamline the addition of new customers to existing products more efficiently.

“Our previous technology required a lot of effort when we wanted to implement code for a customer that we already had in production with another customer. We had to make multiple changes, which took time and were subject to human error,” Barnhart said. “With Oracle Data Integrator, we can clone the same code, change the variables for the new customer, and off we go. It’s only a two-hour process now for some of our products.”

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Sabre has also used Oracle GoldenGate to facilitate migrations from databases—in most cases, different versions of Oracle Database, MySQL, and HP NonStop Kernel (NSK) systems—to Oracle Database 11g with Real Application Clusters. In migrating to Oracle across many systems, Sabre improved on its delivery timelines and streamlined system management. In the case of critical systems, Sabre needs zero downtime during these migrations, and Oracle GoldenGate provides that assurance.

A recent migration project—moving Sabre’s airline ticketing system from the NSK platform to Oracle Database—had additional complexity. Sabre also needed to redesign the database schema during the migration for future growth, and to meet new customer requirements. Sabre turned to Oracle Data Integrator again, using the tool for data transformation once data was migrated to the Oracle Database.

“Having the ability to do the data transformation in Oracle Database, rather than in one of proprietary, middle-tier extract, transform, and load (ETL) engines, is key,” said Dariusz Owczarek, Sabre’s lead database administrator. “It has enabled us to complete the process in the database where we have the most experience, where we have resources that can really improve or tune those transformations and not disrupt existing systems during migration.”

Sabre, working closely with HP, designed a phased-migration approach. The team has already migrated 90% of its customer data for this specific project—with zero downtime or performance impact—and has already activated 30% of customers in production. When the migration is complete, Sabre will have migrated more than 3 terabytes of data, including 200 million ticketing documents across more than 100 airline carriers. Through the initiative, Sabre has reduced complexity, minimized data duplication, and improved processes to identify potential data quality issues. Sabre also estimates the development and delivery time will be reduced by 40% through completing the replatform and refactor in one step and eliminating redundant testing efforts.

Traditionally, replatform (going from NSK to Oracle), data-migration (moving data from source to target) and database refactoring (improving data quality/normalization) is a three-step process, where each step requires separate verification and validation. Sabre’s ticketing solution has combined all three phases into one continuous phase in such a way that it only needs to complete the verification and validation once, and it can perform the migration as a unit of customer (airlines) versus a unit of data by allowing both the old system and new system to operate seamlessly.

“With Oracle, we now know it’s possible to migrate data from the current database right to the redesigned schema in the new database. That’s huge in regards to time savings,” Owczarek said. “We can use this architecture for future migrations. It will allow us to explore new solutions and redesign existing applications and databases, which may not have been possible with previous migration approaches. This approach has reduced our development effort and accelerated time to market for customer product enhancements.”

Migrating to New Platforms

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• Develop data warehouse and business intelligence solutions to meet travel industry customer needs for consolidated data and business intelligence (BI) tools that provide timely marketplace and customer insights

• Retain and grow customer base across airlines, travel agents, corporations and hospitality organizations

• Manage continued growth in the number of data sources that need to be integrated into the enterprise data warehouse

• Standardize development processes across three global locations

• Enable repeatable processes in data migration and loading initiatives to improve productivity and operational efficiency and accelerate time to market

• Provide customers with a breadth of easy-to-use BI tools and dashboards to help them make better decisions that lead to improved operations, performance, and customer service

Challenges

• Implemented Oracle Data Integrator and Oracle GoldenGate to support enterprisewide data warehouse and business intelligence solutions for Sabre’s customers and its own businesses, as well as to streamline migrations to more advanced systems

• Supported significant growth, incorporating more than 50 new data sources into the data warehouse

• Used Oracle Data Integrator to manage outbound scheduling for customer data delivery, managing more than 3,000 executions each day

• Used Oracle GoldenGate to replicate eight sources directly from source systems in real-time, with only one-300th of a second in network latency

• Standardized development processes across the US, Poland, and India and improved data quality

• Accelerated speed to market for new solutions and enhancements by enabling Sabre to reduce time by 30% to 40% to integrate a new data source into its warehouse

• Used Oracle Data Integrator to reuse code, enabling Sabre to add new customers to existing products more efficiently

• Used Oracle GoldenGate to facilitate migrations from databases to Oracle Database 11g with Real Application Clusters with zero downtime—reducing the development effort and timeline and streamlining system management

• Worked with HP within a very tight timeline to migrate Sabre’s airline ticketing system from a NSK platform to Oracle Database, as well as redesign the database schema to add new customer-required functionality

Solutions

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• Processed approximately 200 million daily transactions through Oracle Data Integrator and approximately 48 million daily transactions through Oracle GoldenGate, while maintaining more than 25 terabytes in the data warehouse

Sabre selected Oracle Data Integrator in 2006 and Oracle GoldenGate in 2007 to support its growing data warehouse and business intelligence solutions. These Oracle middleware products were selected as flexible tools that could be rapidly deployed in a global development environment that uses diverse technology solutions. Sabre also needed a tool to load data into the warehouse and schedule outbound data extracts to external customers and other Sabre applications.

“When we evaluated systems on the market, what we liked about Oracle Data Integrator was the scheduling ease. Our executions were growing each day, and it was becoming a challenge for our teams to keep up with the pace. Oracle Data Integrator provided the foundation for growth of both data sources and customers and allowed us to keep pace with the customer demand,” Thorud said.

When Sabre started to look for a tool to support the database schema redesign in its ticketing system migration, it needed something that could get the job done fast.

“We knew that hiring new people and/or developing custom programs would not be the best bet. We wanted to find a tool to do it for us. Oracle Data Integrator and Oracle GoldenGate helped not only with the migration, but also with the transformation,” Owczarek said.

Why Oracle

Sabre, working with HP, implemented Oracle Data Integrator in 2006 as part of its data warehouse initiative. Hardware and software installation was completed within one week, well under the time estimated for the effort. Sabre trained its development team on Oracle Data Integrator—including onsite training from Oracle for nine developers—starting with overall security and administration all the way to code development.

After completion of training, Sabre targeted an aggressive three-month timeline to migrate 98% of existing applications into Oracle Data Integrator and completed the migration well within that timeframe.

Sabre implemented Oracle GoldenGate in 2007 to support the addition of a new data source into the data warehouse which required integration with a NSK platform. Oracle Golden Gate was selected, based on the ease of integration with the source NSK system, and was implemented and in production within four months. GoldenGate has been adopted and expanded for other business applications within Sabre since the initial implementation.

For the ticketing system data migration project, Sabre and HP divided the initiative into four phases: new data-model design and data mappings specification, Oracle GoldenGate and Oracle Data Integrator proof of concept, data-transformation interfaces development and implementation, and data-migration deployment and validation.


SABRE HOLDINGS

38

Sabre conducted a separate database infrastructure build-out in parallel, including installing a high availability Oracle Database 11g with Real Application Clusters infrastructure that has Oracle GoldenGate bidirectional failover replication.

Partner

HP Enterprise Services is an experienced Oracle technology implementation partner, collaborating with Sabre to design and build solutions that enable Sabre to bring high-performance, high-availability, and innovative solutions to the travel and transportation market. HP provides consulting, architecture, and infrastructure delivery, including server and mainframe hosting, network engineering and operations, maintenance, and a variety of other full lifecycle services.

“HP works to define and implement the technology strategy for Sabre’s mission-critical systems, which are some of the highest transaction rate systems in the world,” said, Seamus Egan, vice president Oracle Alliance, HP. “We are pleased to partner with Sabre to deliver best-in-class enterprise solutions to the travel and tourism industry, based on Oracle’s excellent data transformation tools.”

Owczarek added, “On our migration project, HP gave us a high level of comfort by providing dedicated resources. When we started using Oracle Data Integrator, HP worked with us on volume-performance testing for six months, and then turned the program over to its excellent support team. HP executes the migration schedule, piece by piece, completely covering our certification and production environment.”

SABRE HOLDINGS

39

thetrainline.com Cuts Storage 3x, Completes Batch Runs 4x Faster, Triples Data Volume Capacity, and Boosts Website Speed by 10%

Oracle Customer:

thetrainline.com


www.thetrainline.com



Employees: 300



• Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c


• Oracle Platinum Services


Services


thetrainline.com is the United Kingdom’s leading, independent online retailer of train tickets. Customers buying advance fares online save an average of 43%. The company also provides retailing solutions for travel agents and train companies, provides rail content and booking tools for third-party systems, and operates a business travel portal for the corporate market. thetrainline.com is the most popular travel Website in the United Kingdom with 500,000 visitors a day and growing mobile services.

“Oracle Exadata gives us more bang for buck than any other comparable database technology on the market. It facilitates agile, innovative approaches to business development and makes the challenges of big data a nonissue.” –– Josko Grljevic, IS Director, thetrainline.com

• Sustain rapid search and booking times for hundreds of millions of journey requests per annum, with increasing volumes each year

• Enhance the customer experience for the millions of people who visit the site each month, many of whom now gain access via mobile devices

• Handle demand spikes during peak periods without performance degradation and eliminate need for downtime during site maintenance

• Cut overnight batch processing time for transactional data to ensure timely delivery of daily ticket sales figures to travel agents, train operating companies, and corporate customers, and to support fact-based decision-making

• Make financial reconciliation data and results of promotional campaigns available to thetrainline.com’s product managers and analysts in near real time and run queries at the speed of thought

• Store all the commercial data as required and retain all online analytical processing (OLAP)data needed for trend analysis and planning without need to purchase additional hardware

• Scale to manage a projected tripling of data volumes from 3 terabytes to 9 terabytes in four years without increasing IT support costs

Challenges

• Cut data storage by a factor of three, using Oracle Hybrid Columnar Compression in Oracle Exadata Database Machine, which enabled significantly faster data partitioning and storage and boosted Website response times by an average of 10%

• Used robust compression performance to eliminate previous need for scheduled downtime when removing or archiving older data, which enabled customers to visit thetrainline.com 24/7

• Reduced planned outage time for major enhancement or patch applications from three hours to 10 minutes by leveraging Oracle Exadata’s processing speeds

Solutions

THETRAINLINE.COM

40

• Condensed database instances 20%, from 50 to 40, and switched to smaller, appropriately sized servers, which optimized efficiency and cut cooling costs and data center space

• Stored all the financial data and historic OLAP data, and scaled to accommodate tripling of data volumes in the next four years without the need for additional hardware

• Archived historical data while still keeping it online for immediate user access without the need for IT team assistance

• Completed nightly processing of the previous day’s ticket sales data in two hours instead of eight hours

• Ran business intelligence queries that used to take six minutes in just five seconds

• Used Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c to radically improve database-related causes for poor application performance

• Benefited from Oracle Platinum Services to gain proactive system management; two-hour, on-site responses for hardware issues; configuration-specific recommendations; and around-the-clock access to technical expertise throughout the solution lifecycle

• Leveraged Oracle Platinum Services support to reduce IT resource workload by 30%, which freed IT teams to explore the full potential of Oracle Exadata’s processing power to bring new database applications and services online faster and innovate the business model to deliver further benefits

• Planned to capitalize Oracle Exadata’s processing speed to enable future, near-real-time queries and reconciliation to identify where, when, and how tickets are being sold to better understand customers and trends

• Began evaluating service enhancements and additional channels the company can pursue without additional software investment

Prior to selecting Oracle Exadata, thetrainline.com conducted proofs of concept with both traditional, non optimized, commodity hardware and software, and Oracle Exadata’s pre-engineered, ready-to-run platform. The company chose Oracle Exadata for its speed, power, cost-performance, and ability to scale to accommodate rapidly growing data volumes.

“Choosing a traditional, nonintegrated solution would have cost us 3x as much as Oracle Exadata in hardware, software, and project management costs and resulted in a significantly higher lifetime cost of ownership,” said Anant East, head of architecture and infrastructure, thetrainline.com

thetrainline.com chose Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c to manage all stages of the Oracle Exadata lifecycle and automate deployment, maintenance, diagnostics, and tuning. “ Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c was critical for the successful migration of our legacy databases to the Exadata platform,” said Simon Keen, Exadata program manager.

Why Oracle

THETRAINLINE.COM

41

thetrainline.com used Oracle GoldenGate to migrate data from its legacy system to two Oracle Exadata Database Machine X2-2 HC Quarter Rack instances to reduce downtime, avoid risk of data loss, and eliminate the need for complex programming.

“Oracle GoldenGate enabled us to complete the migration of three terabytes to Oracle Exadata, within a single 30-minute system outage,” East said. “Without Oracle GoldenGate, we would have required a 20 hour outage window to complete the migration, something that was completely unacceptable.”

Oracle Consulting and Oracle Advanced Customer Support Services assisted thetrainline.com’s systems implementer and hosting partner during pre-sales and throughout the implementation.

“Oracle Consulting and Oracle Advanced Customer Support Services worked seamlessly with us and our partners,” Grljevic said. “The Oracle teams provided technical knowledge, executed compression testing on our own data, advised on size and configuration, and recommended and applied patches. The excellent cross-team collaboration ensured a timely implementation, smooth go-live and problem-free switchover that caused no disruption to customers.”


THETRAINLINE.COM

42

Europe Airpost Manages Business Intelligence Environment in Real Time with Engineered System

A member of the ASL Aviation Group, Europe Airpost is the world’s largest operator of Boeing 737-300 Quick Change (convertible airplanes that transport freight by night and passengers during the day). With 800,000 passengers and 65,000 tons of freight transported in 2011, it is also the second-largest French airline and the leading French regional charter company.

Europe Airpost first deployed a business intelligence (BI) environment to optimize managing transport activities. It hosted this critical and resource-intensive application with other transactional business applications, such as flight pricing, payroll, and customer billing, on a common Oracle Real Application Clusters 11g infrastructure.

To ease access to business applications, such as the systems used for flight schedule management and aircraft maintenance, the company deployed Oracle Database Appliance to create a new, highly resilient, and dedicated business intelligence infrastructure.

With Oracle Database Appliance, Europe Airpost consolidated all critical business intelligence data regarding flight operation, fuel management, and service quality, while ensuring high performance and the availability of data and applications to efficiently manage its air transport activities. Thanks to a dedicated database appliance, business intelligence data is refreshed every 15 minutes instead of each hour, as with the previous infrastructure. As a result, operations managers can access aircraft mass reporting half an hour before each take off to optimize and to better calculate airport taxes for transported loads. Using Oracle Database Appliance, Europe Airpost has also optimized loading and query data performance by approximately 30%.

“Thanks to Oracle Database Appliance, we have a single, optimized hardware and software system for business intelligence. We can respond to numerous requests from technical services and maintenance staff about inventory tracking, and aircraft schedule forecasting, which improves our ability to maintain our fleet, monitor stock, plan plane schedules, and ensure efficient catering services.” –– Francis Brisedoux, Database Administrator, Europe Airpost

Oracle Customer:

Europe Airpost

Roissy, France

www.europeairpost.fr


Annual Revenue: US$100 to US$500 Million

Employees: 680


• Oracle Database Appliance


• Oracle Business Intelligence Suite,

Enterprise Edition

• Oracle Database 11g,

Enterprise Edition

• Oracle Real Application Cluster 11g

• Oracle Essbase


Services

• Move the resource intensive business intelligence and data warehouse system to a dedicated server to optimize employees’ productivity through faster access to the transactional and business intelligence data used for flight schedule management, pricing, and plane maintenance

• Create a single access point to business intelligence data from heterogeneous sources—including SQL requests, Microsoft Access, and Microsoft Excel—and achieve a single reference point for all data to optimize managing cargo activity

• Consolidate business intelligence and budget data to improve the efficiency of freight and passenger transportation activities

• Deploy a scalable database solution that enables Europe Airpost to accommodate rapidly growing data volumes for its business intelligence environment by simply adding central processing unit (CPU), disk, and memory capacity

Challenges

EUROPE AIRPOST

43

• Created a single, business intelligence data reference point by consolidating 15 databases into Oracle Database 11g, Enterprise Edition, using Oracle Data Integrator, and facilitated better access to homogeneous data

• Implemented Oracle Database Appliance in just one day to host the Europe Airpost Business Intelligence application, Informatisation Décisionnelle d’Europe Airpost, known as IDEA

• Improved cargo activities through a 25% to 30% faster flight-data loading process that incorporates calculations, such as for plane weight mass, flight plans, and fuel consumption into key performance indicators

• Gained the ability to refresh plane weight mass and plane equalization data in near real time—approximately every 15 minutes—compared to one hour previously, enabling airports to accurately calculate taxes on transported loads, and for Europe Airpost to reduce fuel consumption

• Enabled operations managers to obtain an overall view of all planes at any given time on their desktops through a Web interface to better manage fleet use, service quality, fuel demand, and crew schedules,

• Guaranteed high availability of a critical business intelligence application used to manage a 24/7 schedule of passenger and freight transport activity, through a 100% active/active cluster architecture, integrated into Oracle Database Appliance

• Used Oracle Advanced Customer Support Services to automatically generate a ticket, should a problem arise, without any additional costs, to reduce administration charges

• Integrated Oracle Essbase with Oracle Database Appliance to produce accurate financial and budgetary reporting and to provide a strategic vision of transportation activity to key managers

Solutions

“We found that Oracle Database Appliance was the leading solution on the market, offering the best quality and value,” said Francis Brisedoux, database administrator, Europe Airpost.

“The flexibility of the Oracle solution’s pay-as-you-grow model and its ability to easily upgrade hardware components—including central processing units and memory—enables us to efficiently respond to business requests for delivering new interfaces for tracking flight schedules, parts inventories, and airplane lifecycles.”

Why Oracle

Europe Airpost worked with Oracle Support to optimize the roll out of Oracle Database Appliance and achieve performance gains on data loading and reporting processes. Thanks to this optimization, the company deployed Oracle Database Appliance in just one day, including connections, electrical power, and cabling operations.


EUROPE AIRPOST

44

Hong Kong Air Cargo Terminals Ltd. (Hactl) Processes Shipping Manifests 60% Faster, Accelerates Information Searches by More Than 30%

Hong Kong Air Cargo Terminals Ltd. (Hactl) operates the world’s-largest, single, independent cargo handling facility, with a maximum capacity of 3.5 million tons of cargo per year. In 2010, the company handled a record 2.9 million tons for more than 100 airlines and 1,000 freight forwarders. Located at SuperTerminal 1 in Hong Kong’s Chek Lap Kok Airport, Hactl currently handles 70% of the air cargo throughput in one of the world’s busiest cities.

Hactl relies on its cargo management system, which it named Community System for Air Cargo (COSAC) to track cargo as it passes through the terminal. In early 2012, the company completed the upgrade of its cargo management system, renaming it COSAC-Plus. The new system, based on Oracle Database, Enterprise Edition 11g and Oracle WebLogic Suite, can support more than 1,000 concurrent users and complete more than 1.7 million transactions each day. As a result, Hactl lowered shipping manifest processing times by up to 60%, reduced scheduled downtime during system upgrades and implementations, and can now search for information more than 30% faster.

“Based on Oracle WebLogic Suite and Oracle Database, Enterprise Edition 11g, the new cargo management system can handle more than 1,000 concurrent users and complete more than 1.7 million transactions per day. We can process shipping manifests up to 60% faster, significantly improving our customer services.” –– Cindy Ng, General Manager—Information Services, Hong Kong Air Cargo Terminals Ltd.

Oracle Customer:

Hong Kong Air Cargo Terminals Ltd.

(Hactl)

Hong Kong

www.hactl.com


Employees: 2,600


• Oracle WebLogic Suite

• Oracle Database,

Enterprise Edition 11g



• Oracle Data Integrator 11g


Hactl’s services handle physical cargo, documentation, ramp management, crew transportation services, and intermodal transport services. The Oracle-based COSAC system connects Hactl with airlines and freight operators, as well as government authorities, such as Airport Authority Hong Kong, the Customs and Excise Department, Civil Aviation Department, and Census and Statistics Department. Customers can use COSAC to lodge cargo documents and track cargo.

The COSAC system was initially launched in 1976 at Hong Kong’s former international airport, Kai Tak, and has been upgraded several times. After Hactl moved to SuperTerminal 1 at Chek Lap Kok airport in 1998, staff used the legacy COSAC2 system to manage cargo data from a 3,500-compartment, multilevel, container storage system, along with 10,000 compartments accommodating loose cargo.

“Cargo tonnage almost doubled after the move to Chek Lap Kok, combined with an increase in demand for data from customs, airlines, and the International Air Transport Association’s initiatives such as Cargo2000, e-Freight, and e-AWB,” said Cindy Ng, general manager—information services, Hong Kong Air Cargo Terminals Ltd. “To improve efficiency and cope with the increase in the volume and complexity of data, we needed to develop a next-generation cargo management system, and provide a robust and agile platform for our customized cargo management services.”

New Airport Doubles Tonnage Handled by Cargo Management System

HONG KONG AIR CARGO TERMINALS LTD. (HACTL)

45

Hactl is one of two cargo operators based at Chek Lap Kok, with a third operator due to start business in 2013. The increased competition meant Hactl needed to improve the overall efficiency and flexibility of the COSAC system to retain existing customers and attract new business. The company also wanted to offer end-users a more powerful and flexible interface.

In addition, Hactl needed to ensure the transition to the new system and any subsequent upgrades were completed quickly and smoothly. It wanted to avoid excess downtime or other problems that might affect its ability—or the ability of its customers—to provide transport and cargo handling services 24 hours a day.

“COSAC has been the backbone of Hactl’s operations for 36 years, and we continue to invest significantly in ensuring the system is fully up to date and totally robust,” said Ng. “When you handle critical operations round the clock for more than 100 airlines and 1,000 freight forwarders, failure is not an option.”

Redesigning COSAC-Plus to run on Oracle has enabled Hactl to lower document processing time by up to 60%, despite supporting 1,000 concurrent users, conducting more than 1.7 million transactions per day.

“We can now process shipping manifests, which contain thousands of house waybills—which are contracts between shippers and agents for transporting cargo—up to 60% faster than the previous system,” said Ng. “By delivering a faster response to end-users, we have significantly improved our services and customer satisfaction.”

By lowering transaction processing times, Hactl has also enabled its customers, such as airlines and freight forwarders, to more quickly identify and correct errors in the shipping manifests.

“In the air cargo industry, every second counts, so the faster we process shipping documents and information through COSAC-Plus, the sooner our customers can identify and rectify any problems in the paperwork,” said Ng. “This allows cargo to be cleared sooner, without affecting shipment-release times.”

Shipping Manifests Processed Up to 60% Faster

The electronic cargo manifest for each aircraft can consist of thousands of items, making a rapid data entry and search system essential. Using the upgraded, Oracle-based COSAC-Plus, Hactl staff, airline users, freight forwarders, and government departments can now customize the system’s user interface to better suit their requirements. This has improved the speed at which users can search for information by more than 30%.

“By moving to Oracle products, we have enabled COSAC-Plus to optimize functions and customize data fields,” said Ng. “The system can also handle photographs of cargo, which increases the visibility of different items and is extremely popular with customers.”

Oracle Database, Enterprise Edition 11g and Oracle WebLogic Suite have also enabled COSAC-Plus to offer users online help and a choice of English and simplified or traditional Chinese.

Information Searches Accelerated by More Than 30%


46

“Offering simplified or traditional Chinese in the cargo management solution helps our staff use the system more easily, as well as making it easier for us to work with more businesses in mainland China,” said Ng. “This will help us expand our customer base, which will be especially important once the new cargo operator enters the market in 2013.”

In addition, 95% of the 3,500 people trained to use COSAC-Plus rated the new system as “good” or “very good.”

“Thanks to the user interface customization options, COSAC-Plus makes it easier for our end-users to enter and search for cargo information quickly and accurately,” said Ng. “This is improving the efficiency of the system, boosting customer satisfaction, and will help us remain competitive.”

By using Oracle Database, Enterprise Edition 11g and Oracle WebLogic Suite to upgrade its Cargo Management System to COSAC-Plus, Hactl has reduced its scheduled system downtime during new implementations and upgrades.

“We can now implement changes and upgrades to the Web-based system without taking it completely offline, ensuring we can provide cargo management services 24 hours a day, seven days a week,” said Ng.

Scheduled Downtime Reduced During System Upgrades

Hactl has implemented Oracle Business Intelligence Suite, Enterprise Edition 11g, to provide an insight into cargo shipment trends and customer behavior. It allows Hactl to better understand customer needs, and to develop strategies for handling cargo at peak times and during the anticipated changes brought about by increased competition.

“Our Oracle-based COSAC-Plus system allows us to more easily understand the trends of cargo movements across different continents and different airlines, which is important in an industry that is constantly changing according to the global economy,” said Ng.

Enhanced Business Intelligence Helps Predict Future Cargo Demand

• Improve the efficiency, capacity, and uptime of the COSAC-Plus cargo management system, to handle increases in the volume and complexity of data

• Prepare for increased competition in 2013 from a third cargo operator at Hong Kong’s Chek Lap Kok airport

• Enhance the system’s user interface to help improve cargo data entry and searching processes

• Reduce processing times for shipping manifests, to allow customers, such as airlines and freight forwarders, to recognize and correct mistakes faster

• Develop rapid data migration methodology for transferring millions of cargo records from the previous system to COSAC-Plus in a very short timeframe without affecting services

Challenges


47

• Supported 1,000 concurrent users conducting more than 1.7 million cargo transactions per day

• Reduced processing times for shipping manifests by up to 60%, allowing cargo to be cleared sooner without affecting shipment release times

• Accelerated information searches by more than 30%, and enabled users to quickly identify and correct errors

• Achieved a 95% user satisfaction rate by allowing customers to customize functions and data fields, and by providing photographs of cargo

• Maintained cargo management services 24 hours a day, seven days a week, by reducing scheduled downtime during upgrades and new implementations

• Improved competitiveness by supporting simplified and traditional Chinese, so the company can more easily expand its business to customers in mainland China

• Gained better insights into cargo shipment trends and customer needs, and developed strategies for handling cargo at peak times and during anticipated changes brought about by increased competition

• Migrated customers successfully to COSAC-Plus in small windows of only several hours, spread across four months, using tools such as Oracle Database Integrator

Solutions

Hactl chose Oracle, not only for the performance capabilities of Oracle WebLogic Suite, but also for the support from Oracle Consulting and Oracle University when training developers.

“We had already deployed other open and proven technologies from Oracle, such as Oracle Database, Oracle WebLogic Server, and Java in COSAC-Plus’ predecessors, and wanted an offering that would integrate best with our existing applications,” said Ng.

“To manage critical, 24/7 operations for the world’s busiest air cargo hub, we needed the performance and specific benchmarks that Oracle WebLogic Suite could provide, and these weren’t met by open source or other offerings,” Ng said.

Although the Oracle technology provided the performance and reliability Hactl needed, the company’s close work with Oracle Consulting was the key to the implementation’s success.

“We engaged Oracle Consulting to provide professional project management and specialized architectural and database designs,” said Ng. “As well as professional skills, the passion and strong bonds the team brought to the project added a differentiating value, which led to a successful implementation and data migration.”

Why Oracle

Hactl migrated its customers to the new system in batches between December 2011 and April 2012 to ensure they didn’t experience a lengthy downtime.



48

COSAC-Plus was developed by Hactl Solutions Ltd. (HSL)—an independent company established in 2009 to provide full air cargo management solutions for all sectors of the industry. HSL began developing the Cargo Management System in July 2009, working closely with Oracle Consulting on the project for three years.

“Without the luxury of extended downtime during the upgrade, we used Oracle Data Integrator 11g to migrate millions of records in short windows of only three to four hours,” said Ng. “This approach allowed us to contain and rectify any issues before moving ahead.

“COSAC-Plus is our single largest investment since the building of SuperTerminal 1, but this is an international airport so we simply cannot stop the cargo system for long periods to perform an upgrade,” Ng continued. “Thanks to Oracle Data Integrator and the support of Oracle Consulting, we began the migration phase early in the morning on the day after Christmas, and it ran smoothly until all our customers were moved across by April.”


RETAIL

50

Starbucks Coffee Company Delivers Daily, Actionable Information to Store Managers, Improves Business Insight with High Performance Data Warehouse

Oracle Customer:

Starbucks Coffee Company

Seattle, Washington

www.starbucks.com

Industry: Retail


Employees: 149,000



• Oracle Hybrid Columnar Compression

• Oracle OLAP


Enterprise Edition

Since 1971, Starbucks Coffee Company has been committed to ethically sourcing and roasting the highest-quality arabica coffee in the world. Today, with stores around the globe, the company is the premier roaster and retailer of specialty coffee in the world. The company is focused on running its business efficiently to deliver a premier customer experience while ensuring cost-conscious inventory control.

“Our Oracle Exadata-based database warehouse and Oracle Business Intelligence environment deliver detailed insight into point-of-sale data that allows us to innovate and offer our customers better services.” –– Mike Manzano, Vice President, Analytics and Insight, Starbucks Coffee Company

• Create a robust, 24/7-available enterprise data warehouse––containing sales, marketing, store management, point of sale, customer loyalty, and supply chain data––to drive more informed business decisions at the corporate, regional, and store levels

• Improve ability to rapidly analyze and act on customer loyalty, coffee sales, and supply chain information to continue to drive innovation

• Ensure scalability to support rapid growth in data volume

Challenges

• Used Oracle Exadata Database Machine and Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition to create a high-performance enterprise data warehouse and business intelligence environment that provides analysts and managers at the branch, field, and corporate levels with timely and actionable insight into store and product performance, as well as supply chain operations

• Gained the ability to load and refresh data from all stores in time for US East Coast store openings each morning, completing full loads in just four hours, and ensuring service level agreement compliance

• Enabled the company to load point-of-sale and customer loyalty data daily––from 10,000 US stores––to the data warehouse and answer most queries––such as information on coffee sales, promotions, and product mixes in individual stores––in fewer than 10 seconds

• Implemented Oracle Hybrid Columnar Compression to optimize storage area usage and compress 70 terabytes of raw data to approximately 20 terabytes––in one case condensing 2 terabytes of table data to 275 gigabytes, an almost 90% footprint reduction

• Utilized Oracle OLAP option, enabling 1-terabyte cubes to be available for fast and sophisticated analytics

• Developed a front-end dashboard of key business indicators that enables 10,000 users––including store and corporate managers––to gain rapid visibility into store-level sales and operational data

Solutions

STARBUCKS COFFEE COMPANY

51

• Increased product analysts’ insight into customer preferences to facilitate strategic development and product launches

• Reduced by hours the time that store managers spend on weekly reports, while simultaneously expanding insight and improving decision-making across thousands of stores

• Used Oracle Partitioning to optimize data storage manageability and cost efficiency

Starbucks had built its point-of-sale data warehouse on Oracle technology. This foundation, plus the Oracle OLAP option on Oracle Exadata Database Machine, enabled Starbucks to scale and seamlessly migrate its existing Oracle-based data warehouse to Oracle Exadata to expand insight and facilitate decisions, even with explosive growth in data and the user population.

Why Oracle

STARBUCKS COFFEE COMPANY

52

Ace Hardware Corporation Standardized Product Attribute Information to Improve Online Product Search

Oracle Customer:

Ace Hardware

Oak Brook, Illinois

www.acehardware.com

Industry: Consumer Goods

Employees: More than 4,000


• Oracle Enterprise Data Quality

Product Data Parsing and

Standardization

• Oracle Endeca Guided Search

Oracle Partner:

ByteManagers, Inc.

www.bytemanagers.com

Ace Hardware is known as the The Helpful Place ® by both customers and communities. For its first 50 years in business, Ace was privately held. In 1976, it became a retailer-owned cooperative. Each store is independently owned and operated by local entrepreneurs who often live in the communities they serve. With 4,600 stores in all 50 states and more than 60 countries, Ace is the largest retailer-owned cooperative and a clear leader in the convenience segment of the hardware industry.

With a strong focus on customer satisfaction, Ace needed to arm its retailers and associates with information at the click of a button to help customers find the right products to meet their needs. The company’s ACENET solution—a portal for Ace Retailers to look up and search for products—maintains information on 90,000 stock-keeping units (SKUs) and receives approximately 129,000 hits each day. The company had an excellent search engine with Oracle Endeca Guided Search, but it needed to standardize and organize its product content to make product identification and location more effective. Ace worked with Oracle partner ByteManagers, Inc. to implement Oracle Enterprise Data Quality Product Data Parsing and Standardization to optimize product data and drive search effectiveness in its ACENET search.

“With Oracle Enterprise Data Quality, we standardized product attributes for much simpler product classification and more effective search. This makes it much easier for staff to find product information at the click of a button—helping us to increase store manager and customer satisfaction, grow sales, and reduce costs.” –– Scott Heyer, Manager of Store Systems, Ace Hardware

• Keep pace with more than 129,000 daily ACENET hits, including 80,000 product search item detail hits, across 4,600 stores and manage product item information for 90,000 stock keeping units (SKUs) that are constantly changing

• Ensure each product entry in ACENET includes properly standardized product and key search attributes based on a standard product data definition

• Provide Ace retailers and associates with up-to-date, accurate product information, and enable staff to perform product comparisons on demand, particularly helpful if a customer requests a product that is not available

• Reduce expensive drop shipments from manufacturers to meet customer needs

• Improve ACENET adoption rates

Challenges

• Implemented Oracle Enterprise Data Quality Product Data Parsing and Standardization to streamline new product entry to the ACENET system—standardizing manufacturer names, brands, and item attributes to greatly improve search effectiveness

• Implemented a connector between Oracle Enterprise Data Quality and Oracle Endeca to automate dimension management and load item facets to enable guided navigation

Solutions

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53

• Improved product organization and “findability” to increase customer, in-store sales

• Applied more than 109,000 daily standardizations, verifying or updating more than 10,000 product data attributes covering more than 900 categories of hardware merchandise to improve system navigation

• Improved retailer confidence and increased user uptake on ACENET by 300% in the first project phase

• Avoided unnecessary drop shipment costs by enabling in-store staff to provide customers with product alternatives or information on product availability at near-by stores

• Enabled Ace to identify specific items for product lists, such as hurricane preparation lists, allowing stores to more easily order items from one list

• Set the foundation to enable vendors to on board new products into ACENET—ensuring that all products follow description standards before receiving approval

• Helped Ace run reports on new items that do not have a brand or product type association—immediately flagging holes in the data and reducing potential lost sales

Ace selected Oracle Enterprise Data Quality Product Data Parsing and Standardization due to its tight integration with Oracle Endeca Guided Search and ability to optimize product data for searchability within Oracle Endeca. The company was also impressed with the Oracle solution’s ability to examine every product category.

“With Oracle Enterprise Data Quality, we were able to identify holes in our data and be more proactive in meeting our customers’ needs,” said Scott Heyer, manager of store systems, Ace Hardware.

Why Oracle

Ace Hardware worked with Oracle partner ByteManagers to specify required product attributes. ByteManagers then configured the system to identify, extract, and standardize these attributes for improved search and navigation. The partner had two team members onsite at Ace and a team of three analysts offsite.

Partner

Ace Hardware implemented Oracle Enterprise Data Quality Product Data Parsing and Standardization in three phases. First, the company conducted an exercise where it evaluated attributes every item should have. It first identified brand and product type as two classifications that would provide quick wins and an immediate return on investment. Second, the team worked on navigation and product description standardization. Finally, in the third phase, Ace created user friendly expanded descriptions, introducing subcategory product-specific attributes, such as units of measure, material types, and finish/colors.


ACE HARDWARE

54

Wm Morrison Supermarkets PLC Cuts Operational Reporting Time from Hours to Minutes, Extends Analytical Capabilities, Improves Decision-Making and Control

Oracle Customer:

Wm Morrison Supermarkets PLC

Bradford, United Kingdom

www.morrisons.co.uk

Industry: Retail


Employees: 132,000






Enterprise Edition Plus

• Oracle E-Business Suite

• Oracle Retail

• Oracle Manufacturing Analytics


Services

• Oracle Advanced Monitoring and

Resolution

Established 100 years ago, Wm Morrison Supermarkets PLC (Morrisons) is the United Kingdom’s fourth-largest food retailer with 9 million customers shopping at its 476 stores every week. As the second-largest food manufacturer in the United Kingdom, the company sources and processes most of the fresh food it sells through its own manufacturing facilities, which gives it close control over provenance and quality.

“Oracle Exadata helps to derive more benefit and meaning from our data by delivering an immediate response to queries that previously took three hours to complete and enabling deeper analysis on an iterative basis.” –– Jonathan Walsh, Management Information Systems Manager, Wm Morrison Supermarkets PLC

• Maintain enough capacity on the central data warehouse platform to support anticipated growth in the number and complexity of business intelligence (BI) queries

• Enable analysis across a large number of manufacturing, warehousing, retail, and financial applications, bringing data together to provide one view across the organization for improved customer service

• Improve ability to meet grocery shopper’s changing requirements

• Drive company’s growth in the convenience store sector

• Consolidate on Oracle to benefit from strategic alignment and support across hardware and applications

Challenges

• Replaced HP Superdome with Oracle Exadata Database Machine to increase capacity and improve processing power, enabling faster analysis and more informed decision-making throughout the manufacturing, warehousing, and retail business groups

• Improved control over food manufacturing environment by rolling out Oracle Manufacturing Analytics to enable an organizationwide view of food product lines, volumes and lead-times across manufacturing sites, including abattoirs, fish processing facilities, and bakeries for the first time

• Delivered manufacturing BI and analysis to senior management—rather than raw, operational data—to enable more informed decision-making

• Produced financial reports in seconds instead of minutes with Oracle GoldenGate and Oracle Data Integrator, improving staff productivity and agility

• Achieved data compression rates of 100x on some tables, ensuring enough capacity to manage large volumes of data, including information from all in-store transactions

• Reduced the time to run detailed sales analysis reports from three hours to just seconds

Solutions

WM MORRISON SUPERMARKETS PLC

55

• Enabled Oracle Retail users to conduct iterative analysis for the first time, taking the output from one round of analysis and quickly using it as the input for the next analysis, gaining a deeper understanding of customer behavior to meet changing shoppers’ requirements and to help drive growth in the convenience store sector

• Cut the time one user spends running weekly sales reports from all day to just 30 minutes, freeing up staff members to spend more time on value-add analysis and less time on report production

• Deployed Oracle GoldenGate and Oracle Data Integrator to bring new data into Oracle Exadata in near real-time and replicate the data into reporting structures within the data warehouse—extending visibility into operations

• Benefited from technology and support-based synergies by consolidating on Oracle as the company’s preferred IT supplier

• Used Oracle Advanced Monitoring and Resolution to provide 24/7 proactive support for Oracle Exadata, to resolve issues as they arise and ensure up-to-date patching for smooth and uninterrupted operation

Morrisons is undertaking a large-scale IT transformation program encompassing financial systems, planning, forecasting, distribution, and manufacturing operations, and it chose Oracle as its preferred supplier. With a substantial Oracle estate already in place, Morrisons brought its Oracle applications onto Oracle Exadata to benefit from technological and support-based synergies across the organization.

“We chose Oracle Exadata to replace HP Superdome as Oracle Exadata offered the capacity, processing power and availability to meet our growing data processing requirements. We have achieved data compression rates of up to 100x,” said Jonathan Walsh, management information systems manager, Morrisons.

Why Oracle

Morrisons worked with Oracle Advanced Customer Support Services to implement Oracle Exadata within an aggressive six-month timeframe. A short proof of concept demonstrated very high levels of compression and potential for batch processing improvement.

Oracle ran several workshops with Morrisons to demonstrate the necessary steps between delivering the machines and the go-live date. By drawing on Oracle Advanced Customer Support Services’ knowledge and expertise, Morrisons achieved a successful implementation.

Oracle Advanced Customer Support Services’ methodology and quality processes complemented Morrisons’ in-house technical skills. Oracle Advanced Customer Support Services provided best-practice guidance and advice throughout the project to assist Morrisons’ technical teams with installing and configuring applications onto the Oracle Exadata platform and implementing a new backup and restore solution.


WM MORRISON SUPERMARKETS PLC

PROFESSIONAL SERVICES

57

Immonet GmbH Optimizes Analytics and Decision-Making with Engineered Systems, Increases Sales Results by 200%

Oracle Customer:

Immonet GmbH

Hamburg, Germany

www.immonet.de

Industry: Professional Services

Annual Revenue: Under US$100 Million

Employees: 250


• Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine


Foundation Suite 11g

• Oracle Business Intelligence Mobile


Enterprise Edition Plus On Demand

• Oracle Real-Time Decisions


Oracle Partner:

ISE Information Systems

Engineering GmbH

www.ise-informatik.de

Immonet, founded in 2003, and owned today by German media groups Axel Springer and Madsack, provides its commercial and private customers with far-reaching, cross-media, real estate marketing from a single source—via internet, newspapers, and other digital channels. Immonet is one of Germany’s leading real estate Websites with 1,495 million real estate listings and more than 3.7 million Website visitors per month (source: comScore Media Metrix’s ranking for “Total Unique Visitors,” August 2012).

“As a result of deploying Oracle’s engineered systems and applications, we’ve increased sales by 200% and brought Immonet back to its number-two position among Germany’s real estate platforms. With Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine X2-4’s extreme performance for Oracle Business Intelligence, we’ve dramatically improved our performance across the board. With Oracle Real-Time Decisions, we are maximizing our collaboration platform’s value by learning from every interaction with embedded rules and predictive analyses.” –– Christian Maar, Chief Executive Officer, Immonet GmbH

• Gain market share in the very competitive German real estate market, where only 35,000 professional real estate agents compete for millions of customers, by acquiring more real estate agents for Immonet’s real estate business

• Improve agency satisfaction and retention by providing improved sales-lead generation to those real estate agents who are most likely to unsubscribe from Immonet

• Improve the visitor experience with optimized offers because each agent is a highly valuable asset with potentially hundreds of customers, and Immonet expends substantial effort to service them

• Analyze customer-buying patterns, such as increasing mobile applications usage and real estate agent behavior to optimize the property portfolio

• Target only the most valuable real estate agents—for example, agents who will list most or all of their properties on Immonet’s Website and who have cooperated for a long time with the company

Challenges

• Used Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine X2-4, optimized for in-memory business intelligence workload analytics, to deliver powerful computing capacity for analyzing market trends, customer buying patterns, and agent behaviors with Oracle Business Intelligence Foundation Suite 11g, which enables continuous portfolio optimization to meet challenges presented by trends

• Cut query execution times from days or hours down to minutes or seconds with Oracle Exadata Database Machine—in some areas of financial reporting, trimming down an entire week to a few seconds

Solutions

IMMONET GMBH

58

• Used Oracle Business Intelligence Foundation Suite 11g to gain insight into a wealth of data—such as type of property, neighborhood, and price range per town and region—enabling the company to increase customer requests by 300% through better search engine advertising and to grow sales by 200%

• Segmented customers into key accounts, regular agents, and private customers to target each segment’s most valuable customers by using Oracle Business Intelligence’s visually rich and interactive reports and dashboards and Oracle Exalytics’ outstanding performance to process the data within minutes, instead of weeks

• Reduced agent churn rate by more than 50%—a major competitive advantage in the German real estate market that is serviced by only 35,000 professional agents—through automated, real-time recommendations of personalized sales leads to the agents that are most likely to unsubscribe from Immonet

• Integrated the Google search landing page with self-learning predictive modeling in Oracle Real-Time Decisions to substantially improve the conversion rate of new, real-estate agents, as compared to the previous randomized rules

• Reduced high acquisition costs for on-boarding professional real estate agents to Immonet’s platform by optimizing campaign targeting with business intelligence data, developing successful partner acquisition campaigns, such as those that feature partners in each region

• Enabled each department to roll out business intelligence dashboards and reports with ease—such as demand forecasts, employee performance reports, and mobile applications usage—to increase insight and decision-making capabilities across the board

• Delivered specific analyses—such as reports about new customers and lost contracts, issued daily at 3 a.m.—with Oracle Business Intelligence Mobile to iPad to better assist the company’s frequently traveling managers

• Used Oracle Business Intelligence Suite, Enterprise Edition Plus On Demand to gain seamless access to manage Oracle business intelligence and to gain support expertise—ensuring industry-leading availability, reliability, and security, reducing total cost of ownership and improving return on investment

“Oracle is the only company capable of delivering the entire stack for a proper data warehouse and business intelligence environment. The time from our decision to deploy the Oracle stack—including Exadata, Exalytics, Oracle Business Intelligence, and Oracle Real-Time Decisions—until its entry into production, took us less than two months,” said Christian Maar, chief executive officer, Immonet GmbH.

Why Oracle

Oracle Platinum partner ISE Information Systems Engineering delivered and implemented the complete data warehouse and business intelligence solution in September 2012, on schedule and within budget.

Partner

IMMONET GMBH

59

Sterci S.A. Processes 3.65 Million Financial Messages with 57% Lower Total Cost of Ownership by Using Engineered Systems

Oracle Customer:

Sterci S.A.

Geneva, Switzerland

www.sterci.com


Employees: 120



• Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud

• Oracle WebLogic Server 11g

• Oracle Tuxedo 11g

• Oracle Active Data Guard


Sterci S.A., a privately owned company headquartered in Geneva, is a leading provider of financial messaging solutions with branches in Zurich, Frankfurt, London, Paris, Toronto, New York, Riyadh, and Singapore. Every day, the world’s largest banking groups, financial institutions, monetary authorities, and corporations rely on Sterci GTSuite® to improve efficiency and business agility while reducing costs and risks. An official partner of SWIFT—Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, the worldwide financial network cooperative owned by banks—with full accreditation for GTSuite®, Sterci is also ISO 9001:2008 certified by the Swiss Association for Quality and Management Systems (SQS).

Sterci’s GTSuite® is a comprehensive portfolio of solutions for financial messaging, enterprisewide reconciliation, integration of business flows, and market data management. GTExchange®, the company’s high-performance financial messaging solution, is designed to support multiple networks and provide an open, service-oriented architecture for integration, transformation, message management, and connectivity.

“With the incredible throughput of 3.65 million financial messages per hour, we believe that our GTExchange® powered by Oracle Exadata, Oracle Exalogic, and other Oracle technologies is the world’s fastest product in the payment arena.” –– Frédéric Viard, Marketing and Pre-sales Director, Sterci S.A.

• Provide financial institutions, monetary authorities, and corporations with higher message throughput for the real-time processing of their cross-border payments and financial flows

• Manage rapidly increasing payment data volumes arising from significant mergers and acquisitions among key players in the financial services industry and the introduction of payment factories and messaging hubs

• Enable financial institutions, monetary authorities, and corporations to comply easily with new messaging standards, financial market initiatives, and government directives, such as Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA)

Challenges

• Deployed Oracle Exadata Database Machine to operate the company’s GTExchange® messaging solution with extreme performance for all types of database workloads in a system architecture that has no single point of failure

• Deployed Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud X2-2 as a data center building block to provide the highest performance, reliability, availability, and scalability for GTExchange®, improving the customer experience by dramatically reducing application response time and improving usability

• Delivered a total cost of ownership (TCO) that is 57% lower over five years than the TCO of a proposed system made by a competitor of Oracle

Solutions

STERCI S.A.

60

• Provided financial institutions, monetary authorities, and corporations with unmatched performance for real-time electronic financial and securities transactions—including message entry and repair, template creation, routing, printing, SWIFT relationship management application (RMA), supervision, and monitoring—while easing compliance with financial services industry standards and regulations

• Achieved an impressive 365% improvement on message throughput, compared to the previous environment—going from 1 million message flows per hour to 3.65 million message flows per hour

• Won a contract, based on Oracle Exadata benchmarking, to switch several million financial messages per day from the application to SWIFT and from SWIFT to the application for a large, top-tier bank, including the handling of the bank’s internal application-to-application message flows

• Enabled the rollout of the resulting GTExchange® project for the top-tier bank with more than 2,000 concurrent users across 160 countries over a period of two years, anticipating a peak of traffic with 1.2 million financial messages per hour and expected growth of 15% per annum

• Ensured maximum resilience and quality of service by allowing real-time synchronous replication to remote stand-by databases for recovery purposes with Oracle Active Data Guard because the strict requirements for payment applications do not permit any failure

• Enabled the company to replace outdated legacy messaging products of major banks with GTExchange® and GTX Thin Client following a structured approach based on Oracle Tuxedo 11g, Oracle WebLogic Server 11g, and Oracle Database, Enterprise Edition 11g to eliminate deployment risks

• Teamed up with Oracle Consulting on a proof of concept and benchmark test to address mass volume processing requirements in Sterci’s GTExchange®, using Exalogic’s quick deployment, reliability, and manageability capabilities to reduce system complexity and complete the proof of concept within two weeks

“Oracle Exalogic and Oracle Exadata deliver outstanding performance and have a far lower total cost of ownership than competing systems. The deployment enabled us to win a large, top-tier bank, where we will be responsible for managing the global financial messaging infrastructure across 160 countries,” said Etienne Savatier, associate partner, international sales and partnerships director, Sterci S.A.

Why Oracle

STERCI S.A.

61

Targetbase Analyzes Marketing Data up to 40x Faster, Helps Clients Launch Targeted Marketing Campaigns Earlier

Oracle Customer:

Targetbase

An Omnicom Group Inc. Company

Texas

www.targetbase.com



Employees: 200




• Oracle Partitioning

• Oracle Advanced Compression

• Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c

Targetbase is a data-driven marketing agency that delivers customer engagement through database, digital, and direct marketing expertise. It uses data-driven insight to create powerful brand communications that combine the right messages and tactics through the best channels with optimal timing. The results are strong creative services that drive customer engagements and deliver motivated individuals, ready to take action.

“With Oracle Exadata Database Machine, processing speeds are 10x to 40x faster. Queries that used to run in hours now run in minutes or even seconds. This is a huge advantage for providing rapid and in-depth analysis of client marketing initiatives. We are helping clients get relevant consumer-facing campaigns to market faster.” –– Brad Peek, Senior Director, Technology, Targetbase

• Boost processing power significantly to support the real-time capabilities required to deliver sophisticated marketing services for Targetbase customers

• Integrate large volumes of social, retail, and point-of-sale (POS) data, such as Web blogs, to drive richer and more actionable insights for clients

• Enable real-time analytics scoring and consumer-specific text mining on large volumes of marketing-related data

• Increase throughput to enable clients to deliver the right marketing message to the right audience, at the right time

• Gain the ability to quickly interpret raw consumer data and enable actionable insight

Challenges

• Expanded client marketing services—including analytics offerings—and boosted customer satisfaction by increasing throughput with Oracle Exadata Database Machine

• Enabled advanced analytics and data mining in a single data warehouse and operational reporting on one platform—allowing quick processing and analyzing social media and Web blog data to yield actionable insights

• Improved data processing performance of 26 terabytes of data warehouse data

• Achieved up to a 40x improvement in the performance of ad hoc consumer data queries—completing processes that used to take hours in minutes and even seconds—to help clients launch targeted marketing campaigns faster

• Deployed Oracle Active Data Guard to ensure client data is secure and recoverable in the event of a system outage

• Performed updates, refreshing client key performance indicators 9x faster for more timely and accurate information

• Optimized data infrastructure investment with Oracle Partitioning

Solutions

TARGETBASE

62

• Reduced data storage costs by up to 30% using Oracle Exadata Hybrid Columnar Compression

• Integrated analytical modeling capabilities with client Web sites, POS systems, and enterprise resource planning systems to ensure real-time marketing information

• Administered the system using Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c to monitor and regulate usage, ensuring high performance and availability

“We’ve always been an Oracle shop, so migrating to Oracle Exadata Database Machine was an easy decision. Going Oracle-to-Oracle saved us time in not having to rewire applications into a different environment. And, we were confident in the performance gains that we could achieve with the solution,” said Brad Peek, senior director, Technology.

Why Oracle

TARGETBASE

63

EngineON Helps Customers Address Big Data Challenges with Scalable, Reliable, Easy-to-Use Database Platform

Oracle Customer:

EngineON

San Francisco, California

www.engineon.com



Employees: 30


• Oracle NoSQL Database

Enterprise Edition

EngineON’s Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering provides unique, Web-acceleration technology to speed up application performance, enabling its customers—organizations across industries like financial services, healthcare, retail, and gaming—to address their unique big data challenges by efficiently processing unstructured data streams. The company’s fully managed and hosted platform can be set up within days to process high-velocity, high-volume data. EngineON operates in two countries—the United States and Switzerland.

“Our customers are dealing with unprecedented data volume and velocity, and with unstructured data coming from many sources. We needed a solution to help our customers address this significant challenge, and Oracle NoSQL Database delivered with high availability, scalability, and performance.” –– Alex Korotkoff, Chief Executive Officer, EngineON

• Help organizations across data-intensive industries, like financial services, healthcare, retail, and gaming to quickly capture and serve unstructured data

• Ensure system reliability, support, and stability for customers who were uncomfortable using free, open source solutions, due to the need for secure transactions and enterprise-class support

• Enable fast database installation to accelerate time to market for the company’s PaaS offering and allow for the rapid addition of new database instances to scale with customer growth

Challenges

• Used Oracle NoSQL Database to provide a high-performance solution for big data customers, helping organizations process transactions more quickly, while improving reliability, scalability, and ease of use—ultimately enabling them to make decisions in near real time to support their businesses

• Ensured scalability, high availability, and transparent load balancing, even when dynamically adding new capacity—handling several terabytes of data per second during peak processing times

• Provided Transactional Support to guarantee data processing is initiated and processed in a consistent manner—a very important feature for customers in industries like financial services, where “eventual consistency” is not acceptable

• Enabled gaming-company customers to quickly test new game launches—which require feed processing from thousands of users—to accelerate time to market and improve competitive advantage

• Helped retail customers to more effectively manage high inventory data volumes, enabling them to make better purchasing and supply decisions

• Enabled 50x greater data capture rate than offered by Hadoop

Solutions

ENGINEON

64

• Benefitted from Oracle NoSQL Database’s rich major/minor-key data modeling paradigm for managing data, for example, enabling a user to fetch just a small text description and ignore an associated large photograph in the same record—improving performance and using resources more efficiently

• Ensured very easy integration with Oracle Database for simple data migration, enabling customers to analyze structured and unstructured data simultaneously

• Enabled EngineON to very quickly install and administer Oracle NoSQL Database instances, enabling its customers to start using it within just a few hours

“Oracle provided exactly what we wanted—a very easy installation process, enterprise-level support, performance, and unique features that other NoSQL players do not offer. We evaluated other options, but chose Oracle due to its scalability, reliability, transactional support, and robust feature set,” said Alex Korotkoff, chief executive officer, EngineON.

Why Oracle

EngineON completed its initial installation of Oracle NoSQL Database in less than one week in early 2012.

“Oracle NoSQL Database is very easy to install and use. Right now, if we wanted to create an instance in the cloud, it would take us minutes. We can cut out a lot of maintenance and deployment time with Oracle because it is an all-in-one, packaged product,” said Alex Korotkoff, chief executive officer, EngineON.


ENGINEON

65

ProveIT Ltd Uses Event Processing Solution to Enable Banks to Release Billions of Dollars of Capital Set Aside for Risk Exposure

Oracle Customer:

ProveIT Ltd


www.proveitltd.co.uk

Industry: High Technology

Employees: 23


• Oracle Event Processing

Established in 1987, ProveIT Ltd is the leading complex event processing (CEP) solutions provider, striving to optimize business performance through comprehensive data exploitation. Recognizing how critical real-time information is to many organizations, including those in the banking and financial industry, ProveIT developed a real-time risk analysis platform, RiskIT, with Oracle Event Processing at its core.

RiskIT provides organizations with real-time insight into their risk exposure. It helps banks and financial institutions to significantly reduce trading costs and enables them to release billions of dollars in additional funds that the regulator has set aside for risk exposure because RiskIT provides aggregated global risk exposure on-demand.

“Oracle Event Processing was instrumental in bringing RiskIT to market. With Oracle Event Processing at its core, RiskIT offers customers real-time insight into their risk exposure and helps banks comply with strict regulations, thereby significantly reducing risk exposure, capital provisioning and trading costs.” –– Graham V. Smith, Managing Director, ProveIT Ltd

• Provide customers with a comprehensive, real-time risk management system enabling them to assess market risk immediately rather than after two or three days

• Ensure that the system can be implemented quickly to help banks and financial institutions comply with strict rules instituted by the Financial Services Authority (FSA) following the 2008 financial crisis

• Enable customers to capture and consolidate data from multiple systems to accurately assess market risk in real-time

Challenges

• Developed a risk management system with Oracle Event Processing at its core to deliver real-time risk management information to banks, financial institutions, and utility companies and to meet strict Financial Services Authority (FSA) regulations

• Reduced, by up to half, the amount banks are legally required to deposit overnight to cover any potential losses, with accurate, up-to-date risk information, releasing billions of dollars for overnight trading in other geographic regions

• Provided banks with a real-time audit trail to fully explain profit and loss and value at risk volatility and to pin-point the cause, significantly reducing human involvement and therefore reducing the cost of exception handling through the middle and back office

• Enabled banks to drill down into data to present a real-time risk assessment, allowing banks to immediately understand status and thereby improve decision-making during volatile market conditions, a process that previously could take up to two days to complete

• Extracted data from up to 50 systems in each bank—including data fed from Bloomberg and Reuters—to assess the global profit and loss account in real-time and determine the bank’s exposure to risk

Solutions

PROVEIT LTD

66

• Cut implementation time from a typical three year risk transformation program for a comparable custom-built solution to between three and six months by implementing RiskIT

ProveIT was confident that running its risk management system on Oracle Event Processing would deliver an easy-to-integrate solution that would meet its financial services customers’ specific demands.

“Most customers have Java-based middleware, and with Oracle Event Processing we can not only deliver a faster, smoother integration into existing systems, but also provide real-time insight into complex trade scenarios at banks. Similar products from other vendors are built on C++ or native languages which would require further integration and longer implementation cycles. Oracle Event Processing was the obvious choice,” said Mark Bruce, technical director, ProveIT Ltd.

Why Oracle

PROVEIT LTD

67

ON24 Eliminates Service Disruptions for More Than 25,000 Online Events Each Year, Improves System Performance

Oracle Customer:

ON24

San Francisco, California

www.on24.com


Employees: 250


• Oracle Coherence

• Oracle WebLogic Server

• Oracle Solaris

Oracle Partner:

SL Corporation

www.sl.com

ON24 provides a full range of cloud-based Webcasting and virtual communications solutions to more than 700 global organizations in publishing, technology, life sciences, government, and financial services—helping them to communicate with employees, clients, prospects, and partners with measurable impact. ON24’s customers use its solutions for corporate and marketing initiatives, such as demand generation, conferences, events, product launches, training, continuing education, internal communications, and executive announcements.

Quality and high availability of the ON24 platform is critical for the company’s business. ON24 Webcasts and virtual events run continuously through the day and any interruptions or even short degradations in system performance create major inconveniences for the around-the-clock, software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform and its users. Further, by nature, the system’s load has a tendency to change frequently and quickly, literally growing from few hundred active users to tens of thousands in a matter of minutes, if not faster. To address these demands, ON24 implemented Oracle Coherence, integrating it with Oracle WebLogic Server’s ActiveCache, to enable ON24 to store users’ HTTP sessions on the grid for improved system performance and reliability. The solution enabled ON24 to eliminate service disruptions—for improved customer satisfaction—and reduce the hours spent on tuning and traffic switches by more than 90% each month.

“ON24’s SaaS platform implementation is centered on Oracle WebLogic Server and Oracle Coherence. The strategic decision for this was made based on proven, solid performance of these products and the high level of trust that ON24 places in Oracle.” –– Alexander Livitz, Senior Performance Architect, ON24

• Provide 100% service availability to attendees and end users for more than 25,000 events each year, including Webcasts, event portals, virtual events, and virtual environments

• Provide an architectural framework to more easily segment traffic, automatically directing similar traffic to specific technology resources for improved performance

• Reduce system-tuning complexity

• Eliminate service interruptions and performance degradations, while providing the flexibility needed to support fluctuating demand that can grow from a few hundred active users to tens of thousands in a matter of minutes

Challenges

• Implemented Oracle Coherence, integrating it with Oracle WebLogic Server’s ActiveCache, to enable ON24 to store end-user HTTP sessions on the grid for improved system performance and reliability

• Enabled each individual Oracle WebLogic Server to process close to 1,000 requests each second without visible performance degradation

Solutions

ON24

68

• Provided continuous availability and high performance for 25,000 of its customers’ events each year, with one single event having as many as 30,000 concurrent users

• Minimized service disruptions, including planned outages—improving customer satisfaction

• Used Oracle Coherence to monitor system load and utilization, provide incident alerts, and maintain historical data

• Reduced worker hours spent on tuning and traffic switches by more than 90% each month

• Provided unprecedented scalability, enabling ON24 to roll traffic between clusters or change cluster size on the fly

ON24 had used Oracle WebLogic Server for quite some time. WebLogic’s performance, reliability, and high availability features placed it at the top of the marketplace’s application server lineup. Server manageability and monitoring capabilities were also important factors for choosing WebLogic. Further, seamless integration with other Oracle products minimized typical integration pains.

The company decided to implement Oracle Coherence, integrating it with Oracle WebLogic Server to provide a central storage location that is accessible from any connected client node and making it clear which WebLogic server in the cluster is processing a segment of a given transaction.

“This unique technology is only provided by Oracle and integrates well with ON24’s existing WebLogic infrastructure,” said Alexander Livitz, senior performance architect, ON24 “Oracle Coherence is known for its high performance, high availability, and scalability—making it a great match for the strict requirements of the ON24 SaaS platform.

In addition, the flexibility of the Oracle licensing model, as well as support options, made choosing Oracle WebLogic Server and Oracle Coherence not only the best functional choice, but also a cost-effective option.”

Why Oracle

ON24 completed the entire project in four months by involving collaboration between different teams within organization, including those involved in software development, performance, network operations and quality assurance. Because it is pre-integrated with Oracle Coherence, implementing Oracle WebLogic’s ActiveCache feature was straightforward. The product worked well, practically out-of-the-box. However, time was required to thoroughly test the solution, complete comparative performance analysis, define and develop traffic segregation rules, allocate hardware resources, and build automation scripts.


ON24 worked with SL Corporation to monitor its Oracle Coherence Solution, using SL RTView.

“SL RTTView is the best Oracle Coherence monitoring solution out there,” Livitz said. “Its rich graphics show our cluster as a whole, rather than requiring us to monitor each server individually.”

Partner

ON24

69

Sodexo Improves Financial and Operational Data Visibility with High-Performance Enterprise Data Warehouse and Analytics

Oracle Customer:

Sodexo

Gaithersburg, Maryland

www.sodexo.com



Employees: 420,000



• Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine

• Oracle Essbase

• Oracle TimesTen In-Memory

Database


Services

Founded in 1966 by Pierre Bellon in Marseilles, France, Sodexo is now a global, Fortune 500 company and the worldwide leader in quality-of-life services, including food and facilities management, motivational solutions, and business strategy services. For more than 40 years, the company has developed unique expertise, backed by nearly 420,000 employees in 80 countries across the globe. Sodexo’s services help reinforce the well-being of individuals and help companies and organizations improve their performance. The company serves more than 15 million consumers each day.

Because Sodexo offers a wide breadth of services across many industries, the company needed a robust enterprise business intelligence platform to support more than 10,000 North American users. It wanted to streamline many business processes and get information into managers’ hands more quickly to improve decision-making capabilities. Sodexo also wanted to reduce its IT support costs and enable employees working in the field to access pertinent data and dashboards via desktops, laptops, and mobile devices.

Sodexo deployed Oracle Exadata Database Machine and Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine as a data warehousing and analytics platform, consolidating all information from major functions, including human resources, finance, supply management, and retail points of sale (POS).

“With Oracle, we can provide the right information, to the right people, at the right time to create a competitive advantage and enable us to better manage our business, enhancing our value to our clients.” –– Kishore Agasthi, Vice President of Information Management, Sodexo

“Oracle Exadata enabled us to significantly cut the batch times and publish approximately 730,000 PDFs per month. In addition to its excellent performance, Oracle Exadata gives us an extremely stable enterprise data warehouse environment. We get great support and can address disk failures without any production downtime,” said Kishore Agasthi, vice president of information management, Sodexo.

Sodexo also deployed a dashboard application—accessible via desktops, laptops, and mobile devices and based on Oracle Essbase and Oracle Exalytics. This application provides unit managers in North America with visibility into key performance indicators (KPI’s) for each unit’s performance, along with comparisons to similar units, enabling front-end managers to compare performance against their peers and identify opportunities for improvement. The system also allows managers to provide comments, such as, why a specific KPI is off track. This improves senior management’s understanding of actual performance against key performance indicators.

“With Oracle Exalytics, we increased the cube history from two years to four years, giving us access to additional historical data. And, we can support more than 10,000 users with hundreds of concurrent queries without concern of crashing the system,” Agasthi said.

“With the in-memory technology, we can take a process that we previously would have batched and complete it in almost real time.

Streamlining Processes and Enhancing Visibility

SODEXO

70

Sodexo’s financial analysts are responsible for analyzing the suppliers from which the company purchases, as well as identifying opportunities for savings. Previously, Sodexo’s data warehouse was well structured but not fast enough to answer all analysts’ questions. With the performance improvements gained with Oracle, Sodexo has reduced query processing time to 30 seconds or less, enabling the company’s analysts to run many more queries and identify new opportunities for cost savings.

Due to Oracle Exadata’s performance and reliability, as well as its Oracle Hybrid Columnar Compression functionality, Sodexo has also started to bring its high volume POS data into the data warehouse with the goal of better understanding product contribution analysis.

Opening New Doors for Supplier and POS Management

That is really significant for our operators who are making decisions based on those metrics. That capability was not readily available before. Now, with Oracle Exalytics, it comes boxed with the software—a huge advantage for our business analytics team,” Agasthi said.

With Oracle Exadata, Sodexo achieved an 8x to 10x improvement in compression, enabling it to easily manage a 10 terabyte data warehouse on a quarter-rack machine. The company can also back up its database much more quickly.

Sodexo is in the process of implementing Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition, which will enable it to take its Oracle Essbase application from a user-based model to a server-based model—substantially reducing support costs.

Boosting System Capacity

• Deploy a robust enterprise business intelligence platform to support more than 10,000 North American users working across a wide breadth of services and industries, particularly food and facilities management

• Get information into managers’ hands more quickly for better decision-making

• Enable employees to access pertinent data and dashboards via desktops, laptops, and mobile devices

• Reduce IT support costs and management complexity

• Provide strong ad-hoc functionality with quick response times

Challenges

• Deployed Oracle Exadata Database Machine and Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine as a data warehousing and analytics platform, consolidating major functions, like human resources, finance, supply management, and retail POS

Solutions

SODEXO

71

• Provided more than 10,000 users in North America with desktop, laptop, and mobile access to their performance data, as well as comparisons to similar units

• Increased the amount of historical data in Oracle Essbase from two years to four years

• Reduced the time to run queries for supplier analysis to 30 seconds or less—enabling the company’s effectiveness in identifying opportunities for cost savings

• Compressed the data warehouse by 8x to 10x with Oracle Exadata, enabling Sodexo to use less hardware while achieving much higher performance

After a comprehensive, two-month proof of concept phase that examined Oracle and other massively parallel platforms with shared-nothing architectures, Sodexo selected Oracle Exadata Database Machine, due to its storage capacity, redundancy, and infrastructure architected for high-speed performance on a data warehouse.

Sodexo chose Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine because it complemented the Oracle Exadata solution with high-speed analytics.

“We took our production data and ran it through the exact same scenarios we would use on a regular basis. Oracle Exadata beat everything else by large margins. In addition, because we had Oracle Essbase, the next obvious candidate for purchase was Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine. We evaluated it from cost and performance perspectives and determined it was the best choice for our environment,” Agasthi said.

Why Oracle

Sodexo completed the Oracle Exadata implementation in 2011, in house, working with one representative from Oracle Advanced Customer Support Services. After receiving the quarter-rack Oracle Exadata Database Machine, configuration took only one-and-a-half weeks. Then, Sodexo migrated from its old hardware to Oracle Exadata and ran a few test cycles before going live.

“It was a very easy implementation. We didn’t need an implementation partner. From start to finish, it took less than six weeks. Throughout the process, we received excellent support from Oracle. As an IT organization, we want to spend more time adding value to our business and less on system configuration. Oracle’s engineered systems enable us to do that,” Agasthi said.

One year later, Sodexo implemented Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine, completing configuration and software installation in just one to two weeks and then migrating Oracle Essbase within four weeks. Within five weeks, Sodexo had its Oracle Essbase applications running several times faster. The company is now migrating applications to Oracle Business Intelligence Edition.


SODEXO

72

Epsilon Enhances Business and Marketing Service Offering by Consolidating Mixed Workloads onto High Performance Data Infrastructure

Oracle Customer:

Epsilon

Irving, Texas

www.epsilon.com


Annual Revenue: US$500 Million to US$1 Billion

Employees: 3,600



• Oracle Enterprise Manager


• Oracle Auto Service Request

Epsilon is a global leader in delivering direct-to-customer connections that drive business performance. Epsilon’s integrated solutions use the power of rich transactional and demographic marketing data, strategic insights, analytics, award-winning creative and robust digital and database marketing technologies to connect brands with consumers, both online and offline, increasing engagements to generate measurable marketing outcomes.

Epsilon manages customer loyalty programs for major global brands. These programs generate large amounts of data and must be capable of high-performance transaction processing, tracking, configuring, logging, and campaign execution. With many of its information systems experiencing significant growth, and seeing increased demand for real-time reporting and end-user engagement, Epsilon needed a data infrastructure that could scale to meet exponential data growth. It also needed to maintain strict performance and availability requirements for online transactional processing (OLTP) workloads that support its client programs.

Epsilon has selected Oracle Exadata Database Machine for some of its client environments to deliver extreme performance for data warehousing and OLTP workloads, and Oracle Enterprise Manager to enhance system management and ensure high availability to meet customers’ real-time data needs. With Oracle Exadata, Epsilon can deliver highly available marketing solutions that adhere to strict, service-level agreements (SLAs).

As an example, Epsilon provides real-time support for a large US retail customer’s tens of thousands of point-of-sale terminals, which have peak loads exceeding 1,000 Web service calls per second and reaching 500,000 input/output operations per second (IOPS). Each Web service call can include hundreds of transactions, with transactions averaging between 10 milliseconds and 200 milliseconds, and must meet stringent expectations for real-time data processing.

The extreme performance of Oracle Exadata has enabled Epsilon to enhance its business and deliver new value-added services to its client base. Specifically, the company has achieved transactional processing speeds of 5 times to 12 times that of a traditional database solution.

With Oracle Exadata and Oracle Enterprise Manager, transaction times have dropped by nearly 75%. Information is now in real-time, meaning that when a customer checks out at a retail store, the system can instantly calculate a new loyalty program score for the shopper, identify instant savings to which the shopper is entitled, and enable a customer marketing conversation, all before the customer leaves the store––ultimately improving the customer experience, brand perception, and overall brand loyalty and adherence.

“Oracle Exadata has enhanced our service offerings, enabling us to deliver new value-added services by achieving transactional processing speeds that were unthinkable and unaffordable in the past. We have deployed Oracle Enterprise Manager to bring our IT management capabilities up to the task of ensuring the best operational environment for Oracle Exadata. Efficient IT management is more essential than ever in a market that expects real-time data.” –– Jeff White, Vice President, Technology, Strategic Database Services, Epsilon

EPSILON

73

Epsilon uses Oracle Enterprise Manager to provide a cohesive end-to-end view for its Oracle Exadata and nonExadata environment—thus ensuring all environments operate at peak performance. With Oracle Enterprise Manager, Epsilon benefits from a single comprehensive management solution for the entire Oracle-based infrastructure, which simplifies both hardware and database administration and enables administrators to focus on tasks of higher value.

• Gain the ability to process and analyze, in real time, massive volumes of clients’ sales and behavioral data that drive client promotional and loyalty programs

• Gain a competitive edge with extreme performance and analytical capabilities that enable retailers and other concerned organizations to significantly improve the impact and effectiveness of their marketing programs

• Enable clients to enhance loyalty program experiences for consumers, such as immediately updating shoppers’ customer loyalty profiles and points after a purchase

• Ensure high levels of analytical system and data warehouse performance and availability, even as data volume increases by 40%, year-over-year

• Adhere to strict SLAs that retail clients and clients in other industries require

Challenges

• Achieved a critical competitive advantage with Oracle Exadata Database Machine and Oracle Enterprise Manager, which enable Epsilon to achieve unprecedented data processing speed and efficiency for some retail clients and customers in other industries

• Gained the real-time processing capabilities and insight required to take clients’ marketing and loyalty programs to new levels of effectiveness

• Used Oracle Exadata to provide a major US retailer with real-time support for tens of thousands of point-of-sale terminals, resulting in peak loads exceeding 1,000 Web service calls per second, and reaching 500,000 IOPS per second, to deliver customer satisfaction

• Acquired extensive performance and analysis tools with Oracle Enterprise Manager to proactively manage and monitor Oracle Exadata, detect emerging problems before they impact end users, and analyze the root causes to accelerate solutions

• Acquired a standard management solution and policy-driven templates to more efficiently monitor Epsilon’s Oracle databases and attributes, mitigated the need to write and deploy scripts, and automated monitoring and alerts––enabling database administrators to focus on more pertinent and high-value tasks, such as system tuning that delivers efficiencies and additional business opportunities for customers

• Used Oracle Enterprise Manager, along with Oracle Auto Service Request for Sun System to reduce the time to resolution when system issues occur

Solutions

EPSILON

74

• Ensured high availability for Epsilon’s Oracle databases and enabled real-time replication with Oracle Active Data Guard

“Oracle offers a complete solution, and Oracle Exadata delivers unprecedented processing speed and efficiency, which we require,” said Jeff White, vice president, technology, Strategic Database Services, Epsilon. “When it came to a management tool, Oracle proved to be our best option. The majority of database administrators are familiar with Oracle Enterprise Manager, and we heavily utilize templates to standardize common tasks and actions. This standardization enables us to save the time that we would have spent writing, maintaining, and deploying scripts, so we can focus on higher-value tasks that provide increased return on investment, such as application system performance and tuning that enhances the customer experience and provides efficiencies to our clients.”

Why Oracle

EPSILON

PUBLIC SECTOR

76

Companhia Imobiliária de Brasília (Terracap) Produces Performance Reports 50% Faster, Improves Access to Management Information

Oracle Customer:

Companhia Imobiliária de Brasília

(Terracap)

Distrito Federal, Brazil

www.terracap.df.gov.br

Industry: Public Sector




• Oracle Database 11g

• Oracle Real Application Clusters

• Oracle Spatial and Graph

• Oracle Business Process

Management Suite 11g

Companhia Imobiliária de Brasília (Terracap), also known as Agência de Desenvolvimento do Distrito Federal (DF), or the Development Agency of the Federal District, is a company controlled by Brazil’s federal and federal district governments. By managing public lands and providing sustainable real estate projects, the company promotes socioeconomic development and quality of life for the federal district’s population. Established in 1972, the company manages federal district property through the use, acquisition, incorporation, encumbrance, or transfer of assets, as well as by directly or indirectly carrying out road construction projects in the district.

The company also oversees land sales and urbanization in the Noroeste neighborhood, the first sustainable neighborhood in Brazil. The project’s 220 buildings, on 243 hectares, use solar heating, recycled rainwater, and a suction system to transport household waste to a treatment center. This reduces garbage truck traffic and pollution in local communities. In addition, the company uses light emitting diode lamps for public lighting to conserve energy.

“With Oracle Business Process Management Suite 11g and Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition 11g, we can now immediately determine the viability of government projects.” –– Geraldo Rodrigues Soares, IT Coordinator, Companhia Imobiliária de Brasília (Terracap)

• Provide managers with quick access to financial and collection-portfolio information, improving performance in billing and budget processes

• Provide better oversight of loans and mortgages by simulating different scenarios for analysis and informed decision-making

• Replace the use of spreadsheets in performance reporting by integrating nearly 60 applications—including those for urban property management, sales, billing, and assets—to accelerate financial processes

Challenges

• Deployed Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition and Oracle Business Process Management (BPM) Suite 11g, enabling detailed, real-time analysis of the billing portfolio (valued at nearly US$1.5 million), and allowing the company to obtain updated values, including customer fines and late payment fees

• Carried out monthly closing during business hours—a process previously done at night to avoid disruption—achieving this using Oracle Database with Real Application Clusters with two-node servers, significantly accelerating access to customer portfolio information and making more accurate receivables calculations

• Enabled faster decision-making about project implementation using Oracle BPM Suite, allowing managers to immediately analyze resources, ensuring the economic viability of projects marketed by Terracap

Solutions

COMPANHIA IMOBILIÁRIA DE BRASÍLIA (TERRACAP)

77

• Enabled simulating various economic scenarios for the next three years, which is essential to managing real estate financing extended to customers for up to 40 months—an operation that was only possible using Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition’s metrics, reports, and analytics

• Integrated nearly 60 legacy applications, such as sales management, accounting, property costing, tax payments, and payment slips with Oracle Real Application Clusters, assuring security and high performance for business applications, which helped the company to process data at high volume without affecting routine transactions

• Provided the federal government with access to data about critical operations, such as urban property and budget management, including scanned documents and low-income housing project deadlines, replacing a paper-based model and creating performance reports 50% faster

• Developed a georeferencing solution that enables land and topography analysis through Oracle Spatial and Graph technology integrated with Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition, ensuring the provision of safe and sustainable real estate projects through a detailed analysis of data and images of buildings, hydrographic systems, roads, and protection areas, minimizing environmental impact

“Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition’s ease of use and flexibility in developing multiple views of sales performance and process automation were critical to our decision process. Furthermore, the solution’s easy integration with our 60 applications was another important factor,” said Geraldo Rodrigues Soares, IT coordinator, Terracap.

Why Oracle

COMPANHIA IMOBILIÁRIA DE BRASÍLIA (TERRACAP)

Oracle Corporation

Worldwide Headquarters

500 Oracle Parkway

Redwood Shores, CA

94065

U.S.A.

Worldwide Inquiries Phone

+1.650.506.7000

+1.800.ORACLE1

Fax

+1.650.506.7200

oracle.com

C00000-00

Copyright © 2013, Oracle. All rights reserved. Published in the U.S.A. This document is provided for information purposes only, and the contents hereof are subject to change without notice. This document is not warranted to be error-free, nor is it subject to any other warranties or conditions, whether expressed orally or implied in law, including implied warranties and conditions of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. We specifically disclaim any liability with respect to this document, and no contractual obligations are formed either directly or indirectly by this document. This document may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, for any purpose, without our prior written permission.

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