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CIO STORYThe Enterprise Gateway

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JUNE - 2015 WWW.CIOSTORY.COM

The Ruler In DATABASEFor Three and Half DECADES

CIO STORY, LLC1999 S.Bascom Avenue,Suite 700, Campbell,CA 95008, USA

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With 27 Wizards in our toolbox, the solution you are seeking is sure to be found with More4Apps!

SpeedWizardsProductivity

Accuracy

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EaseValue

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COVER STORY

CIO VIEWS

CXO PERSPECTIVES

COVER The rulers in database for three and half decade

CTO, Branden R. Williams

Social digital leader, David Chou

CEO, Dr Eslambolchi

VP & CIO, Doug Myers

President Gregg Rennie

IT Director, Jerry Horton

President, Steve Lucas

VP of Equity Research,Georgios Kyriakopoulos

Cyber Security Solutions

22 Joanna Young, VP & CIOMichigan State University

45 Dr Ganesh NatarajanVice Chairman & CEO

Zensar Technologies

42 David Cornwell, CEOPlease Tech Ltd

Healt

CyberFlow Analytics

Pepco Holdings

The 41 North Group, LLC

Blue Valley Telecommunications

SAP

SunTrust Robinson Humphrey

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24 46

14 36

26

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28

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Dan Maude, President John Clow, CEO

Tomaz Gornik, CEO Dan Gannon,President and CEO

Tim Bacci, CEO John Deeb, CEO, Co-Founder

John O’Keeffe, CEO and Co-Founder

Rob Bernshteyn, CEO Hemen Vimadalal, CEO

Pandyan Ramar, CEO

Joe Rymsza, Director & Co-CEO Lavinia Noble Surjove, Founder and CEO

Asif Ramji, CEO

Jothi Radhakrishnan, President Mehmet Beyaz, CTO

Nag Karaka, CEO

Beacon Application Services Process solution assurance

Marand TurnKey Solutions Corp

BMC Software, Inc

Infor

Digital River

DocuSign, Inc

Equisoft

Cintra Software

AppDynamics, Inc

Composer Ciphersoft Rubicon Red

More4Apps

Coupa Software SIMEIO SOLUTIONS

ONWARDPATH

Foresight Swift Pace Solution

paymetric

iWorks TTG International

PCB Apps

For Three and Half

decadeS

The Rulers InDATABASE

By Neethu Mohan

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The advent of technology has brought myriad of changes in the business sector. The CIOs across the globe is ready to accept the changes and they

are also ready to implement new technologies in their organizations. At the same time they are concerned about taking correct decision and choosing the right technology for their organizations, like never before.

According to a study released by IBM in 2014 there are several challenges faced by the CFOs worldwide. Optimizing planning, budgeting and forecasting, Driving enterprise cost reduction, Supporting/managing/mitigating enterprise risk, Managing investor/stakeholder relations, and Processing transactions are some of the major ones.

And it’s an accepted truth that the CFOs just don’t hold the business model these days, they repeatedly filter it in defy to troublesome risks and competitive opportunities. At the same time there is an unseen pressure over the financial chiefs to bring instant developments to the organizations from their IT investments.

Technologies are double edged weapons, for example Enterprise resource planning (ERP) system has been one of the most popular business management systems. ERP provides large organizations the assistance of real-time capabilities and seamless communication. Yet, not all ERP employments have been successful. This can adversely affect the affects entire organizations such as process, people, and culture.

The Oracle Solution Providers all over the world should be aware of the changing landscape. Some of the solution providers are facing the challenge of choosing the right consultant. The CIOs who are able to meet the customer requirements are sure to emerge as winners.

In this issue of CIO Story, we bring to you 25 Most Powerful Oracle Solution Providers 2015. The companies featured in this issue have shared their stories of how they have helped the organizations to optimize their businesses. The CEOs of these 25 Oracle Solution Providers have also shared their views on the challenges faced by Oracle customers and the products and services the customers awaits or are excited about.

We also bring out articles and opinion columns by experts in the industry. Let us know what you think, We look forward for your feedback.

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Views and opinions expressed in this publication are not necessarily

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If asked the question, ‘Who is the leader in database software?, undoubtedly one can give the

answer, ORACLE. For more than three and a half decades Oracle is decorating this position.

With the development of new technologies and by acquiring best-in-class companies, Oracle once again proves that they are the captains in database software. From servers and storage, to database and middleware, applications and into the cloud, the expansion plans of Oracle have covered the entire technology industry.

The Beginning and Initial Days Looking back into the history, Oracle had a very humble beginning when Larry Ellison, an American computer programmer found an opportunity missed by other companies: a description of a working prototype for a relational database. During that

time no company had effectuate in marketing the technology. But Ellison and co-founders Bob Miner and Ed Oates foresaw the immense business potential of the relational database model. And the trio never imagined that the organization established by them would change the face of business computing forever.

It was during the 90s that Oracle faced management challenges with that arouse the need to control sales through proper financial monitoring. In spite of the challenges Oracle succeeded in delivering software that enables customer programs to automatically adapt to the graphical user interfaces on PCs, Macintoshes, and work stations. Oracle was the successful in providing the first client or server packaged applications.

When the computer environment grew and became more advanced Oracle delivered a database with

scalability, portability, and increased reliability. In 1992, after in-depth research Oracle launched Oracle7 which had new performance features, administration enhancements and new security methods. Foreseeing the trends in media industry, they became the first vendor to launch a media server with tools for managing and delivering multimedia applications. Oracle 8i is the first database to support webs technologies such as Java and hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP). Oracle E-Business Suite 11i is the first fully integrated applications suite.

Oracle has always been successful in proving that it can build for the future on its innovation foundations and in-depth knowledge

“We will continue to provide our customers with hardware and software engineered to work together—integrated from disk to applications that meet their business needs and

solve their business problems. And we will continue to innovate and to lead the industry, while always making sure that we focus on solving the problems of the customers who rely on our technology”, says Oracle website.

Products And Solutions From Oracle Oracle offers myriad numbers

of products and services to the customers. From portfolio of cloud solutions to the world’s best enterprise database, Oracle always stands first in the customer requirements. Oracle has been successful in building the database and applications as per the industry demands. At present they offer solutions in storage equipments, servers, operating systems, virtualization software, middleware and the seminal Oracle Database.

Oracle Fusion Applications Oracle Fusion Applications (OFA) is a suite of enterprise resource planning software applications which is distributed across various product families. This includes financial management, human capital management, customer relationship management, supply chain management, procurement, governance, and project portfolio management.

Oracle's E-Business Suite (also known as Applications/Apps or EB-Suite/EBS) includes a collection of enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management(CRM), and supply-chain management (SCM) computer applications either developed or acquired by Oracle. The software make use of Oracle's core Oracle relational database management system technology. The E-Business Suite consist of several product lines often known by short acronyms.

Significant technologies incorporated into the applications include the Oracle database technologies, (engines for RDBMS, PL/SQL, Java, .NET, HTML and XML),

the "technology stack" (Oracle Forms Server, Oracle Reports Server, Apache Web Server, Oracle Discoverer, Jinitiator and Sun's Java). Oracle Corporation brands the on-line technical documentation of E-Business Suite as eTRM- "E-Business Suite Technical Reference Manuals"

It makes the following enterprise applications available as part of Oracle E-Business Suite:

Asset Lifecycle ManagementIt improves equipment reliability and plant utilization with solutions that offer real-time collaboration and adaptive procedures. It also improve productivity with real-time analytics and better PM schedules

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)CRM solution is a set of applications that provide information-driven sales, service, and marketing. Oracle CRM is built on an open, standards-based architecture that streamlines business processes, improves data.

Service Management Oracle E-Business Suite family of Service Applications provides true information-driven customer service—service that enables your agents and technicians to meet and exceed customer expectations by empowering them with information that is consistent, accurate, and actionable.

The other E-Business Suite applications include: • Financial Management• Human Capital Management• Project Portfolio Management• Advanced Procurement• Supply Chain Management • Value Chain Planning • Value Chain Execution• In-Memory Application

Oracle's E-Business Suite In-Memory Applications leverage the power of both the Oracle Database

In-Memory option and Engineered Systems to transform big enterprise data into actionable information through a set of critical, robust and real-time analytical features. Oracle In-Memory Applications running on Oracle Database In-Memory Option and Engineered Systems are a direct result of Oracle's "Engineered to Work Together" strategy, built to exploit the combined capabilities of software and hardware to deliver transformative solutions.

Oracle Financial ApplicationsThe Oracle E-Business Suite provides a set of financial applications used internationally in businesses. Oracle Corporation groups these applications into "suites", which it defines as sets of common, integrated applications designed to execute specific business processes.

Oracle Financials deals with financial modules such as :• Oracle Assets• Oracle General Ledger• Oracle Payables• Oracle Receivables• Oracle Cash Management• Oracle Tabs

The major business processes enabled by the Financial Applications include: • Procure-to-Pay business process flow involving activities like procurement, purchasing, making payment to Suppliers and subsequent accounting. • Order-to-Cash business process flow involves activities such as Customer Orders, Order fulfillment, receiving payment from Customers & subsequent accounting.

Project Portfolio Management Applications deals with the following: • Oracle Project Portfolio Analysis• Oracle Project Billing• Oracle Project Analysis• Oracle Daily Business Intelligence• Oracle Project Collaboration• Oracle Project Contracts

For Three and Half

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• Oracle Project Costing• Oracle Project CRM.• Oracle Project Management• Oracle Project Resource

Additional Oracle E-Business Suite products include:• Oracle Bills of Material• Oracle Capacity• Oracle Advanced Planning & Scheduling• Oracle Business Intelligence• Oracle Order Entry• Oracle Order Fulfillment (order to cash process)• Oracle Payroll• Oracle Purchasing• Oracle Landed Cost Management• Oracle Receivables• Oracle TMS (Transportation/G-Log)• Oracle Work in Process• Oracle Process manufacturing• Oracle Federal Administration• Oracle Sales• Oracle MRP• Oracle Workflow

• Oracle Financials• Oracle SCM• Oracle HRMS

Oracle AccelerateIn 2007 Oracle launched a set of applications for mid-size businesses called Oracle Accelerate. Accelerate provides access to Oracle's ERP products through a local partner-network and packages the products to meet vertical industry requirements. It help midsize organizations get up and running rapidly and efficiently, with minimal business disruptionOracle User Productivity kit (UPK)It is an easy-to-use and comprehensive content development, deployment, and maintenance platform for increasing project, program, and user productivity.

Customer ChallengesOracle is the strongest financial pillar of support of many organizations worldwide, but there are several

challenges faced by them. In a highly competitive industry it is very important to make their own space and to survive in the changing landscape, the organizations need to find a balance between saving money and enabling change.

Taking the case with customers who use the inclusive capabilities of Oracle Fusion Middleware, this platform spans Application Development, Security, Integration, BPM, Portals, Content & Document Management and more. The manual provisioning of Oracle Middleware environments, and the build and deployment of code into these environments is resource intensive and prone to errors. Incorrect installations or deployments cause issues which are difficult to diagnose, resulting in many wasted months of effort. Much of the waste in software deployment comes from the progress of software from development to testing and finally to operations.

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According to Madeline Osit, COO of Beacon Applications Services, Corporation the

challenges faced by Oracle custom-ers in growing their businesses have es-calated significantly due to increased competition, whose innovative offer-ings and channels eclipse traditional models. Highly regulated industries like the Financial Services organizations that Beacon services have the added complexities of maximizing evolving technologies and creating an envi-ronment to foster innovation in their products, services and understanding profitable channels, facilitated by a technology infrastructure responsive to evolving needs. It starts with the ability to deliver significant, enduring and transformation business impact through well-planned initiatives in tar-geted areas. It points to Cloud solu-tions becoming a viable option for many organizations rather than hav-ing to structure multiple infrastructures and staff an in-house support team. These conditions lead to the ultimate challenge: creating and executing to a vision. The experts at Beacon strong-ly recommend organizations create a comprehensive roadmap that they can follow,with clarity of the end state (with interim wins through sprints along the way) and stick to the course and execute against it.

Beacon’s strength lies in bridging the gap between the business needs of their clients and the optimal con-figuration of the Oracle solutions they implement for them. Their deep under-standing of the Financial Services busi-ness domain, matched with an equal-ly deep understanding of the Oracle suites of applications, enables them to build a strong financial systems foun-dation that services their clients needs today and is flexible for changes that

lie ahead.Through their experience and ex-

pertise the team at Beacon creates an Oracle solution that leverages the functionality and technology with-out having to engage in extensive customization. Beacon consultants come armed with tools and templates from 23 years of implementing Ora-cle’s PeopleSoft systems and make it a priority to transfer knowledge to cli-ent staff so that they are self-sufficient upon go live, creating systems that are efficient to run and maintain.

Beacon also takes the guess word out of implementations from a techni-cal perspective. Each of their techni-cal consultants has broad and deep knowledge of the entire technology stack and can work with the clients to ensure that they are able to minimize the challenges described above and get the most from their investment.

Madeline believes that it is an un-fortunate reality that many of Bea-con’s clients still have existing systems with silos of information and business processes that have evolved to fill gaps due to system inflexibility. There-

fore, Beacon’s solutions are focused on transforming production workers to knowledge workers. It’s about using the software for what software excels at: transforming, consuming and pro-cessing large quantities of data. It’s about using people for what people excel at: taking the results of all this processing and applying knowledge and know-how for analysis, growth, and increasing value to their custom-ers.

Examples would include seamless integration to operational systems, like banking, administration/claims and trading systems through an account-ing hub; workflow enabled processes to proactively deliver work to the ap-propriate individuals; implementing a center-lead procurement organi-zation and systems to reduce overall costs and maximize spend; and deliv-ering a suite of application manage-ment software to optimize support and maintenance of their ERP systems.

Beacon’s customers are evaluat-ing the time they are spending and the effort they are exerting on back-office software solutions and want to focus more on the systems that grow their business. Therefore, the future for Beacon will have them doing more steady-state support for their existing clients and/or helping them to move to Cloud solutions which are cost-ef-fective, reliable and secure.

According to Dan Maude, Presi-dent of Beacon, three words that define Beacon are responsiveness, reliability,and knowledge. Beacon measures its success by their custom-er’s satisfaction with their new solu-tions. Moving forward, Beacon is plan-ning for steady and managed growth. They want to continue to be the best at what they do.

Continuing To Be the Best At What They DoBeacon Application Services

Dan MaudePresident

Overcoming Technology issues Technology issues come in a number of forms, any of which could quickly derail an initiative. If there is a common denominator, it is probably that the majority of IT projects end up going over budget and are delivered late. Often times IT projects are under scoped to get them approved. Even when they are properly scoped, there can be issues along the way that cause delays. Finally, if users do not accept the technology and incorporate it seamlessly into their work it may be seen as a wasted investment. Design processes that don’t take the end user’s experience in mind are doomed to be shelved.

I have found that IT projects bought in from all of the parties who will be impacted by the project tend to be more successful than those that are not. They also need to have realistic timelines and budget amounts that can be positively managed. When IT leaders have to adjust those arbitrarily to fit a timeline or a number to push it through approvals, bad things are bound to happen. Communication is the key in any IT endeavors.

Focus On Improving The Work Flow IT spending as a direct correlation to revenue is a unicorn that practitioners and scholars have chased since the 1980s. For the most part, it’s not something that you can reliably do and pass the inspection of a diligent CFO. There have been exceptions in certain situations—for example in the DevOps movement of the last decade. In this case, IT spending along the lines of automation as well as treating the IT organization like a factory will prove to speed up the movement of work

through the system. CIOs that focus on improving the flow of work through their systems will almost immediately start to generate positive ROI.

IT- a Key Player IT is shown to be both a key player in the enablement of those areas as well as the detriment. We’ve all been in a situation where an IT system impeded business productivity, prevented growth, and stifled innovation. Part of what causes this to happen is the buildup of technical debt, or those things that we choose to do as a quick fix today that is never properly done tomorrow. Firms get into these situations because of poor IT leadership and usage of budget. The worst offenders typically have a revolving door in key leadership positions in the organization.

Focus on getting good people in the right positions and consistently providing leadership and management throughout the journey. Ensure alignment with corporate objectives and strategy and find ways to partner with your business counterparts to ensure you are meeting their objectives.

Ensure Proper Positioning of Solutions There are a dozen IT vendors to solve every problem. I look for vendors who help me solve a business problem. This ensures that the solution is properly positioned to help the company as a whole. This helps you to find more strategic partners who will ensure your success and help to make you a better business partner to your colleagues. I also look for the standard things that we are all trained to focus on like lock-in, financial health, interoperability,

reviews of their service, and of course, price.

IT- an Enabler I expect that IT acts as an enabler and not a roadblock. Part of that has to come from IT, Infosec, and the business coming together on specific issues to understand how we can “get to yes,” and be the ones putting the “no in innovation.” I also expect that IT will embrace emerging technology such that they can become experts in how it is used, and how we can incorporate it into our business to create competitive advantage. What really matters is that whether know how to use the right technology at the right time to ensure durable competitive advantage.

Branden R. Williams, CTO, Cyber Security Solutions, First Data

Communication Is The Key In IT Endeavors

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According to Tim Bacci, CEO Daegis Inc., one of the major challenge is faced by Oracle

customers is the modernization of their Oracle Forms applications. Another challenge is minimizing the impact to the end users when moving from client-server applications to browser-based interfaces.

Composer CipherSoft is a Daegis-owned automated software tool that converts Oracle Forms applications to browser-based applications with open standards based technologies in the Oracle stack such as Java, XML and ADF. It will also convert the PL/SQL within the database to standard Java classes, but this can also be left unchanged in the database. The appropriate code is generated to invoke these program units from the converted Form, library and menu modules. The product is highly automated, requiring little to no manual coding.

Composer CipherSoft provides a wide range of benefits. For example, a large insurance company had a set of custom developed applications in Oracle Forms 6i to help their agents manage the day-to-day insurance operations more efficiently. They had an objective to modernize the presentation layer from client/server to a browser-based interface, and that objective transitioned into the company’s overall IT direction of Java. The converted application was rolled into production with minimal impact to the business as no re-

training of the end users was required on the converted application. The IT organization is using their Java-based resources to maintain and extend the application. When testing the converted application, IT was able to compare the behavior, functionality, and data results of the converted Java application directly with the original Oracle Forms application. This helped streamline the testing process and the communication between the IT team and the end users.

Daegis has knowledgeable and experienced staff with over 15 years of experience in Oracle Forms upgrades and conversion projects to Java. They are an Oracle Gold Partner and part of the Oracle Technology Network. Composer CipherSoft is available as licensed software or as a service to the customer. As an Oracle Solution Provider, Daegis delivers an automated, cost-effective, and fast modernization from Oracle Forms applications to browser-based applications in the Oracle stack.

Daegis Inc. is an enterprise software company that provides solutions to manage, modernize, and mobilize data. They are well positioned to provide a broad breadth of product and service offerings to meet corporate needs pertaining to enterprise information archiving and eDiscovery, application migration and mobile application development. Its customer base includes 20% of the Fortune 100 Companies.

Provides Automated way To Convert Oracle Forms Applications To Browser-Based Applications

Composer CipherSoft

Tim Bacci, CEO

"As an Oracle

Solution Provider,

Daegis delivers

automated, cost

effective, and fast

modernization

from Oracle Forms

applications to

browser-based

applications in the

Oracle stack"

On Technological issues Unfortunately I am in the healthcare and higher education vertical that is historically known to be late adopters of the latest technology. I can empathize with the healthcare vertical being risk adverse because we are dealing with people’s lives and a minor mistake may ask cause

a human life. That is a lot of pressure when we think of the impact that technology may have. On the flip side technology can be a positive and brings a lot of efficiencies. The issue that I have seen mostly in my journey is that most healthcare institutions are not adopting the latest technology and there is more resistant to change and adoption. You also see a lot of very traditional IT staff that are use to being the “break fix” employee and have not invested a lot in themselves professionally to keep up with the market. Education and internal marketing is the key to overcoming these solutions. CIO’s must show the value and the ROI on adopting the latest technology and at the same time mentor the employees on the value of keeping their skills sharp in a highly competitive market.

On Strategies The key to ensuring that IT spending provides a ROI is that the spend must be tied in to a strategic goal. Everything that we do in IT is part of the enterprise strategy and I emphasize that we no longer should be talking about IT strategies but only business strategies. This helps shapes the conversation a lot easier. For example, moving to the cloud should be tied in to the organization strategy of doing business faster, cheaper, and better. I believe that by linking IT spending to the organization strategies solves the discuss of “proving” a ROI and it helps the CIO align with the organization on the business strategies.

On IT and productivity IT is in the center of every business. If you think about every company in the world, there is an enterprise application that is used to run the business and the

infrastructure foundation must also be in place to run the application. With that mentality in place it highlights the ability for IT to enable the organization growth.

Right Technology and Organization Choosing the right technology involves stakeholder buy in and most important the understanding of the business requirements. We know for a fact that there are no perfect solution in the world in terms of hardware and software so the critical elements is to clearly define the requirements so that you can narrow down the choices of the technology. Once you have narrow down the choices there must be a consensus from both the stakeholder (users) and technologist to agree on a solution moving forward. The last thing we want is to have a product that fits the IT requirements but the users will not use the product. The same is true for finding a solution that meets the stakeholders requirement but it is missing some core IT components (security, scalability, etc) that may put the organization in jeopardy.

IT and Organization’s SuccessIT should function in a matter to allow the organization run faster, cheaper, and better. We need to think beyond just being an enabler and be part of the organizational strategy advisor. When I think of the role that IT plays in healthcare, my work touches every department on campus so that means I must understand the business side of every department in order for me to be successful. That is a very valuable asset to a CEO when a strategy discussion arises. That should be the mindset of the CIO and the IT department on the role that IT plays for the organization success

Think Beyond Just Being An Enabler

David Chou, Social digital leader

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Oracle can be a strong financial backbone for global organizations, but many

Oracle customers are challenged to optimize their Procure-to-Pay and Expense Management processes. faced with siloed business processes and technology that is not well integrated and was built for back office power users, they must deal with poor usability and adoption, incomplete data, and lack of real time visibility. In addition, customers today face increasing requirements around compliance, regulations and policies.

In most organizations, user adoption of automated business processes for procurement, invoicing and expense management still hovers around 20-40%. Coupa’s, easy-to-use, easy-to-configure platform changes that. Every employee and supplier can use Coupa from anywhere on any device, with little training or enablement. With that increased adoption comes dramatically better visibility into a company’s spend, resulting in increased compliance, tighter control and measurable savings.

Coupa’s true cloud solution is built to serve as a strategic front end to any Oracle ERP system. The integration with Oracle is fast, seamless and complete. Data flows back and forth from Coupa and Oracle through a single integration point, increasing accuracy, streamlining processes and delivering a consistent purchasing experience. Customers can complete the integration and be up and running within a matter of months, driving immediate savings, reducing TCO,

and increasing ROI from their Oracle investment.

Coupa has enabled enterprises such as Salesforce.com, AECOM and Aholdto transform, enhance and optimize their business processes. AECOM is one of the most complex Oracle customers in the world with over 50,000 engineering and construction projects managed via Oracle. They use Coupa to configure dynamic approval work flows for each of these frequently changing projects and to access real time project budgets before any new spend is committed in the requisition workflow.

Coupa’s customers average over 88 percent spend under management, 30 percent more then best in class and more than double your typical ERP procurement solution. Coupa enables business agility without requiring IT resources via a highly configurable platform, allowing IT organizations to empower their business stakeholders and focus on strategic projects.

Delivering Savings-as-a-Service that drives profitability. That’s Coupa’s mission. The Company partners with their customers to define business success and is obsessive and unwavering in their commitment to reach those goals.

“We work with our customers to re-imagine their business and set specific, measurable metrics for success. We deliver Savings-as-a-Service via a cloud-based platform that is broadly and willingly adopted by the mobile workers and suppliers of today’s extended enterprises. And we partner with the world’s best systems integrators and ERP vendors

to drive unprecedented value from the innovations built into the Coupa solution, “said Rob Bernshteyn, CEO.

According to Bernshteyn, executives need to examine their internal processes and operations to find areas where they can drive value and a competitive advantage. How a company manages their indirect spend (Procurement, Invoicing, Expenses) is an area where hard dollar, quantifiable savings are possible, but also an area that is not optimized in most companies. Coupa can help them move these functions from back office tasks, to front office strategic operations that maximize every dollar spent, while driving compliance, providing visibility and enabling control.

Delivering Savings-as-a-Service That Drives Profitability

Coupa

"Coupa will ensure customer success by being obsessive and unwavering in our commitment to make them successful"

The relentless growth in data consumption is driven by growing demand for voluminous

video-based big data, for real-time and time-critical fast data and for remotely stored anywhere data that is transported to wherever the user is.

Broadband is a "two-headed monster," -- one head facing ever-faster access networks with the rollout of LTE, multi-user WLAN (Wireless Local Area Network) and long-reach fiber, the other head facing the core, with cloud-hosted functions, OTT-TV broadcasting and streaming video distribution that generate even more heavy traffic. This is especially true with Ultra high definition (4K TV) streaming or broadcast or even super ultra-high definition content (16K).

Everything in the network must gear up to the inevitable yottabyte future. There is a sense of looming crisis of spectrum crunching, so unused spectrum must be reclaimed, and new spectrum ranges must be licensed. It is a crisis that demands increasing capacity at an alarming rate, so every last byte should be squeezed from existing infrastructure via performance and asset management. Most importantly, this crisis means finding ways of combining heterogeneous network technologies, such as Carrier Ethernet and Optical Wireless Broadband, and utilizing legacy as well as advanced networks, such as Dense Wave Division Multiplexing (DWDM) and Optical Transport Network.

These pressing requirements explain, perhaps, the great interest in Carrier SDN (Software Defined Network) and NFV (Network Function Virtualization) as well as the cloud. SDN and NFV are complementary technologies that usher in greater automation via virtualization, which

is essential for complex network and massive traffic. They decouple hardware from networked functions, allowing more cost effective deployment and multi-vendor integration.

However, these yottabyte "saviors" are also the culprits - SDN/NFV send data to different server locations, wherever the virtualized functions have been assigned to a real server, and remotely stored data has to be transmitted to the device every time instead of used locally. Cloud data is also sent across to multiple data centers for safe-keeping. Hence, the monster remains hungry and data volumes continue to spiral up. At the same time, users’ expectations of uninterrupted, high quality service are growing too.

Availability of faster data, not just bigger data, encourages the unprecedented demand for video streaming and real-time transmission. What LTE (Wireless Based Technology) provides in increased speed, Voice over LTE provides in smarter ways of satisfying customer preferences and

on-demand OTT (Over the Top) video. Perceptions are also all-important for Service Level Agreement (SLA) management, with real-time response to network events, pre-empting problems before users notice them.

Analyzing what happens in the network now means processing huge amounts of network information. Therefore, more powerful, dynamic network management and analytics tools are required, which can be run, for example, at the cell tower, not just at the core, and provide a dynamic view of how customers’ services actually perform.

The next generation of 5G and perhaps 6G standards should focus on methods of overcoming yottabyte issues. You may see "yottamen," armed with a pioneering spirit, who will build DIY (Do it Yourself) broadband connections to remote co-operative communities and find novel ways of re-engineering fiber conduits.

More likely, though, 5G and perhaps next super generation wireless evolution to 6G will bring enhanced methods of utilizing the spectrum, say through cognitive radios, methods of increasing density by smaller cells, more powerful handover and collaborative outdoors WiFi, compression-as-you-need-it that responds to congestion situations and generally performance improvements.

No one knows how fast and how far this data monster will travel in future, so all we can do is stay just a few steps ahead. IP Data growth is like our solar system and will expand for many decades to come at an incalculable rate, similar to how fast the universe is expanding, and that creates an environment hungry for innovation in both the business and consumer space for many years to come.

Gear Up To The Inevitable Yottabyte Future

Dr EslambolchiCEO, CyberFlow AnalyticsRob Bernshteyn, CEO

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All Oracle Life Sciences customers face the common challenge of keeping pace

with organizational, technological and regulatory changes.

Foresight Group, an Oracle Channel Partner, focuses exclusively on helping life sciences companies address their worldwide pharmacovigilance (PV) and risk management challenges through a unique mix of management and technology consulting services, software tools, application hosting, and managed services.

“Pharmaceutical, medical device and Contract Research Organizations (CROs) around the world trust Foresight to help improve different elements of their PV and risk management operations”, said Joe Rymsza, Co-Chief Executive Officer of Foresight Group.

“The PV and risk management operations of life sciences companies are under constant pressure due to many factors, including a very dynamic and demanding regulatory climate, the worldwide marketing of their products, mergers and acquisitions, and the need to sustain critically important compliance levels while often facing contracting annual budgets,” said Rymsza.

Foresight Group has an accomplished team in Europe, Japan, India and the United States to help companies comprehensively address these challenges. Foresight Group’s consultants leverage Foresight’s tools, data centers and their real-world experiences - an important blend of functional skills, technical skills and

knowledge of global regulations – to bring pragmatic and cost-effective solutions to pharmaco vigilance and risk management problems.

One of the key forces facing the industry right now is the need for life sciences companies to reduce operating expense and complexity by harmonizing the different processes and systems used by their Japanese and global organizations into one globally integrated PV and risk management system and process.

“Over the past five years, virtually all organizations that have embarked upon this system and process harmonization have selected Oracle Health Sciences PV software as their core platform”, said Rymsza.

Foresight saw this trend emerging in 2011 and has invested significantly in their Japanese delivery capabilities to ensure they could meet the needs of their clients to not only deliver all technical and functional aspects of the project in both Japanese and English, but also to provide long-term hosting and managed services for these clients in both Japanese and English.

The result of forward-looking investments like this is that Foresight Group has delivered the greatest number of Oracle pharmacovigilance system deployments and data migrations of any Oracle channel

partner, both globally and within Japan. The Company is recognized as the premier provider of PV and risk management services to life sciences companies around the world, and runs the industry’s largest client-focused user group meeting for Oracle’s pharmacovigilance product lines.

Clients worldwide leverage Foresight’s experience to solve business challenges in regulatory compliance, process optimization, hosting, and application management services with the use of Oracle Health Sciences software.• The consolidation and integration of systems and processes of four discrete multi-billion life sciences companies into one globally integrated process and Oracle-based system – including their Japan operations.• Enabled a CRO to consolidate and migrate a significant number of single Oracle Argus instances into one multi-tenant system that is hosted and managed by our services team.

Organizations such as ones referenced above that use or are looking to implement Oracle Health Science’s Software often turn to Foresight to deliver the projects on a fixed fee basis – including technical aspects such as system configuration, implementation, upgrades, data

migration, hosting and/or application management services, as well as functional aspects such as business process harmonization, change management, implementation and/orrevision of standard operating procedures and training (in multiple languages including English and Japanese).

Over the next few years Foresight will continue to evolve and stay ahead of the curve with respect to changing regulations and the technology that enables regulatory compliance. Foresight will also grow and adapts a leading provider of services and software to support client needs, while working with Oracle to bring innovative solutions to the market.

According to Joe, a successful company requires top industry talent to ensure high levels of quality and to consistently deliver vibrant solutions and superior quality products and services. Joe recommends that consulting organizations closely monitor the industry and invest in partnerships with their clients that result in mutually agreeable success. This investment will position consulting companies as a “trusted advisor,”which results in increased customer satisfaction and leads to repeat business.

Continuing To Evolve And Stay Ahead Of The Curve

Foresight Group International AG "Foresight Group has proven industry experience

with successful Oracle technology consulting

deployments that engage customers throughout the

entire process."Joe Rymsza

Director & Co-CEO

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According to Jothi Rad-hakrishnan, President of iWorks Corporation (iWorks), Oracle

customers face multiple challenges in the current environment.On an infra-structure level, clients face the eco-nomic pressures of shrinking budgets and accelerated timelines; confront-ed with the need to upgrade systems, many clients do not have the resources to complete them in a timely manner. On a technologicallevel, iWorks has observed that clients are aggressively looking for cloud computing services and cloud system integrators, but too often encounter a gap in standardized processes and tools in on-boarding Oracle products into the cloud. Add-ing to the issue, many clients have legacy applications (web 1.0, client/server etc.) as part of their application portfolio, making the transition even harder.

iWorks leverages expertise in Ora-cle PeopleSoft ERP, Oracle Fusion Mid-dleware Products, Oracle Business Intelligence, and Oracle Virtualiza-tion technologies to provide flexible solutions for clients. iWorks’ R&D team can produce quick prototypes for cli-ents on any Oracle solution and im-portantly, iWorks is CMMI level 3 and ISO 9001:2008 certified, demonstrating their commitment to mature, repeat-able processes.

To address this need, iWorks has developed solutions that have suc-cessfully enabled enterprises to trans-form, enhance, and optimize their business processes.A key differentiator of iWorks’ solutions is the iWorks Lab, which comprises dedicated serv-ers and the Oracle stack of products and provides R&D capacity for iWorks’

skilled technicians. PeopleSoft up-grades are an illustration of how iWorks uses proven processes along with the iWorks Lab to develop efficient solu-tions for their customers.

iWorks has developed a hybrid upgrade methodology for PeopleSoft upgrades which involves using the iWorks Lab to optimize the process be-fore implementation at the client site.Using this approach, satisfied custom-ers realized an average of 25% cost

savings and shorter cycle times com-pared with previous upgrade cycles. Additional, they got tailored solutions so they could meet their commitments to their stakeholders.

To address cloud issues, iWorks has migrated infrastructure into a hosted cloud solution which supports a scal-able dynamic environment provision-ing to meet a large software integra-tion project using Oracle VM. With this approach, iWorks’ clients achieve seamless migration of the Oracle stack of products.

In addition to a seasoned team of professionals, iWorks’ Gold Partnership with Oracle gives access to resources within Oracle to support innovative solutions for clients, making iWorks an ideal partner. In fact, iWorks is one of the top 50 fastest growing small busi-nesses in the federal IT landscape, with an ERP practice that is growing expo-nentially.

“Our people, with their Oracle-based expertise and commitment to excellence, are our strongest asset. The right people combined with the capabilities of the iWorks Lab and our mature, defined processes enable us to stay ahead of the curve and de-velop innovative solutions to known and emerging problems. These are all critical components of our success delivering value to our clients,” Rad-hakrishnan says.

iWorks’ Oracle team iseagerly awaiting the release of Oracle Cloud offerings and engineered systems, on the horizon for the latter part of 2015. iWorks is committed to continuing to align with changing market conditions and providing innovative solutions that cut costs while adding value.

The Right Partner For Consulting, Implementation, And Support

iWorks Corporation

Jothi Radhakrishnan, President

"iWorks is the right partner for clients who are looking for consulting, implementation and support"

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Building a New Enterprise IT Strategy With New Oracle Technology Solutions

Two decades ago, MIT published some path breaking research titled “The Corporation of the

Nineties” where they argued that the role of IT solutions would move from one that supported the business strategy of the firm to a truly revolutionary role that would enable transformation of strategy and redefinition of business scope. Through the last two decades, the rapid evolution in the capabilities and role of Information Technology has exceeded all expectations and IT solutions have become a key determinant of new opportunities and redefined strategy on an ongoing basis.

A significant part of this transformation has been the enterprise solutions landscape, which has evolved rapidly. The rapid progress in the SMAC stack (Social, Mobility, Analytics& Cloud) and the pervasive influence of digital commerce in business to consumer as well as business to business environments has provided a revenue fillip to organizations and forced them to take a hard look at their methods of consuming IT.

As one of the leading providers of Oracle solutions in the Bay Area, we have seen large Enterprise Solutions deployments covering everything from applications, database and tools to integrated engineered hardware system solutions including security, operating systems and other operating components.

Some key benefits that we see accruing to companies who are adopting new solutions are:- Availability of options across complete enterprise solutions landscape including applications, database and tools to encompass integrated engineered hardware system solutions including security, operating systems and other operating components.- Ability to move from on-premise

solutions (partly as a co-existence model or completely) with a range of solution options by addressing their concerns around scalability, availability and security.

Mid-size enterprises are undoubtedly the fastest growing segment for enterprise solutions today. However the limitations in the way of their success are more around committing investments across the enterprise chain tools. Some key challenges we find are:• Budget constraints to upgrade and maintain enterprise business solutions across Finance, Supply chain, HCM, manufacturing, data analysis etc.,• Inability to upgrade infrastructure and enterprise solutions frequently to leverage the new capabilities• Limited capabilities to track, measure and sustain key business metrics for decision support• Inability to automate all enterprise processes• Limited ability to deploy tools and resources for organizational compliance

Leading enterprise solution vendors such as Oracle have incorporated a robust approach and program in recent years to design, build and deploy scalable enterprise solutions for these mid-size clients, with defined scope and predictable performance metrics.

Security has been a principal concern as organizations today rapidly embrace cloud options. The enterprise solutions today have options to address overall security including user access, security information, events, network penetration etc. These options, in addition to providing the required security cover across the enterprise chain also help automatically update provisioning based on any changes and exits to enterprise users.

Engineered Solutions today come with a combination of Integrated Database hardware including In-memory analytics and appliances for storage and big data analysis. This has helped enterprise clients improve their analytics performance several fold. Big Data as a value enabler has clearly come to stay. Data is the new capital that enterprise clients have to invest in strategically. Converting raw data from multiple sources into actionable insight. Leading enterprise vendors such as Oracle have built integrated solutions that simplify information access and discovery, integrating them securely with existing data, applications, infrastructure and processes. These integrated big data appliance tools enable streaming real time data from diverse transactional system and leverage the strengths of popular target systems such as Hadoop, Apache ready to be deployed across a private or public cloud or an on-premise infrastructure.

Today the expectations from consultants and implementation and re-engineering partners have evolved. Co-creation of solutions incorporating domain specific flavors across specific verticals notably manufacturing and retail and focus on adding business value by having the client define the business outcomes they would like to see supported by enterprise solutions and their implementation partners. Finally, enabling, integrating and exchanging information across the enterprise value chain and providing a big data management and cloud broking service to drive analysis and decisions that support client’s strategic intent and support operational plans is the key – whether it is the solution builder, the implementer or the company itself, these partnerships hold the key to success in future.

Dr Ganesh NatarajanDr Ganesh Natarajan is Chairman of NASSCOM Foundation in India and Vice Chairman & CEO of Zensar Technologies, a global firm that specializes in Oracle solutions for the Manufacturing & Retail industries.

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Looking at healthcare, where their focus is, Marand believes healthcare is starting to realise

that the real value of IT is not in applications but data. Good data is the key to improving outcomes, managing chronic disease and especially enabling population health management, observes Tomaz Gornik, CEO. And further, this data must be kept and accessed for the lifetime of the patient. This brings many challenges to current IT systems, since they are not designed for data outliving the application. When a change of application occurs (usually every 7-10 years), it is not uncommon to lose the historical data and start fresh with a new system. So it is becoming clear that the storage of clinical data should become independent of the application - i.e. vendor-independent. This has already happened in imaging where PACS systems follow standards making images accessible regardless of the system that produced them. Marand believes the same thing has to happen with all structured clinical data. And this is what their Think!EHR Platform provides - a vendor neutral structured health data repository.

What is interesting is that Marand has had longstanding partnerships with many of the companies Oracle acquired over the years like BEA and Sun. Hence they have a very good understanding of the products and technologies including hardware and software that now make up the Engineered Systems. Also important, they have more than 20 years of experience delivering solutions in both telecommunications and healthcare. And lastly, they now have a set of products which have been build to work well with the Oracle stacks.

In telecommunications, Marand

have delivered CRM, billing and Product Lifecycle Management solutions to Telekom Slovenia. This suite of products enables Telekom Slovenia to launch new services, manage and bill for them in a matter of weeks, thus reducing the time to market by a factor of five. In today’s competitive environment, this is a key requirement for success as a communications service provider.

Cambio, the largest hospital information system provider in Sweden, is deploying Think!EHR Platform for clinical decision support. By normalizing clinical data using Marand’s platform, they can roll out the same application across their customer base, significantly reducing integration costs and time to market.

Their largest customer is the, The City Moscow with a city wide deployment of Think!EHR Platform for

managing health data of it’s 12 million citizens. And just recently, Marand joined forces with NHS England, offering an open source in-hospital Medication Management solution build on top of Think!EHR Platform to several trusts in the UK.

The major advantage Marand bring to the customers is their leading edge products and the knowledge and experience of their employees. They are an engineering company at heart and have always pushed the limits of IT technology. They have gained considerable domain knowledge in their two verticals, so they have a good understanding of the challenges their customers are facing and how to overcome them.

Moving forward Tomaz is now focused on expanding Marand’s ecosystem of partners that offers interoperable, best-of-breed solutions based on a common data platform.

“We are a product/solutions company. Our future depends on our ability to develop great products, generate customer demand and build a network of implementation partners. Our challenge is executing on our vision in these three areas. It’s that simple,” says Tomaz.

According to Tomaz, Executives need to guide their companies through these paradigm shifts which are affecting all industries. They need to take advantage of digital business which enables them to compete on the global stage thus fuelling growth.

The four trends affecting all business: mobile, social, cloud and big data. These are the buzz words and Oracle focusing on these as well is reassuring. The customers are excited about products like Oracle Cloud, Engineered Systems and Big Data Analytics, observes Tomaz.

Building Better Solutions For CustomersMarand

Tomaz Gornik, CEO

There are many technological issues that act as a hindrance to organizations and businesses.

Hands down, it’s NIH, the ‘Not Invented Here’ syndrome! Developers and the Business often want to build the 100% solution to create “the way we have always done it.” Often times an off the shelf solution can be a better answer. And if you feel that a canned solution doesn’t meet your requirements, then you should be looking at changing your process. Begin with your requirements list, and compare those against vendor offerings.

However, the buy decision can also backfire. We implemented a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system from a major vendor and modified it to the point when, even though the original package cost was about $7 million, our cost several years later to upgrade for a major release was over $40 million! The canned package was modified so heavily that it bore little resemblance to the original.

Strategies to be followed The most important strategy is to make sure you are actually solving a business problem that has a return greater than the investment. That sounds easy and obvious but that often doesn’t happen. When you look at completed systems you often find that a significant percentage of the code is either never or seldom used. If you keep the functionality to solving a problem 80% - 85% of the time the cost often drops by well over 50%. First, list every function that could possibly be needed, then prioritize them to the “nice to haves.” Then, start building the most critical and you often find the system is very useful long before all

the functions have been completed. Hold those “nice to haves” for a future release (which will hopefully never start).

You should be certain that the Business and IT know the expected value BEFORE they start designing. IT must ask the question about the goals and the ways to accomplish them. Make sure you aren’t developing a $2 million solution to a $1 million problem. This view can apply to compliance as well. Compliance projects are often considered “must do” no matter the cost. For example, in one situation it was suggested an entire system be rewritten to avoid a yearly penalty of $250,000. The cost to redevelop was over $5 million and we were planning to sunset that system in 3 years anyway. Had the Business and IT had their way we would have spent $5MM to avoid $750,000 in penalties. It is also important to note that in this case the penalties weren’t headline-generating. If they were, that cost would have been factored into the penalty.

Finally, not every problem requires a computer solution. Sometimes a manual process is more effective and might even provide better customer service.

IT – Growth and Innovation One area of focus is to assure that the business process IT is automating is efficient and effective. Don’t just automate the process because the Business has always done it that way. Train some Business Process Management Professionals (BPMPs) and look at the processes BEFORE you automate. This will also go a long way towards IT becoming a trusted partner. IT understands the logic behind process

and can eventually teach our Business partners how best to utilize it. This is also an area where LEAN strategies can be used very effectively.

Choosing The Right TechnologyMake sure everything begins as a business/customer need and the best way to accomplish that need. I’m not saying IT shouldn’t be making suggestions but they should always be in response to a business or customer need that generates revenue or increases profit. Everything starts with requirements. Once the requirements are defined, make sure they include items like compatibility with existing systems. Then you can perform a make versus buy analysis.

Organization’s Success and ITIT should be an equal partner at the table. They must be current on the business strategy, have a track record of using solutions (automated or manual) to address that strategy, and they must be an equal partner to other business functions.

Not Every Problem Requires Computer Solutions

Gregg Rennie, President, The 41 North Group, LLC

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One of the major challenges Oracle customers face is getting data into their

E-Business Suite (EBS) in a timely manner. The standard user interface provided by Oracle is fine for some data elements however they are not designed to load large amounts of data. There are various means in which to mass load data but they are usually custom solutions where continuous input from the IT department is required and therefore not true end user solutions. The customers want to empower their end users and that is where More4Apps come in with their Excel based software.

Once a customer has made contact with More4Apps, their presales and support teams work with said customer and their scenarios to help provide solutions to their

problems. The company’s pre-sales team is made up entirely of ex-Oracle consultants or IT managers from fortune 500 companies, so they are a great resource to bounce the clients’ various challenges off. In many cases More4App’s presales and support teams have seen or been involved in exactly the same problem in the past. Along with them they have a development team featuring people with 10+ years of Oracle experience.The Partners in this company are all former Oracle consultants and also have extensive experience with Oracle software. The Company’s developers and support teams are all highly trained and experts in their respective areas of Oracle to ensure they are able to sustainably offer the best service and solutions.

The solutions developed by More4Apps have enabled enterprises to transform, enhance and optimize their business processes. One such example is Centric Group.

Centric Group – Providers of consumable products to prisons and hotels, discovered as they began their end-user testing cycle the length of time required to update the price data in Oracle. The pricing staff were less than impressed and the project was nearly derailed. They looked at designing and building a solution themselves and realised that the time, effort and complexity involved was just too much. Once the users were introduced to More4Apps’s Price List Wizard things changed pretty quickly. What was an onerous task was turned into a simple job lasting only a few hours, instead of days.

More4App’s 27 (and growing range of) products are not customised options but pre-built. They are ‘out of the box’ end-user solutions, which are excellent alternatives to expensive and resource-heavy custom programming. A focused team of solutions providers, More4Apps are committed to empowering Oracle end-users,allowing them to maximise their use of Oracle EBS.

More4Apps currently have their own staff and offices in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, with their Head Office in New Zealand; they are further represented well in Mainland Europe and Asia. Moving forward, over the next 4-5 years the company will be represented in South America, Asia, China, and the Middle East.

‘Out Of The Box’ End User Solutions For Oracle EBS Integration

More4Apps

"More4App’s

products are

pre-built, not

customised

expensive

tailored options.”

"Excel to Oracle -

we speed you up"

John O’Keeffe, CEO & Co-Founder

According to Jerry Horton, Telecommunications is one of the grandfathers of modern

IT providing the very foundations of switching, routing, framing protocols, and how to build resilient networks. IT, as it evolved, it replaced the traditional analog/digital voice switches with VoIP, low-cost broadband circuits and Metro Ethernet supplanting the dedicated four-wire circuits of yore, and even SIP trunking - giving traditional TDM trunks a run for their money. Adoption of integrated information systems architecture, security principles, and IT in general have lagged behind. Split personality still exists between traditional central office functions and those of IT—something called copper line mentality. This is a universal blind spot that ‘hides’ the central truth- skill in telecommunications requires significant IT/IS knowledge, a skill set that can be grown to sustain and improve the core business.

For traditional telecomm operations, the technology issues are myriad: 1.) Choosing technology partners whose products will scale 2.) Selecting network access terminals that will offer the best possible services while leveraging the investment in the current physical plant 3.) Managing bandwidth utilization; and 4.) Growth in the world of streaming content and the burgeoning Internet of ‘things’.

First and foremost, a solid foundation in IP networking and security has to be built in the organization. In the businesses the silos between traditional IT and telecoms began to break down with the advent of each company becoming an ISP; to some extent however, the walls do still exist. The quickest method to resolve this issue is cross training. The telecomm

industry has started moving towards computer-based training; the sheer volume of available online IT training makes this more achievable than ever before. In an all-IP environment, the cross-pollination between the disciplines is a natural outgrowth, but one that must be cultivated and carefully maintained. To help build that foundation, combinations of training in CompTIA domains -specifically Security+ - and basic Cisco training have been invaluable. Cisco’s curriculum does the best job explaining both the theoretical foundations and applications of IP networking. While several online training vendors offer live streaming classes with excellent trainers and resources at very reasonable prices, the return on investment can only be truly realized by a disciplined scheduling of training anda product that gives the student an opportunity to practice and hone theirnewly learned skills in a non-production environment. More importantly, a close-knit relationship must be fostered between CO and IT.

Once the IT skillset is firmly in place, the architecture of the system is the next challenge. Traditional, non-IP telecommunications systems were very much hub-and-spoke - designed to get the end nodes connected to the central core and routed by the central switch; any point-to-point or other special circuit’s required specialized equipment and knowledge for both the telco and the customer. The ubiquitous adoption of IT and Ethernet has changed that radically. Now, telecommunications companies design and implement Layer2/3 switching and routing systems and security systems up to Layer 7 at the perimeter, all built out for the

goal of 99.999percent reliability and availability.

Fortunately, our company had 100percent fiber-to-the-home. The trickiest part in this design is properly sizing and placing routing. After an intensive search, based on selection criteria, we selected a vendor which provided DWDM on our transport layer for rapid scalability, Layer 2 only service to our core, an additional Metro Ethernet ring to replace many special circuits, and centralized routing and security functions. The second half of this project (upgrading our core routing for throughput and advanced functionality) is currently in the design phase and slated for implementation in mid-July. One of the issues we needed to resolve was a flexible, scalable, carrier-grade design at a reasonable price. This design allows our company to provide customers extremely high bandwidth and enhanced private network solutions, and sets the stage for the next generation of products and services.

In summary, IT/IS is critical to modern telecommunications companies. Training, cross-functional staffing, proper design, and modularity allows us to resolve issues, provide outstanding service, and prepare for the future.

IT- The Future For Telecomm

Jerry Horton, IT Director, Blue Valley Telecommunications

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OnwardPath is an Oracle Gold Partner and they provide Sys-tems Integration Services for

Oracle WebCenter Suite product. Ora-cle WebCenter is one of the industry leading Portal and Content Manage-ment product. Oracle WebCenter is a feature rich product that can trans-form the culture and productivity of customers organization both internally and externally.

OnwardPath is a leading Systems Integrator for Oracle WebCenter so-lutions. Their Architects and Develop-ers posses several years of hands-on experience on all Oracle WebCenter Suite of products such as Oracle Web-Center Portal, Oracle WebCenter Con-tent and Oracle WebCenter Sites. Their technical team is capable of deliver-ing end-to-end WebCenter solutions to small, medium and large enterprises including government organizations.

The expert team at OnwardPath have implemented Systems Integra-tion services for new installations of Or-acle WebCenter and also performed migration services where they have migrated large volume of content from legacy and other content manage-ment systems into Oracle WebCenter Content. They have successfully imple-mented upgrade projects where they upgraded Oracle WebCenter product and infrastructure from earlier version to the latest version. This experience gives OnwardPath a unique advan-tage when dealing with technical is-sues that are common in such projects.

At OnwardPath they understand the changes in the information shar-ing landscape and they prepare their clients to meet the challenge by using Oracle WebCenter Suite products.

OnwardPath recently upgraded and redesigned the Intranet of a na-tionally ranked academic medical

center hospital in the Mid West region. The hospital ranks 10th in the nation in the U.S. News World Report 2014-15 Honor Roll of America’s Best Hospitals and its intranet is accessed by over 7000 employees and affiliated phy-sicians from different locations on a daily basis. It is critical that the intranet is always up and accessible. Onward-Path assisted in building the intranet in a Highly Available architecture that involved clustering the webtier and middleware layers. The implementa-tion involved Oracle WebCenter Suite (Portal, Content and Sites) and Oracle Secure Enterprise Search.

The upgrade involved migrating content, group spaces, security and portal objects from a previous version of Oracle WebCenter Content and Portal to the latest version of the prod-uct. The redesign involved integration of WebCenter Portal and WebCenter Sites which is not available out of the box.

The three most important value ad-dition OnwardPath offers to its custom-ers are 1. Guidance - All their implementation projects involves closely working with the client before, during and after the systems integration project. 2. Quality – OnwardPath’s team is

extensively experienced in imple-menting Oracle WebCenter Solutions. WebCenter implementation typically involves several technical issues that only an experienced WebCenter ex-pert is able to resolve. 3. Cost – OnwardPath’s onsite and off-shore capabilities allows them to pro-vide cost benefit advantage to their customers.

Moving forward OnwardPath will stay focused on providing Systems Integration services to Oracle Web-Center customers. The organization’s experience implementing Oracle WebCenter solutions gives them the unique opportunity to understand what additional functionalities Oracle WebCenter customers will benefit. As a leading WebCenter Systems integra-tor they are committed to bridging the gaps in the usability aspects of Web-Center Content and Portal. In August 2015 they will be launching a product “SmartEdit” that will improve some of the front-end capabilities of Oracle WebCenter. SmartEdit will be availa-ble for free for select customers during the beta launch.

Consulting services companies, es-pecially in the Technology sector need to spend on training, observes Pandy-an Ramar . CEO OnwardPath’s policy is to have every employee attend one training program every year.

“The second other most important aspect that a vibrant solutions/con-sulting company need to focus is un-derstanding the clients requirements,” says Ramar.

According to Ramar, Executives who encourage open information sharing are in the right direction to take their organizations to the next level up.

Focused On Oracle Webcenter Integration ServicesOnwardPath Technology Solutions LLC

Pandyan RamarCEO & Solutions Architect

All billing system conversion projects are challenging. The project named SolutionOne

by Pepco Holdings, Inc. (“PHI,” NYSE:POM), involved the replacement of two legacy mainframe systems each of 1970s vintage, more than 2,000 business requirements, gas and electric services, multiple jurisdictions and cutting edge metering infrastructure and customer programs.

The SAP CR&B system has set a new standard in the industry for what a successful implementation can achieve. System performance and availability has been exceptional from Day One. Billing exceptions increased, but at a much lower rate than any reasonable expectation given the magnitude of the change. First quarter 2015 Overall Customer Satisfaction scores, as measured by MSI, also increased compared to pre-conversion levels.

Success Factor #1: The customer information system is the heart of the utility’s operations, replacing it requires clear vision and commitment by senior leadership to a successful outcome. The commitment includes a realistic assessment of the challenges and potential risks of the project, a willingness to take the steps necessary to address them, and an ongoing emphasis on the criticality of the effort even in the face of multiple, competing priorities.

Success Factor #2: SolutionOne was not treated as an IT project, but rather as a business project. IT was a trusted and respected technical partner. This level of business engagement helped ensure that both business readiness and technical readiness were given

equal weight. Each on their own is necessary, but not sufficient, for a successful implementation. Success Factor #3: Guiding Principles were established at the outset of the project, before the organization arrived at stressful decision points. The Guiding Principles were developed through stakeholder interviews and represented a collective view of how to make tradeoff and other decisions as the project progressed.

Success Factor #4: As with the establishment of Guiding Principles, it served the project well to identify the criteria for going live before the pressure of an impending implementation date. PHI worked with its integrator, Accenture, to identify more than 50 objective criteria across seven categories: Application Readiness, Business Readiness, Support Readiness, Technical Readiness, Controls, Data Migration, and Deployment. Prior to the actual implementation date, a series of practice sessions were conducted with the Chief Financial

Officer and the Executive Vice President of Power Delivery using different Go Live Criteria scenarios. As a result of this, the ultimate “Go / No-Go” meeting was efficient, effective and straightforward.

Success Factor #5: PHI made a concerted effort to consider the impact of all aspects of the project on what the customer ultimately would experience. As a result of this conscious focus, PHI ensured that multiple rounds of readiness testing and multiple “dress rehearsals” were built into the project plan.

Success Factor #6: Three dedicated roles were established for this project, each of which helped to mitigate significant operating risk. IT resource dedicated to all internal and external system interfaces was established. A Customer Care resource was tasked with ensuring that all aspects of business readiness were identified, coordinated, and successfully completed. This business readiness resource was also involved in working with the third of the three roles: a dedicated IT resource focused on operational continuity during cutoverSuccess Factor #7: PHI was committed to establishing a project culture that exhibited a handful of key attributes. These include a healthy respect for the complexity of the effort a willingness to acknowledge and address the root causes of an earlier, failed, billing system implementation at one of PHI’s heritage companies; a commitment to listen to the advice and counsel of vendors and utilities and to learn from their experience; and trust and collaboration between business and technical resources.

Success Factors for the Customer Relationship and Billing System

Doug Myers, VP & CIO

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Processing electronic payments outside of the standard workflow introduces risk and inefficiencies

for Oracle merchants, states Asif Ramji, CEO, Paymetric.

Leading Oracle enterprise businesses seek an efficient, seamlessly integrated, safe and affordable way to accept credit cards, eChecks and other electronic payment methods within Oracle E-Business Suite in order to automate payment acceptance for sales orders and invoices.Paymetric’s Xi Pay for Oracle E-Business Suite provides a world-classsecure integrated payment solution for Oracle clients. Paymetric has over 15 years’ experience delivering secure payment solutions for enterprise clients.

Paymetric XiPay® for Oracle E-Business Suite is a SaaS-based, multi-tenant platform that facilitates credit and debit card acceptance, processes eChecks/ACH payments, offers multi-currency payment methods and enables fraud scoring and reporting services.

The cost effective XiPayplatform enables Oracle merchants to fully integrate and secure electronic payment transactions from their Oracle enterprise systems, such as Oracle E-Business Suite, without the upfront expense of purchasing and maintaining additional hardware and software.

Electronic payment transactions originating from Oracle E-Business Suite across the globe are transmitted securely to the XiPay platform for authorization and settlement. Behind the scenes, Paymetric works with the merchant to ensure payment transactions are integrated tightly and securely with system workflows that support order-to-cash and collections processes. The result is end-to-end automation that streamlines and

secures all payment transactions anywhere payments are accepted.

Merchants that store credit card numbers onsite are subject to an increased risk of a breach and are accountable for meeting the Payment Card Industry Data and Security Standard (PCI DSS) requirements. Finding secure and cost-effective solutions to meet these requirements can be a difficult, costly task and can result in irreparable brand damage and financial loss if not implemented correctly.

XiSecure® for Oracle E-Business Suite is Paymetric’s award-winning tokenization solution. It eliminates the transmission and storage of sensitive cardholder data, dramatically improving data security and reducing PCI audit scope and cost.

How does it work? The solution intercepts credit card numbers entered into an Oracle merchant’s systems and environments and replaces credit card numbers with a surrogate value or token. The encrypted card number is stored off-site in Paymetric’s secure, PCI-compliant data vault. This token is used just as if it were the real card to support customer requests and facilitate reporting without interrupting day-to-day operations.

Benefits • Significant decrease in scope and cost of a PCI DSS audit • Reduces risk associated with a data breach• Accelerated time to PCI compliance • Increased security and protection of brand reputation• Eliminates processor lock-in, allowing Oracle merchants freedom of processor choice and transition• Works seamlessly and is tightly integrated with XiPay for Oracle E-Business Suite, allowing over 6,000

Oracle merchants a single solution suite with best-in-class payment acceptance and tokenization technology integration

Paymetric is the standard for excellence in secure integrated payments for enterprise clients.Paymetric’s commitment to world-class service and product innovation will continue to fuel the business for greater success in the years to come.

Paymetric’s tremendous success is a result of the team’s relentless pursuit for excellence, innovation and overall best-in-class client experience. The world’s leading enterprise businesses continue to choose Paymetric each year as a result of their dedicated focus in these areas.

Paymetric solves a mission critical problem with payment workflow optimization and data security. Executives should continually look for market opportunities to provide high value solutions with demonstrated return on investment metrics.With Paymetric’s recent Oracle validated integration certification, Oracle merchants can have the confidence and peace of mind when choosing Paymetric to enable payment acceptance and tokenization of sensitive data everywhere they do business.

Standard For Excellence In Secure Integrated Payments And Data SecurityPaymetric, Inc

Asif Ramji, CEO

Technological Barriers Inlarge companies it comes down to the amount of complexity found in technology landscapes and companies inability to innovate.I am constantly amazed at how often I stumble upon an article decrying the inability of large organizations to innovate. Focusing solely on a company’s ability to innovate is, to me, a red herring that distracts from the real issues facing large businesses today – execution. If an organization is struggling with complexity and bringing innovative products to market or competing with a more nimble entity, I would posit that what they really lack is the ability to execute on innovation. Disciplined execution fuels innovation.

Simplify Technological Experience It’s important to find the right technology that eliminates complexity and delivers greater ROI. It’s critical to simplify enterprise infrastructure and applications. All that’s required to build a solution, such as user portal, analytics, data integration, mobile, collaboration, API management, document management, data

management needs to be pre-integrated and ready to run in the cloud.

Simplifying the experience and consumption is another way to increase ROI. Users can grab data on their mobile, tablet or desktop – get a snapshot of the company’s operations and raw data, without weeding through unnecessary layers of data or complexity. You getonly the data that counts.

Complexity Hinders Innovation Complexity costs companies the ability to execute which hinders innovation, while simplicity frees them to grow. IT can be the forcing function to simplify business. Technological breakthroughs, globalization, and a deeper focus on employee engagement are putting business simplification at the forefront. As I said earlier, execution is the oxygen that continually fuels innovation. Any organization, no matter the size or industry, must empower people throughout the organization, from the shop floor to the top floor to constantly seek ways to introduce innovative ideas into their products, roles and

processes and have the freedom to execute on them.

Choosing The Right Technology It’s critical for a company to choose the right technology – if done right it can make them more agile and give them the needed competitive advantage in the market. IT organizations shouldn’t spend time just moving data from one source to another. Moving towards a real time business and technology enabling that is the right strategy. Innovative business models can be unlocked based on real-time opportunities.

IT and Success IT must be simple. Why? The answer is that enterprise computing has become absurdly complex (both on-premise and in the cloud). The journey to success isn’t trivial. No two customers are alike. Many customers have different starting points. Heterogeneity is the name of the game in the cloud (as well as on-premise) and simplification has to be part of that.

Disciplined execution fuels innovation

Steve LucasPresidentSAP Platform Solutions, SAP

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According to Nag Karaka, CEO, PCB Apps, one of the major challenges faced

by the Oracle customers are the implementation partners concentrate on Bill-ability than understanding the customer problems “Success of the implementation depends on the knowledge/experience of the implementation partner and the customer participation. The customers are not aware and/or not educated enough on the features of the best-in-class Oracle products. At the end, customers lose the confidence in the ERP product and the implementation partner. Traditional implementation technics/approach is not enough these days and out-of-box thinking is a must to meet the current industry & technology challenges/demands,” says Nag.

PCB Apps is a company with proven expertise for Oracle Enterprise Technologies, namely JD Edwards, PeopleSoft and Oracle EBS suite of products. They have expertise providing solutions in JD Edwards Enterprise One and Enterprise World services to large number of international organizations, including Fortune 500 Companies. As an Oracle Platinum Partner with a proven and acknowledged performance record PCB Apps deliver services across geographies encompassing Americas (North and South), EMEA (Europe, Middle-East and Asia), South Africa, West Indies & India. The key differentiators that set PCB Apps apart from others is their “QualityAcross” methodology with precision driven JD Edwards (Enterprise One and World)

Expertise using blended shore model.

PCB Apps hasthe following services.Implementation Services like assess-ments, implementations, migration, and upgrades. Hosting and Managed services in-cludes, Remote CNC Support, Ap-plication Managed Services, Data Center Services, 24X7 Infrastructure Support, Server, Database and OS Managed Services. Disaster Recovery Services offered by PCB Apps are, business continuity planning and execution, disaster re-covery configuration for failover, and planning and testing.Remote Development Services in-cludes the re-engineering of the 3rd party integrations using business ser-vices, application of Mobility Apps, and usual traditional development services for customizations.

Expert team at PCB Apps has delivered many successful projects

across the globe including but not limited to the Custom Archive solutions to a large telecom enterprise even long before Arching tools came in to the market, ATP (Available To Promise) and CTP (Capacity To Promise)for a large food colors manufacturing company and Custom blend manufacturing module for a large liquor manufacturing company. PCB Apps has upgraded JDE within 60 days under 100K for a large financial services company. They have migrated Oracle World to E1 for a large electronics manufacturing company with Blended shore model.

PCB Apps has proven experience for 11+ years delivering Oracle solutions with strong customer references. They have certified implementation specialists by the business verticals

Based on the outlook of the ERP and Cloud market, they are looking at 20-30% growth every year for next 5 years. Company’s growth is not only planned organically but they are looking for potential M&A activity to grow the company.

Nag believes that an experienced, certified and enthusiastic solution experts who understands the customer pain points, constitutes a healthy and vibrant consulting company. According to Nag, by creating niche market solutions with hisloyal employee base, can position their company for growth.

The Oracle customers are excited about hosted/ cloud based ERP solutions, Business Services, Mobile capabilities/ solutions. They also look forward for the hardware and software bundled hosted solutions.

Global Experience In Implementing Oracle Solutions With Blended Shore Model

PCB Apps

Nag Karaka, CEO

The networking industry has been evolving towards networks with higher software content

that are characterized by openness and programmability. While this transition will continue for many years to come, it is not until last year that it started to gain wide acceptance with consensus now agreeing that the future of networking involves an ever increasing amount of flexibility and software. In an SDN world, network operators can reduce operational costs by simplify provisioning and potentially increase sales by creating new service offerings. Early adopters such as Big Switch have argued for 50% savings for SDN enabled networks.

What is SDN? We are in the early stages of SDN and its definition and attributes continue to evolve but generally SDNorSoftware Defined Networking refers to a network architecture where the network control plane is decoupled from packet forwarding resulting ina greater degree of automation, programmability and openness. As such, network administrators can specify configurations for networking equipment such as routers and switches and manage their entire network much easier and efficiently than in today’s networks. Traffic can be managed from a centralized control point without the need to manually reconfigure individual equipment. SDN in practiceAlthough the benefits of SDN such as increased automation and operational flexibility are well understood and desirable among network operators, given the high complexity of networks

the transformation won’t take place overnight. Most likely, initial SDN implementations will be surgical starting with individual server racks and scale out rather than the other way around.As such, even new data centers will be built using “legacy” architectures with little initial SDN presence.This approach lets network operators get comfortable with the new technology while keeping capital expenditures low.

How it startedThe networking industry first learned about SDN in April 2012, when Google announced that it had transitioned its data center networking to a solution controlled by software, instead of traditional hardware equipment. Later that year, in August 2012, VMware acquired Nicira, an SDN start-up with less than $10 million in annual sales, for $1.3 billion. Since then,there have been considerable discussions and often speculation regarding implications for traditional equipment vendors. The reality is that the evolution to SDN will take years and early adoption will come from a limited number of sophisticated networkers such as Google, and not by the majority of enterprises.

Cisco’s approach to SDNCisco, the clear leader in Ethernet switching with over 60% market share was considered as the most at risk during the early days of SDN. While Cisco was not an early adopter of the new networking paradigm, its strategy around SDN,the ACI (Application Centric Infrastructure),which was revealed two years ago, has evolved significantly and shown accelerated

progress this past year. The ACI uses a holistic systems-based approach that integrates both physical and virtual environments under a common policy-based operational model. The ACI strategy enables a network that is driven by the applications that run on it.

Cisco’s SDN ComponentsThe ACI strategy became tangible after Cisco announced products tailored to the aforementioned vision. At the heart of Cisco’s SDN offerings lies APIC, an open policy controller accessible by a set of APIs, that is positioned between the applications and the network and is the unified point of automation and management. Through APIC, applications can make changes to the network configuration to meet their needs. In terms of physical hardware, Cisco introduced a new line of switches, the Nexus 9000, for both traditional and ACI data center deployments. Cisco has seen significant interest for its Nexus 9000 switches evident by its expanding customer base that reached 1,700 end-customers in the January quarter up from 580 customers six months earlier.

While incumbent equipment vendors were initially hesitant to change, over the last year there has been significant progress with new products entering the market at an accelerated pace.Similar, despite Cisco’s initial hesitation towards SDN, a refocused strategy has resulted in a full suite of SDN products helping the company remain its leadership in networking.

SDN - Opportunities In The New Networking Paradigm

Georgios Kyriakopoulos, VP of Equity Research, SunTrust Robinson Humphrey

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Many Oracle customers struggle with choosing the right Oracle application/

technology to meet their needs, knowing the sequence of deployment of the application/technologies offered, and knowing how to navigate through Oracle, observes John Clow, CEO of Process Solutions Assurance

Process Solutions Assurance is comprised of ex-oracle domain experts in the areas of Solution Architecture, Product Development, System Integration, and Solution Deployment and resources from asset intensive industries that bring a customer, process and value centric view of benefit. The majority of their resources and management group are certified reliability leaders through The Association for Maintenance Professionals or Certified Maintenance and Reliability Professionals through the Society of Maintenance and Reliability Professionals.

Process Solution Assurance’s approach to deploying and managing software solutions (like Oracle) follows a proprietary methodology known

as, Business Assessment and Solution Optimization (BASO). BASO is centered on understanding and documenting the current business processes used to support key activities in an organization and defining the optimum “to-be” business processes considering utility “Best Practice”, IT application infrastructure, Oracle application’s functionality and the documented business requirements from each customer. The main principal of the BASO methodology believes that each business process (however it is defined) should be (and can be) easily traced to an organization’s goals, objectives and mission.

Integrations between Oracle’s Utilities Work and Asset Management system and Oracle’s E-Business Suite- with constant demands for strategic efficiency improvements, utilities are being pressured and encouraged to reduce redundancies in processes and data entry wherever possible, in particular related to Supply Chain processes. Accuracies in data entry and the ability to reconcile costs are critical to an organization’s use of Business Systems. Increasing numbers of customers are purchasing Oracle’s Enterprise Business Suite (EBS) and Work and Asset Management.

The main objective of the integration should be is to move data between applications and keeping data synchronized automatically, without any user interference.

The solutions developed by the organization have enabled enterprises to optimize their business, Use and Deployment of Oracle’s User Productivity Kit (UPK) for enhanced testing and training during implementation - Oracle’s User Productivity Kit (UPK) is a content development platform that assists in

end-user testing and training activities as well as introducing work and asset management concepts and overview during system implementation.The value of UPK pre-built application content expedites the design and requirement-gathering phase of implementations that saves substantial time, which leads to lower implementation costs.

Process Solutions Assurance are Customer centric; their reputation is very strong in the Utility market as implementers of the Oracle Utilities Work and Management application.

“The outlook for our company is very strong. We are coming out with new product offering as add-ons to Oracle software (in the Utility sector) that benefits both Oracle and customers,” says John Clow.

Process Solutions Assurance have a very healthy pipeline of projects that will be starting up within the next 6-12 months. This year they will be starting their first project outside North America and have a good pipeline of other international projects starting up within the next 12-16 months.

According to Clow factors like Customer centric attitude, Empowered employees create a healthy and vibrant workspace.

“We have to challenge ourselves continuously to be better. One important advice is that don’t be afraid to fail or make a mistake. Quickly learn from the mistakes,” says Clow.

According to Clow, the customers are most excited about the Oracle Utilities Global Business Unit (UGBU), which they primarily work with, is constantly coming out with new products for the Utility sector. This year they are releasing a new version of their Work and Asset Management system that we specialize in implementing.

The Customer Centric Solution ProviderProcess Solutions Assurance

John Clow, CEO

Meeting the Business Challenge of Big DataBig data is becoming a big busi-ness. The many types of data sourc-es, as well as preparation, analyt-ics and storage options, seem to growall the time. The need to keep up with and manage this data is, correspondingly, a big challenge.

I see two key challenges CIOs face from big data; a business challenge and a technological one. If these challenges are met with a new strategic approach, your organization stands to win its piece of the big data pie.

Simplifying the business of Big Data The major business challenge to answer is, how can organizations s implify their operational process of dealing with big data? How can we make complex volumes of big data easier to get, sort, analyze and offer to our constituents, such as department heads, executives and l ine of business owners?

For example, imagine a large retailer that sel ls al l types of com-modities. The value they offer cus-tomers is proximity to a customer’s location and cost, so they must be competitive within their specif ic store geographies. They have to look at competitive data, SKU by SKU, on a daily basis in each ge-ography. As part of their big data initiatives, they create an applica-tion that runs against a database updated with competitive pricing information every morning. The application then delivers new pro-motions and sales.

Consider a large Telco. Ten years ago, if a customer had a bad experience, nobody would know about it, r ight? Now, if you or I have an upsetting experience,

we can just go to the web, and mil-l ions of people know about it. So this organization does a massive search for negative mentions of their company so they can reach out to individuals to resolve such is-sues. This is a challenge businesses in almost al l industries are facing.

Realizing the economy of big data integrationThe major technological challenge to answer is the move from large volumes of structured data to high percentages of unstructured data in massive databases. Meeting this challenge is going to require a ma-jor shif t in how IT is operating.• Big data is driven by economicsFor chief executives, it’s impera-tive to recognize that the cost of keeping data is much less than throwing it away. And the cost of storage continues to decline. Or-ganizations must make sure they are at least maintaining and stor-ing data to be analyzed later. Applications are driven by dataMake sure you have the connec-tivity to all your data, wherever it resides, so your applications can work with the right data at the right time to produce the right results for your customers and constituents.

• Data sources must be accessed efficientlyTypically, organizations combine their data sources together and then analyze a combined ware-house. Big data comes from dif-ferent data sources, and dif ferent locations—in dif ferent countries, probably. But the overwhelming volumes of unstructured data, and the calculations that wil l have to be performed on it, wil l require CIOs to take new approaches.

Developing a new approach The Internet of Things (IoT) is begin-ning to complicate the Big Data challenge and opportunity even farther. CIOs wil l have to develop new approaches to integrate IoT data into the enterprise.

A new approach should start with a standards-based data con-nectivity solution that accounts for the variety of sources, applica-tions and places that corporate data is stored. As infrastructure continues to move into the cloud, it makes economic sense to use SaaS to host and manage cus-tomer, marketing and other data. But integrating that data with ex-ternal data, including social data, weather and other available data crit ical to you business has to be in the IT plan too.

The CIO must also devise ef-fective uti l ization strategies for al l the data. Fundamental BI and BI tools to blend, sort, provide ac-cess to and analyzedata for bet-ter decis ion-making wil l have to be flexible and be ready to scale for multiple data sources, more data types and new volumes.

Like all major technology shif ts, the big data challenge has been slowly shif ting IT thinking for years, but is now a pressing matter. Just the sheer volume of big data has to move us in a new direction.

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Organizations are in a digital race, where the speed at which IT can reliably deliver

new features and innovations is what sets them apart from their competitors. But IT projects are failing in most organizations in different ways. Research shows that a typical software project will often waste 40 percent or more of their resources. It also highlights organizations embracing delivery strategies such as Continuous Delivery or DevOps are able to significantly reduce this waste, and on average are 5-7x times more productive than their peers.

Rubicon Red has developed two solutions to support a DevOps approach for Oracle Fusion Middleware customers.

Rubicon Red MyST: It is an on-premise product that contains a range of knowledge modules for provisioning and deploying Oracle Fusion Middleware components. It enables you to quickly establish a standardized, repeatable and automated process for the deployment of Oracle Middleware solutions. MyST reduces risk, decreases costs and speeds up time to market in the delivery of Oracle Middleware solutions.

FusionCloud: This helps in the provisioning and support of an Oracle Fusion Middleware Platform on the Cloud. It also provides cloud independence.

“Using a specific customer example we can work through the benefits we have achieved in enhancing and optimizing customer’s business processes,” says John Deeb, CEO and Co-Founder.

Originally, this customer gave minimal thought to the design of the WebLogic / SOA Platform. As the use of BPM/SOA has expanded across

multiple lines of business, it has caused a number of issues, including:• Release Management and Mainte-

nance windows are difficult to achieve (e.g. hard to find Windows that work for all parties)

• Patching Inflexibility –Require all up-grades and patches to be evaluated and applied to all components

• Higher impact while making changes with no isolation of issues; regression testing efforts are relatively high

• Conflicting SLA’s – For example, perfor-mance tuning changes to one com-posite can have a negative impact on another.

• Source / target system downtime im-pacts all sectors

• Same admin server / Weblogic con-figurations across sectors

• More difficult debugging / trouble-shooting (messier logs, many change factors to consider)

• Difficult to scale – current environment reached maximum threshold

This customer was looking to deliver a SOA platform as a service (PaaS)

to each Division in order to enable faster time to integration, increased organizational effectiveness and increased service levels.

This is where the value of Rubicon Red Myst came to the fore and provided the customer with the ability to address each of these issues head on.

From the very beginning Rubicon Red’s purpose has been to lead customers past the point of return, in the successful adoption of Oracle technologies.

Rubicon Red offers organisations a set of innovative and market leading software and consulting solutions for Oracle Fusion Middleware customers. Rubicon Red along with its customers was awarded an unprecedented 3 Oracle Excellence Awards at OOW 2014.

According to John Deeb, a health and vibrant solutions company is one that can respond the needs of their customers. He believes that executives need a clear plan to take advantage of the current changes in the enterprise technology landscape.

Moving forward Rubicon Red is fo-cused on alignment to Oracle's Cloud Strategy and providing customers the help they need to migrate to their Ora-cle capabilities to the Cloud. They are also determined to provide customers with a DevOps capability utilizing Ru-bicon Red MyST and FusionCloud. Ru-bicon Red understand that customers will continue to have both OnPremise IT Systems and that the only viable me-dium term solution is to have a Hybrid of Cloud/OnPremise integration. Rubi-con Red is in a position to deliver the right solutions to customers in order to make them successful with Oracle technologies.

Guiding Organizations To Their Required DestinationsRubicon Red

O ver the last four decades, the automobile has fol-lowed the rest of our l ives

in transitioning from a place of relative isolation to constant con-nectedness and that trend is set to accelerate dramatically in the coming years. We’ve gone from zero electronics and at best AM and FM radio s ignals coming in to be on the verge of cars that are in constant communication with each other, pedestrians and infra-structure and security is becoming a crit ical component of the trans-portation ecosystem.

In 2015 a typical car with a selection of driver assist systems such as lane keeping, adaptive cruise control and blind spot warn-ing may have anywhere from 50 to 100 CPUs constantly process-ing incoming sensor s ignals and sending out commands to actua-tion hardware. Approximately 0.5 GB of data per hour is generated in a typical car in order to do eve-rything from delivering fuel to cyl-inders to applying the brakes to opening the sunroof. In most cases today, most of that data is going through a control ler area network (CAN) bus, a technology originally developed by Robert Bosch GmbH in the early-1980s.

As we transition to ever more sophisticated automated driving systems and perhaps completely self-driving vehicles some day, the data load is going to explode so automakers are actively working on moving to the next generation of on-board networking technol-ogy including Ethernet that can provide substantial ly more band-width over fewer wires. A typical contemporary car may have over 300 pounds of wiring and automo-tive Ethernet is expected to reduce

that by nearly a third.However, getting all those bits

where they need to be in the car is only part of the problem engineers face today. They also need to keep erroneous bits out. The era of auto-motive connectivity began in the mid-1990s when General Motors in-troduced its OnStar telematics sys-tem. OnStar used cellular connec-tivity to provide hands-free call ing and services such as remote door unlocking, diagnostics and auto-matic emergency response in the event of an accident. In the inter-vening years, OnStar and compet-ing systems have been far more capable with turn-by-turn naviga-tion, remote monitoring of electric vehicle charging and even stolen vehicle recovery and slow-down.

Beginning in 2016 we’l l see the first wave of cars with vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications that uses a Wi-Fi based technol-ogy called dedicated short range communications (DSRC). As ever more automated vehicles become increasingly connected to the out-s ide world through DSRC and cel-lular networks, the possibi l it ies for electronic mischief wil l ramp up dramatically.

Earl ier this year, security re-searchers working for the United States Defense Advanced Re-search Projects Agency demon-strated the abil ity to remotely take control of an OnStar equipped Chevrolet Impala on the 60 Min-utes news show. Automakers are aware of the risks of combining au-tomation and connectivity but the potential benefits to both safety and efficiency are also huge. In its notice of proposed rulemak-ing to mandate V2V in upcoming vehicles, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration es-

timated that 70 to 80 percent of accidents could be avoided if most of the vehicle f leet had V2V. But that assumes that no one wil l f ind a way to send a message to a vehicle that would tr igger auto-matic emergency braking or lane changes or prevent the driver from control l ing the vehicle.

Optimal security would seem to call for isolating communications and control networks in the ve-hicle. However, to reap the maxi-mum benefits from connectivity and automated driving as well as meeting modern customer feature expectations, those in-vehicle net-works cannot be entirely isolated. That means automakers wil l have to be much more aggressive in their ef forts to stay ahead of the bad actors. Companies l ike Te-s la have been publicly recruiting hackers at events such Black Hat and Defcon while other manufac-turers have been doing the same more discretely.

If the next generations of vehi-cles are to be trusted by drivers and be successful in the marketplace, manufacturers need to do more. They need to consider fol lowing in the footsteps of tech compa-nies l ike Microsoft, Facebook and Google and offer rewards for re-sponsible disclosure of vulnerabil i -t ies and then they need to correct those flaws quickly. Not only do they need to respond to the issue of security, they need to be seen by the public to be responsive. Af-ter mass recalls of GM lock mecha-nisms and Takata airbags in 2014, automakers and suppliers cannot afford to be perceived as ignoring the network security of their vehi-cles.

Automotive Network Security

John Deeb, CEO & Co-Founder

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Simeio Solutions is a unique strategic partner offering a comprehensive suite of enterprise

Identity and Access Management (IAM) resources designed to provide a fully integrated solution that meets the specific needs of each client. The company's single-source approach to IAM encompasses expert managed services (both on-premise and remotely managed), business-ready IAM cloud, and professional services that ensure on-target, smooth and cost-effective system design and implementation. “Simeio’s full range of services are powered by the Simeio Identity Intelligence Center (IIC). Simeio IIC is the first and only solution of its kind designed specifically to operate, monitor and defend complex, multi-vendor IAM infrastructures, and to leverage those infrastructures to deliver actionable business intelligence. It's a powerful combination of cutting-edge and proprietary IAM technologies backed by a team of highly skilled professionals, that is currently managing over 20 Million identities.

It is in the area focused on Identity Management and Security where Simeio works closely with Oracle, providing services for this market segment. Cyber Breaches, access certification requirements, and security for a mobile workforce are but a few of the many issues that Oracle customers are seeing these days

As an Oracle Gold and Specialized Partner with arguably the largest number of Identity Management

subject matter experts on staff, Simeio is uniquely equipped to help clients with their Oracle technologies.

From planning, to building, and then ultimately operating the Oracle Identity Management technologies, Simeio is able to draw from its years of experience in this space to help clients receive business value from their Identity Management investment. Simeio also provides Oracle customers with the ability to run the entire Oracle

solution in the Cloud as an Identity as a Service offering. The complete solution is then fully monitored through the Simeio Identity Intelligence Center, with its newest location in Atlanta just having come online in 2015 and providing additional redundancy to the facilities already in Mumbai and Bangalore. In addition to the new IIC locations, Simeio has opened new offices in Brazil and the United Arab Emirates to support global demand.

Simeio has benefitted many of its clients with its solutions for example:

It helped a Fortune 50 Global Investment Services Company meet regulatory compliance mandates by deploying a repeatable certification process for some of their most critical Applications.

Simeio provides Identity as a Service to a leading Defense Contractor to enable automated user account provisioning, access certification, and single sign-on.

Simeio provides Expert Managed Services of the Oracle Identity Management technology to a non-profit healthcare system – allowing them to manage the lifecycle of their disparate user population (employees, contractors, physicians, nurses, etc.) and ultimately to provide for quicker

and more secure access to patient information.

Simeio Solutions has Oracle Certified Specialists in Identity Management, with the largest number of subject matter experts in this Space. It offers flexible Deployment Options – Professional Services, Expert Managed Services, and Identity as a Service as well as having a long history and strong connections with Oracle Product Management and Development. As breaches become more pervasive, end-users demand more self-service control, and security resources become more in-demand (scarce), Simeio is uniquely positioned to help its customers.

Simeio hires and retains full time employees that are subject matter experts and are passionate about what

they do, measuring success based on the success of its clients. Investing in its employees and partnering with market leading technology vendors has led the company to grow to new heights.

Simeio is seeing new demands from Oracle customers for Mobile Security Services – securely protecting access to company owned applications and data on personal devices, without negatively influencing end-user experience. There is also heightened demand for Privileged Account Management to protect access to some of the most important applications and devices within the enterprise. Simeio will continue its focus to offer managed services for Oracle IdM technologies, and to offer Oracle Identity as a Service.

Unique Strategic Partner Offering A Comprehensive Suite Of Enterprise Identity And Access Management (IAM) Resources

Simeio Solutions

Hemen Vimadalal, CEO

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Today IT enterprise infrastructure revolves around consolidation, time saving ways to manage existing applications and adding more application, which

helps companies to simultaneously create differentiation and increase IT delivery capabilities, observes Lavinia No-ble Surjove, Founder and CEO, Swift Pace Solutions Inc.

The organization’s decision to achieve Oracle Partner-ship helped them to demonstrate to their clients their ele-vated level of commitment towards continual growth and improvement in the organization’s services and depth of their specialization in Oracle based solutions.

At Swift Pace it has always been to do more than what they are contracted to do with their clients. Swift Pace wants to go an extra mile and get all their clients’ needs taken care of and with Oracle introducing a range of prod-ucts has helped their clients to get the new and innovative ways they were looking for to help them maintain a com-petitive edge in a highly competitive market.

Swift Pace have had clients with Business that started small and grew substantially in a short period of time caus-ing technical debt with Duplicative, fragmented applica-tion systems throughout the front and back office environ-ment, they studied their systems, retired some systems and replaced some with Oracle products to achieve sustain-able results.

Swift Pace have around 1500 consultants that work

towards helping clients overcome the defaults that oc-cur while using Oracle solution. Every client’s case is ap-proached in a different way. They study what issues the clients are facing and then match those issues with appro-priate solutions provided by Oracle like security, collabo-ration and performance technological tools provided by Oracle web center, Oracle based CRM application and Oracle Enterprise Content Management (ECM) platform. After identifying the appropriate solution we then help our clients in migration, integration and provide support in case a technical issue arises.

One of Swift Pace’s clients had a transparent Data En-cryption (TDE) issue and they with oracle support were able to fix that issue.

The expert team at Swift Pace tailors their services to meet the IT needs of the mid-market group, which is their niche. Swift Pace want their partners to have the commit-ment and passion to serve the mid-market like they do with-out thinking about enormous profitability but emphasizing more on ensuring that they are serving their customers what they have contracted with them to do.

Swift Pace uses mutual benefit method where they pro-vide theirpartner with brand recognition, new opportunities on which they can embark the future of their company, di-versify existing services and increase overall brand equity in lieu of their trust in us.

“Our company's outlook over the next few years is to rev-olutionize IT services by finding ways to provide IT services with increased quality, keep it as cost effective as possible and to provide end to end solutions to almost all possible emerging IT needs of businesses,” says Lavinia.

Lavinia wants to foster a sense of innovationin the com-pany hence she want to focus on providing an organiza-tional culture where employees have access to sharing ideas, articulate clear goals and vision, employee rewards program, support in learning new skills, etc.

According to Lavinia, Oracle payroll product is the cur-rent in high demand of their clients. Another product that the oracle customers are excited about is Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c. Lavinia strongly believes that the current Oracle Service Cloud for Customer Service and Analytics will soon be the next big thing under the Oracle platform.

Going An Extra Mile For Customer SatisfactionSwift Pace Solutions Inc,

Lavinia Noble SurjoveFounder and CEO

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Hurdles in Strategy And Management Any technology professional’s journey is peppered with technical issues. I remember losing sleep over electronic mail “zip storms” and inexplicable slow performance in client-server applications back in the 1990s, and more recently, denial of server attacks and inexplicable slow performance in mobile applications. However, my concern is for strategic and management issues. Fixing the huge project you thought was green but is now fire-engine red. Preventing top talent from getting recruited away by another company. Removing the burden of operational expense that restrains innovation. Forming constructive vend or partnerships. Ensuring that culture doesn’t derail strategy. Solving a difficult relationship with an executive colleague. Each issue has its own unique solution but you always need skill, teamwork, creativity and perseverance. Technical issues will have less frequency and severity if the organization has the right strategy and is functioning in a professional, contemporary manner.

Be More Aggressive For Innovation I typically use one or a blend of these strategies. For projects that are

more operational or back office, you have to influence the organization to always do the hard work up front of defining what it is going to be fixed and/or better, both quantitatively and qualitatively – which means a culture of continuous improvement and being strict about prioritizing. For example, don’t upgrade an ERP system just to upgrade. Upgrade because it’s going to make a positive, measurable difference, and be sure that difference is being overtly captured and monitored. For innovation, you’ve got to be more aggressive, take more risk, be okay with failure, and iterate and refine in small increments. Get to market quickly with innovation; I think the saying ‘fail fast’ is particularly applicable.

Challenge The Status Quo It’s easy for IT to stay in the role of order takers and infrastructure providers, particularly in organizations that are not used to 21st century pace of change. A CIO can do a good job by ensuring reliability, security, efficiency and service. A CIO is only going to do a great job if they push the organization to deliver innovation and delight ever-more customers. That often means making others uncomfortable and

challenging the status quo. CIOs have to figure out ways to disrupt the organization in bold ways. I was referred to the other day as a ‘rebel CIO,’ and I have no problem with that moniker, as long as adjectives like curiosity, respect, and professional go along with ‘rebel.’

Keep Strategy Light Weight The strategy ‘bumper sticker’ is easy. First, there are no technology projects, there are only business projects. Second, choose technology that’s going to deliver the most amount of positive change, as defined by value to the customer, the fastest. 1) Know your industry and your market as well as any other executive, 2) the moment a strategy is published, it is obsolete, so keep strategy lightweight, 3) tie strategy to every person and every day, through planning, objective setting and measurement, 4) timing is everything – know when a technology decision needs to be made so that delivery fits with business value, and 5) if buying a solution, don’t just write a contract, create a partnership.

IT Professional Should Know The Business As Technology As a CIO, I expect the IT professionals

on the team to know the business as well as they know technology, be customer-delight driven, and be respectful and accountable to each other and the larger organization. Taking off the IT hat, as an executive I expect interest in technology that sparks innovation, creates value, drives outcomes, and enables effectiveness and efficiency. When I buy a smart phone, I’m not buying a phone, I’m

buying a portable communication, entertainment and productivity experience. When a faculty member implements instructional technology, they aren’t implementing technology, they are delivering new pedagogy. When you start to think about technology as process and experiences rather than hardware and software, it changes the conversation.

Just recently, I was talking to a group of IT leaders about what we needed to make a large initiative successful. There wasn’t much on the resulting list that was about technology. The list included items like financial planning, customer value, communications, stakeholder involvement, and outcome management. And that’s how it should be.

Joanna YoungVP & CIOMichigan State University

CIOs Need To Figure Out Ways To Disrupt The Organization In Bold Ways.

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Having a real turn-key solution and running the system without difficulties (adoption,

maintenance, support etc.). Customers always prefer/desire to get their support services from a single vendor rather than communicating with several resources. These are the common challenges faced by Oracle customers face, according to Mehmet Beyaz, CTO, TTG International

TTG’s NORTH-I Performance Management solutions have set the standard for multi-vendor, multi technology performance management. NORTH-I manages GSM, CDMA, GPRS, UMTS, LTE POTS, SDH/SONET, SS7/ Sigtran, IN, ATM, Frame Relay, IP and other technologies today.

NORTH-I takes performance management to the next level with its flexibility to collect and interpret terabytes of data from an approximately unlimited range of sources in near real-time. Thus increasing the performance of the network, people and the business with its extremely customizable architecture, robust, easy-to-use Web-based administration and reporting tools, dashboard, report portal, industry-standard database and open interfaces including SQL, ODBC, XML and CORBA, SNMP NORTH-I Performance Manager release the power of the data.

Managing a wireless network has always been a balancing act: operating at maximum efficiency while maintaining competitive quality of service (QoS); deploying capacity where and when needed as traffic increases and making the most of the frequency spectrum whilst avoiding interference. NORTH-I is the solution

of selection for communications providers across the world, enabling them to maximize QoS through optimum network performance.

TTG’s customers are enjoying the benefits of the seamless fusion between NORTH-I’s state-of-art performance management and EXADATA’s extreme big-data processing capabilities.TTG International is an Oracle Exadata Certified Company.

TTG’s technologies have brought benefits to many clients. One of the largest Telco operators in Turkey and North Cyprus have been using NORTH-I Network performance management for all network (Core, 2G,3G,IMS,transmission, etc…) since 2008. NORTH-I currently measures the performance of the more than 100k network elements around the clock via many KPIs, processing terabytes of data daily. NORTH-I allows continual improvement in operators’ services to subscribers and their overall effectiveness paving the way for further profitable growth

Additionally, three Telco operators in Azerbaijan have been using NORTH-I Network performance management for all networks (Core, 2G, 3G, LTE, IMS,

Transmission and VAS) since 2013.TTG has been dedicated to

developing solutions with Oracle since its first day. They have several Oracle certifications and awards in addition their decade-long experience on Oracle products. They have successfully implemented seamless and durable Oracle based solutions in many different environments for lots of customers.

The team at TTG is pretty optimistic for 2015 and the next few years, as companies continue to slowly grow and invest in systems that will help Telco operators around the world to improve revenue and efficiency. Also, they have recently started a new division in the company for the energy sector and have launched a Smart Grid tool.

A healthy company is one that is profitable/sustainable and constantly up-to-date over time. Balancing the growth and profitability is one of the key aspects for achieving this, observes Beyaz

A company’s life cycle and growth is based on understanding the market needs, making the right decisions and having an action plan. Beyaz believe that companies should work hard to make a difference in their respective fields while staying fresh. “Continuous development of products and services plays a crucial role in identified as the best and the most reliable provider in a domain,” says Beyaz

TTG would like to provide their customers with innovative products in order to enhance their infrastructure as well as reduce their costs. In order to do that they are following Oracle Cloud strategy closely and new technologies like In-Memory Database and multi-tenancy.

Taking Performance Management To The Next Level TTG International

D ata is driving greater at-tention these days. The amount of data is growing.

It is growing in organizations and outside of organizational bounda-ries. Organizations are using the term of big data for dif ferent pur-poses and situations. According to Wikipedia, big data consists of data sets that grows so large and complex that they become awk-ward to work with using on hand database management tools. Dif-f iculties include capture, storage, search, sharing, analytics, and vis-ualization.

Manufacturing companies are starting to recognize the oppor-tunity and think how to use piles of data from their enterprise en-gineering and manufacturing sys-tem to drive some analysis and use it for decis ion making.

In the past, main focus of prod-uct l ifecycle management systems was about how to automate work of engineers, manage change processes and collaborate with suppliers. Customized design and an increased amount of configu-rations is a challenge for many or-ganizations. Customer feedback is getting more important.

Manufacturing organizations are desperately looking how to improve their decis ion manage-ment process. It related to data about change management his-tory, maintenance, suppliers, prod-uct performance. Unfortunately, the majority of information stored in application s i los and cannot be used.

How to leverage data wisely to drive profit, improve products and generate better user experience? Here are two examples demon-strating how innovative companies

can do that.First company True & co is ac-

tively experimenting and leverag-ing data science to improve de-sign and customer experience. True&Co is focusing on design and e commerce l ingerie based on ab-solutely incredible data driven ap-proach. It combines data and de-sign to create an opportunity for consumers to share data with the company, improving the appropri -ateness of the product. True & co claims to be the first company to f it women into their favorite bra with a f it quiz – no fit t ing rooms, no measuring tape, no photos. The data they collect al lows them to match the customer to over 6000 body types on their database.

One of the most interesting pieces of True & Co experience is the abil ity to gather a massive amount of data about their cus-tomers and turn in into a informa-tion to improve product design process.

The second example is GE, which is innovating with data to improve their products. The ex-ample captured in the article GE, Industrial Internet and radical ef-f iciency published by GreenBiz blog. It brings few examples how GE is planning to leverage Big Data technology. GE is capturing information from multiple low cost sensors, which is a new possibi l ity enabled by new connectivity and industrial internet.

Monitoring of products in a real l ife becomes an interesting and fascinating topic. It can pro-vide s ignif icant impact of design improvements and help manufac-turers to innovate. GE sees it as a very big business opportunity.

The conclusion.Decis ion matters. The trend is to-wards empower designers and manufacturing companies with data insight to develop better product. Big data can help com-panies to create a unique product experience, to design better prod-ucts and optimize resources.

Big data is a big opportunity for many companies. It is coming as a revolution in engineering design and operation. It can optimize de-sign, supply chain and operation. This is not s imple and wil l not hap-pen overnight for most of manu-facturing companies using.

Product configuration is a very complex f ield. Traditional PLM implementations typically dem-onstrating aerospace and au-tomotive industries to describe the complexity of configurations. Monitoring products in a real l ife is another interesting topic. How-ever, most of the l imitations today are related to inabil ity to analyze a massive amount of data produced during the monitoring.

Data is a new oil. Whoever wil l have an access to a most ac-curate data wil l have a power to optimize processes, cut cost and deliver product faster. Engineering software companies should take a note and think how to move from products “documenting” data about design and processes to-wards analytical application and actionable data.

Engineering and Big Data Driven Engineering

Mehmet Beyaz, CTO

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There is no question that being able to capture, document and effectively manage change

across critical business processes will reduce operational expenses and mitigate business risk. But without the right automation solution, achieving that can be much easier said than done. In fact, given the resource constraints and the limitations of most existing tools, many business-critical applications actually go minimally tested until they are in action and the success of the business depends on it.

Oracle EBS environments typically represent some of the most vital and vulnerable aspects of a business, including functions like finance, supply chain and HR. And while applications like Oracle EBS, PeopleSoft and Siebel are clearly business critical, they are also typically highly customized and extremely change-centric. The challenge for the business is that each time that one of these applications is changed, it must be fully validated to ensure full functionality. If this isn’t done, the results can be catastrophic.

This means more than just testing

the primary application itself, as it is common for several applications and technologies to be integrated into a full solution. The real challenge, then, is the requirement for end-to-end, cross-platform business process validation. Unfortunately, the tools that most companies use simply don’t support the depth and breadth of coverage required to truly ensure business continuity.

TurnKey Solutions gives businesses the visibility and control they need to effectively maintain pace with application change without the risk associated with sacrificing quality. TurnKey empowers customers to validate end-to-end business processes, working equally well across both Oracle and non-Oracle applications and systems.

Innovation coupled with expertise is the foundation of TurnKey’s success in the Oracle application marketplace. With over 15 years of experience in Oracle testing and business process validation, TurnKey brings unparalleled value to Oracle application users. It has been delivering solutions to the Oracle marketplace in virtually every industry sector across EBS, Siebel, PeopleSoft and Fusion. TurnKey understands the unique requirements of nearly any application, delivering solutions capable of addressing challenges only seen in the world’s most complex environments.

TurnKey solutions help customers cost-effectively ensure higher quality with much less effort. Whether a change is as substantial as an upgrade or simply involves rolling out patches, support packs or adding/changing application functionality, TurnKey provides the right solution. Their unique technology includes pre-built Oracle

test assets as well as products that enable quick, effective support for customizations. These enable greater frequency, breadth and depth of testing—without any unnecessary overhead or complexity.

And, because many critical business processes include a range of third party or bespoke applications, TurnKey enables validation of business processes across heterogeneous technologies. Its cFactory™ Scriptless Testing software enables companies to validate broader application and business process functionality, ensuring comprehensive, end-to-end application quality.

Finally, TurnKey helps support audit and compliance by documenting each individual business process while also capturing all of the relevant information about the testing process itself. This includes security access, user information, date/time stamping of the process and detailed results of the actual tests run.

With TurnKey’s products and services, customers can leverage the most innovative and capable technology available on the market to better manage change and boost application quality and delivery. Customers have greater visibility and increased control over their application management process, resulting in improved quality, reduced costs and increased agility across their business.

Turnkey’s solutions offer more than just simple and cost effective test automation—they have a direct impact on the mitigation of business risk while increasing business agility and responsiveness in answer to the needs of both users and the global market.

Innovation And Expertise Drive Better Business ValueTurnKey Solutions

Dan Gannon

President & CEO

CXO VIEW POINT

Wind the clock back a few years and one of the most popular initiatives

launched by CIOs was to reduce email traffic between employees. Fast forward to today, and email and email attachments continue to be the primary means of sharing and reviewing documents. According to Osterman Research, 98% of the bits that flow through the typical email system are files attached to emails, with the typical information worker spending 167 minutes per business day doing work in their email. For nearly 50% of employees, collaborating on document review is a significant business process.

Let us take a common scenario to show how effective is an email when it comes to providing the right tool for job. You are working on a number of lengthy documents which requires the inputs of a large and dispersed team of people. The only way to get those documents reviewed is by emailing them out as attachments and having them marked up by each individual.

Further, the process becomes still more time consuming. Because only one person can review the same document at one time, invariably people end up working on different versions of a document and suggesting different changes to the same area of the document. Merging

those changes and rectifying any associated formatting issues requires a lengthy manual process. From a compliance perspective, inactivity on a document needs to be recorded, it doesn’t capture any metrics.

Evidence collected amongst the Oracle community suggests it’s really a big deal. Fifty eight per cent of those involved in document review would like to be able to access a document and review it at the same time as their team, 52% would like to be able to see other people’s comments and changes as they are made, 47% would like to be able to compare review versions, 38% require a report showing all activity on a review and 35% would like a controlled process so nothing gets missed.

Companies, particularly those that are operating in heavily regulated, document intensive industries, that have moved away from email and sought outspecialist document review solutions are reporting savings of 50% and more in the time it takes employees to prepare documents, and the output (documents) being of a much higher quality.

With IT playing an increasingly important role in the retention and motivation of knowledge workers, the result of providing the right tools for the job is evident. For example, the cost of losing an employee can cost

thousands of dollars, often up to 1.5-2x annual salary. Furthermore, it is estimated that it may take up to two years for a new employee to reach the productivity levels of a predecessor.

Evidence points to the fact that, whilst Oracle users would generally prefer an Oracle solution when seeking out a solution to a specific business problem, they are becoming more open to offerings from third parties and Oracle partners. In fact, it has been suggested that almost twice as many people within the Oracle community are likely to seek out a third party solution than their SharePoint counterparts, raising the question of whether this group have a greater understanding of the limitations of their IT framework.

The increasing trend towards BYOD and whilst this brings its own challenges, it also highlights the need for the right technology for workers on the move, which is where specialist software offers distinct advantages.

Better software systems are gateway to save time and cost and to improve productivity and employee retention. Overwhelmingly evidence points to time, money and the willingness of decision makers to initiate change. But it’s the chicken and the egg, companies need to make time to save time, only then will they reap the benefits.

David Cornwell

CEO, PleaseTech Ltd

Save Time And Cost To Improve Productivity

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