An Oracle White Paper March Oracle Fusion Applications on Engineered Systems

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1 An Oracle White Paper March 2013 Oracle Fusion Applications on Engineered Systems

2 Disclaimer The following is intended to outline our general product direction. It is intended for information purposes only, and may not be incorporated into any contract. It is not a commitment to deliver any material, code, or functionality, and should not be relied upon in making purchasing decisions. The development, release, and timing of any features or functionality described for Oracle s products remains at the sole discretion of Oracle. 2

3 Executive Overview... 5 Introduction... 5 Business Benefits of Deploying Oracle Fusion Applications on Engineered Systems... 6 Benefits Overview... 6 Fusion Supply Chain Management Distributed Order Orchestration Product Hub Materials Management and Logistics Oracle Fusion Project Portfolio Management Oracle Fusion Financials Accounting Hub Oracle Fusion Procurement Spend Analysis Fusion Human Capital Management Fusion Customer Relationship Management Customer Hub Order Management Quota & Territory Management w/ Incentive Compensation Overview of Engineered Systems Oracle Exalogic Oracle Exadata Database Machine Oracle Exalytics Oracle s SPARC SuperCluster Technical Benefits of Oracle s Engineered Systems Overview Exadata

4 Oracle Exalogic Oracle Exalytics Summary References

5 Executive Overview Businesses and organizations around the world use Fusion Applications to manage their mission-critical operations. Business owners expect real-time insights into the health of their business that will allow them to make informed decisions and remain competitive and profitable. Increasing revenue opportunities, improving the efficiency of the supply chain, and being compliant with the regulatory requirements are key objectives of every business. These objectives can be achieved by improving overall productivity and the performance throughput of processes such as financial close, order orchestration, cost management, payroll processing and other similar business functions. With the addition of the Exalogic and Exadata engineered solutions, enterprise clients have an opportunity to modernize their technology, increase performance, and reduce current IT costs Introduction Oracle Fusion Applications were designed from the ground up using the latest technology advances and incorporating the best practices gathered from Oracle's thousands of customers. They are 100 percent open-standards-based business applications that set a new standard for the way we innovate, work, and adopt technology. Oracle Fusion Applications deliver enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management, supply chain planning, human capital management, project management and more. This whitepaper describes how Oracle Fusion Applications users can further build on these benefits by deploying Oracle s engineered systems. For more information about these systems, see the section Overview of Engineered Systems at the end of this white paper. 5

6 Business Benefits of Deploying Oracle Fusion Applications on Engineered Systems Benefits Overview Oracle s engineered systems leverage the latest technology to deliver maximum availability, high performance, scalability, and standardization. Benefits for Oracle E-Business Suite users include: Faster application responsiveness for end-users Faster batch processing Faster report generation Faster data loads Scalable platform to support business growth Faster time to value & improved supportability These benefits are discussed in more detail here. Faster application responsiveness for end users Employee productivity, customer satisfaction, customer retention and ability to increase revenue recognition opportunities will increase as a result of faster application responsiveness to end users. Employee productivity is critical for customer-facing operations, including quote-to-order processing, product catalogs, customer data, and other similar processes. We tested Fusion applications on Exalogic / Exadata systems using Infiniband to demonstrate scalability and performance. We also compared the gains of Fusion Applications with Exalogic optimizations ON vs. OFF. The study showed that enabling Exalogic optimizations resulted in gains, which are highlighted below: CRM HCM Procurement Projects SCM Avg 1.2x times faster (23% gains) Avg 1.47x times faster (47% gains) Avg 1.2x times faster (17% gains) Avg 1.3x times faster (27% gains) Avg 1.1x times faster (11.3% gains) Here are some specific examples where engineered systems can increase end-user responsiveness: Processing of orders quickly and responding to customers is an essential business need for e-commerce or online vendors. Large numbers of customers concurrently submitting orders or requests for information expect instant responses. Superior performance of engineered systems facilitates such response times and helps retain customers, increase revenue and customer referrals. Ability to respond quickly is critical for businesses relying upon customer service or call centers. In order to deliver timely response to customers, the customer service representative must be able to retrieve all the relevant information real-time to provide critical information that customers are looking for. 6

7 Accounting departments can reduce the invoice processing costs and improve the predictability of the cash flow by increasing the speed of the receivables invoice entry. The vast majority of warehouse management users on the warehouse floor use mobile devices to complete their tasks. A busy facility may complete thousands of tasks per hour, which require tens of thousands of data entries and validations. Users typically demand sub-second response time for mobile warehouse applications. End user productivity is tightly coupled with the response times. If a picker spends 10 percent less time entering the data, this would increase worker productivity and decrease costs. Procurement professionals using the system with high intensity can benefit from increased productivity. A buyer who can quickly access relevant details about a supplier, including recent transaction history, can be more effective in negotiations. A supplier sales administrator can more efficiently update the large documents with thousands of lines due to faster response times. This leads to higher efficiency between suppliers and buyers leading to increased purchases. Improved performance will increase efficiency and transparency of the auctions. Faster Batch Processing Improvement in batch processing or concurrent programs aids on-time completion of critical business processes, thereby improving productivity of day-to-day operations, and increasing the ability to meet service level agreements and regulatory reporting needs. Here are examples where these resource-intensive batch programs can benefit from the performance of engineered systems. Faster period close helps businesses with timely regulatory reporting, early visibility of revenue, margin and profits for real-time decision making. Financial period close comprises of several highly resource intensive batch programs that involve gathering of up-to-date information from numerous divisions, cost centers and other stake holders. Businesses often struggle to close the financial periods on time. Engineered systems can increase the speed of these batch programs enabling a faster period close. Case in point: We tested throughput with Fusion Applications (Financials Service Level Agreement (SLA)) running on Exa-systems and Commodity-systems. On Exa-systems, we observed 5.3x better throughput compared with non-exa commodity hardware systems; the workload was IO bound on DBMS tier in both Commodity and Exadata case. Frequent running of batch processes for supply chain operations increases the timeliness and accuracy of information required to complete manufacturing planning. Service providers or companies engaged in delivering customer warranties can realize cost savings in fuel expenses and increase revenue by performing more service calls when the field service technicians use optimized trip routes. Almost all corporations need to complete the payroll processing within a time critical window in order to ensure employees are paid on-time and accurately, payment transfers to banks are completed on time, and legal and compliance issues are prevented. Improved time in transferring payroll data to General Ledger also helps in a faster period close. 7

8 Case in point: We tested throughput with Fusion Applications (HCM Payroll) running on Exa-systems and Commodity-systems. We used Gross to Net for one of the tests. On Exa-systems, we observed 2.25x better throughput compared with non-exa commodity hardware systems. We used Prepayments for another of the tests. On Exa-systems we observed 1.95x better throughput compared with non-exa commodity hardware systems. Improved performance in batch processes can allow customers to run them by including more details that will increase the value of the information for decision making. One such example is running cost rollups by using greater number of cost elements to obtain precise costing information. Faster Report Generation There are hundreds of delivered reports within Fusion Applications to meet the needs of the business users. Increasing the performance of these reports will help to increase the accuracy and timeliness of the decisions made and to reduce the risk of non-compliance. Here are some examples of the reports: Fusion Global Payroll year-end reporting is needed as part of statutory reporting. This report data is further used by various processes like generating physical withholding reports (W2/P6) for employees and reporting to the federal and local authorities. Understanding up-to-date information regarding the health of a project is critical for any project-centric company. By improving the performance of reporting that provides details of project performance, burden rates, and revenue impact project managers can gain quick insight into the health of the project to make critical decisions or changes to project scope, or cost of time. Integrated territory management, quota management, and incentive compensation is critical for optimal sales coverage. Simultaneously, social collaboration, competitive insights, and contextual analytics must provide sales reps the information they need at their fingertips, whether they are asking for help from fellow team members, leveraging competitive information gleaned from past deals, or retrieving insight about a particular account. Integration with mobile devices and everyday applications, such as Microsoft Outlook needs to be real time to ensure that sales reps can access and capture valuable customer information as they go about their daily tasks. Consolidating all this data in real time and promptly rendering the dashboards with the most current data to a sales person could be the difference between a happy and an upset customer. Generating what-if scenario reports for forecasting, territory and quota management are highly iterative processes with very rich UI. Faster report generation will significantly improve productivity of the employees and timeliness of the reports. Oracle Fusion Sales Predictor enables organizations to improve their sales performances using predictive intelligence to maximize the likelihood that a customer will buy their product offerings. The recommendations generated from Oracle Fusion Sales Predictor are integrated and can be viewed in other CRM applications, such as Opportunity Landscape, Customer Center, and Territory Management. The Sales Predictor has to consolidate data from various sources and represent it graphically for the end users in near-real-time reports. Therefore, improving the performance of report generation and UI rendering can help sales representatives gain quicker insight into the cross-sell and up-sell opportunities to a client, the maturity of the deal, and thus, prioritize their opportunities. This directly contributes to improved efficiency in terms of increased deal closure ratio per sales person, better and more effective sales planning, and increased revenue. 8

9 As organizations deal with exploding data sets and business needs for near real-time decision making, the need for applications running in a highly optimized manner will increasingly become mainstream. That being noted, no solution provider can anticipate all of the needs of their customers when it comes to report generation. Oracle has integration with Oracle BI Publishing directly into the Fusion Application suite, enabling customers to create their own reports and customize the look and delivery of existing reports. Many reports are interactive delivering blazingly fast interactive output with up to 1,000,000 records in memory. The interactive output processes the report requests against data that is stored in memory delivering response times and flexibility once thought unachievable by a user-friendly reporting platform. Faster Data Loads There are many business processes within Oracle Fusion Applications that facilitate importing of massive amounts of external data. Increasing the performance of these programs will help to increase the overall performance of the business process flow. Here are some examples of the data imports/loads: High order volume processing and order import programs are designed to process large numbers of orders and fulfillment rapidly. In certain industries such as retail, this is an extremely time-sensitive process where orders are received in the morning from thousands of stores and have to be delivered from the warehouse to the store the same day. Oracle Fusion Customer Hub is a comprehensive master data management (MDM) solution for customer data that unifies customer data across multiple business units and functionally disparate systems within the enterprise to be the source of truth for customer information. In order to understand the customer life cycle, Oracle Fusion Customer Hub captures complete history of all customer information, including versions of corporate hierarchies. This allows you to better understand the evolution of customer information and relationships, providing a foundation for more in-depth analysis and proactively respond to customer behavior and changes. This means processing and consolidating millions of customer records. Initial batch load consolidates initial customer data from all operational systems to Fusion Customer Hub, which involves extracting and loading data from one system to another. List import Workbench is an example of one such heavy duty import. This is followed by daily operational loads where the Fusion Customer Hub is used as the customer repository. Fusion Applications use coexistence solutions that enable companies to incrementally adopt the capabilities of Oracle Fusion Applications along with their existing Oracle Applications. The coexistence processes between your source application and Oracle Fusion is prebuilt, fully supported, and leverages Oracle's integration framework and guidelines. Processes include the initial load and on-going synchronization of like data for related products. For data loads and background processes running on Exadata and Exalogic, customers experience much faster data load and transaction processing times ensuring that your data stays in synch and your enterprise operates at the highest possible levels. Reduced need for application tuning. Oracle Fusion Applications allows customers to extend the applications. Most large customers extend or add customizations to meet their specific needs. Enterprises often make substantial investments with system integrators or use in-house developers to tune these custom applications. These recurring investments are needed as the changes occur in the systems or new custom applications are developed. With the performance gains of Oracle s engineered systems, these custom programs are likely to perform faster, thus reducing the need to invest in highly expert performance tuning projects. 9

10 Faster extraction-transformation-load to populate data into business intelligence data w arehouses In order to deliver business intelligence to executives, transactional data has to be aggregated and loaded into data warehouses. This process is called extraction-transformation-load (ETL). By speeding up these processes and running them frequently, customers can ensure intelligence provided to decision makers is current and accurate and they can make timely and informed decisions. The performance gains from engineered systems allow these ETL processes can be executed more frequently without impacting the performance of other processes and without impacting the online users. Oracle Incentive Compensation Analytics is an example where increased frequency of incentive insights will help better alignment of selling behaviors to corporate goals. A case in point is Oracle s Fusion Customer Hub, which provides the capability to manage a customer record over its complete lifecycle from analyzing/measuring the quality of customer data, to identifying potential duplicates, merging them, standardizing the record, cleansing and validating the address, updating the record over time, enhancing it with third-party data, and monitoring data quality over time. Oracle Fusion Customer Hub embeds customer data quality metrics and dashboards to provide a snapshot, as well as the trend of data completeness. Improving the performance of the ETL of the backend data during initial batch loads and daily incremental loads significantly improves efficien cy of knowledge workers and enables delivery of rich, insightdriven, cross-channel customer experience. Scalable platform to support business growth Engineered systems deliver the capacity and scalability that allows companies to deploy Oracle Fusion Applications rapidly across multiple business units or multiple regions, consolidate existing application environments, add new users, add additional workloads or transactions, quickly assimilate new organizations during mergers and acquisitions. Faster time to value and improved supportability Exalogic and Exadata are pre-assembled systems with limited variations in customer configuration. Pre-assembly saves 1000s of hours spent by customers in researching and building a system to scale to the demanding needs of Oracle Fusion Applications. Pre-configured systems allow customers to spend less time and resources on implementation and realize the value of the production systems quickly. Reduced number of customer configurations (uniform Operating system, CPU, memory, network, and storage) allows Oracle to replicate customer issues easily and maintain consistent patch sets across components, reducing regressions and simplifying diagnosis, and hence, faster problem resolution. Oracle offers Platinum Services at no additional cost to Oracle Premier Support customers. This service provides peace of mind to customers with industry-leading response and restore times, including a five-minute Fault Notification service level agreement. Running Fusion Applications on Oracle s engineered system platform saves the cost of configuration and reduces business risk. 10

11 Fusion Supply Chain Management Distributed Order Orchestration Business Requirements Oracle Fusion Distributed Order Orchestration is a standalone application that enables organizations to accurately and efficiently manage customer orders across multiple order capture and fulfillment system s. Oracle Fusion Global Order Promising is an optional component of the Distributed Order Orchestration solution and enables companies to make product availability commitments while minimizing fulfillment costs. The ability to orchestrate a large number of orders across multiple order and fulfillment channels depends on the capability to execute critical tasks, such as receiving, transforming, routing and updating multiple systems for new, change, return, and other order types. It is vital that the order-to-cash flow across many disparate systems is accurate, seamless, and quick to ensure that customers are satisfied and company revenues are recognized on time. In addition, companies with large order volumes may require real-time integration with multiple applications on different platforms, such as Web store, sales, order management, supply planning, inventory, shipping, finance, invoicing, and receivables systems. For all of the above reasons, complex and large-scale deployments of Distributed Order Orchestration and Global Order Promising often require additional system configuration and performance tuning, as well as upgrades to support future volume requirements. Companies should have the ability to complete the order-to-cash cycle quickly. This implies that the underlying processes that connect the many different systems across order-to-cash should be completed quickly and end users and business owners should be able to get accurate transactional and decision support information in real time. Business Benefits Oracle Engineered Systems provide superior performance for Distributed Order Orchestration deployments and help organizations perform real-time order execution, regardless of underlying complexities inherent in environments with many disparate systems. They deliver quick end-user response times to prevent loss due to long waits. The modular scalability of Oracle Engineered Systems permits seamless scale-up of order throughput as business volume increases seasonally or over time. In other words, Oracle Engineered Systems help in reducing the amount of time required to process and update orders and exceptions that directly impact the bottom line of the company. Oracle Engineered Systems dramatically improve load times for data, such as large volumes of order changes. It is essential that these orders be processed rapidly and the status of these orders during the order lifecycle be continuously communicated to order capture and fulfillment systems so they, in turn, can keep the end customers up-to-date. In addition, organizations can schedule collection of supply data more frequently and improve visibility to source system changes for more accurate promising. The pre-configuration of Oracle Engineered Systems also reduces implementation and maintenance costs to support current and future order volume growth. Deploying Fusion Distributed Order Orchestration and Global Order Promising on Oracle Engineered Systems will increase revenue and improve customer satisfaction by dramatically improving order cycle times across multiple applications and systems, decreasing the batch processing time. Furthermore, it will decrease implementation costs by reducing the need for extensive system configuration and performance tuning. 11

12 Product Hub Business Requirements Oracle Fusion Product Hub allows organizations to take control of their product master data across their entire portfolio of applications, both Oracle and non-oracle. Oracle Fusion Product Hub collects product information from heterogeneous systems, stores it in a centrally managed repository, consolidates, cleanses and enriches the data, and then shares it across systems, as well as with other internal and external parties. The result is reduced maintenance, improved accuracy and faster new system and product introductions. Retailers often struggle with managing large volumes of new and updated product information, which they regularly receive from their suppliers. Suppliers might send their data in different formats, including Excel, CSV, and XML, and might also include high-resolution images, videos and similar digital assets. To achieve the critical goal of faster product introductions, retailers need a product hub application optimized to onboard large volumes of new and updated product records that come in various formats from multiple suppliers and systems. Rapid product commercialization is a key concern for most companies. In order to achieve faster time to market, not only do they need to rapidly onboard various supplier or engineering data, but they also need to publish a harmonized, enriched and standardized product definition to various consuming systems. This means a product hub application needs to be optimized, not only to import large volumes of product data, but also to publish large volumes of product data, synchronously or asynchronously, to multiple systems. Given the criticality of product master data to key business processes, customers want to ensure that the data is accurate, cleansed, and standardized. They define data quality and business rules which need to be called real-time upon item creation and update, irrespective of mode of data entry. This requires a large volume of product records sent by suppliers to be validated against these rules during the item import process without compromising performance. Owners of product master data need to control the process of new product introductions and product changes. Product Data Hub provides the ability to define and deploy human workflow to enforce data governance policies, streamline administration, reduce errors and accelerate product launch. In a large and dynamic product master environment, the volume of interactive users managing product definitions, searching for products, or browsing product catalogs is often high and variable. Rapid, scalable user response is critical to a well-functioning operation. Product data stewards need real-time reporting and embedded analytics to make faster and better decisions across all product data management processes. For example, real-time reporting on new item request and change management cycle times can give a data steward actionable insight to identify and remediate process bottlenecks in a timely manner. Business Benefits Deploying Oracle Fusion Product Hub on Oracle Engineered Systems improves performance, throughput, scalability, and total cost of ownership. Product data import and publication are large-scale batch processes that are accelerated by Exadata and Exalogic. 12

13 Exadata and Exalogic optimize the evaluation of business rules and accelerate the batch processing of data cleansing and quality assurance. Exalogic ensures the performance and scalability of executing large numbers of simultaneous workflow processes for new product approvals, change approvals, and data governance. Exalogic and Exadata minimize user response times for frequent, critical activities, including product management, product search, and catalog browsing. Seasonal or long-term changes in interactive user load can be handled seamlessly with modular scaling of system resources. Exadata and Exalytics optimize the evaluation and presentation of real-time reports and embedded analytics. Materials Management and Logistics Business Requirements Traditional ERP supply chain systems evolved from their financial forbearers. This meant that inventory and cost management systems were built, not for supply chain execution, but for inventory asset accounting and to be systems of record for on-hand balances. This approach to inventory and cost management implied four basic characteristics to the ERP s supply chain solutions: They did not direct work on the shop floor, but instead took feeds from execution systems or data entry clerks armed with paper reports from the actual warehouse or manufacturing operators. They did not often store granular inventory information. Specific stocking locations, serial numbers, and other execution details were often stored in separate execution systems. They did not service as many inventory management use cases. Generally these systems could receive purchased material and store and ship finished goods, but early use cases such as field service, reverse logistics, retail store inventory and others were handled in specialized, non ERP-based solutions. As a result of the points above, they often had fewer end users interacting with the system. Transactions were often entered electronically (and at a summarized level). Those users that were entering data and transactions were professional users, trained in data entry. IT organizations demand a change. We have an opportunity to provide all materials management, use-case requirements on a single platform, thereby consolidating the number of systems required to track raw materials, finished goods, MRB stock, spare parts and store inventory. We have an opportunity to converge the global inventory system of record and accounting with the execution systems, traditionally deployed on a local or regional level, thereby ensuring that the organization has access to a single global source of truth with all of the detail required for global planning and accounting, as well as local execution. Most importantly, we have the opportunity to create a materials management system that users want to use because it quickly and easily presents them with the necessary information to get their work they done and move on with their tasks. All these opportunities will come at a cost. With the advent of global multinational trade, ERP systems manage warehouse operations 24 x 7 with little or no off-peak time available for the high-volume, batch-oriented, disk I/O-bound cost processes. As a result, batch cost pro cesses are in contention for system resources with the realtime, user-facing interactions, resulting in system response lags that decrease personnel efficiencies in all warehouse 13

14 operations. The system resource contention can dramatically slow the cost processing runs, stretching their completion times by hours or even days. These delays place significant pressure on the time-critical managerial reporting and the financial accounting period close process where timely financial reporting of operational results is essential. Business Benefits Fusion Inventory Management represents a transformation in the ERP-based, inventory control paradigm. With Fusion, Oracle has delivered an inventory control system that can: Proactively direct work to the appropriate operator Alert managers to bottlenecks, delays or other problems requiring attention Store granular inventory data Support a variety of materials management use cases Support both professional and casual applications users The application provides this new level of work direction, inventory granularity, and transactional support through new paradigms in user experience design. That design includes built-in key performance indicators and embedded analytics and a user-friendly approach to applications design and business process savvy user flows. This new approach to inventory-control work management provides organizations with the opportunity to broaden the scope and reach the depth of their materials management platform. This can minimize the number of systems required to track and account for an organization s inventory. Modern inventory operations can generate very large volumes of data when warehouse activities are captured in Fusion Applications. The costing and supply chain accounting of the resulting logistics transactions are performed in batch-oriented runs that are scheduled to optimize total ERP system performance. These cost process runs are typically scheduled for off-peak hours in order to prioritize system resources for real-time system interactions with warehouse personnel. Oracle Engineered Systems provide superior performance for Oracle Fusion Inventory Management, enabling it to scale to the volumes of transactions required by a global materials management solution. They deliver quick response times and higher throughput on data intensive processing tasks, such as inventory allocation during pick release, min-max replenishment runs, and inventory cost accounting. They can also deliver faster end-user response times in high-volume transaction processing. They will enable the organization to scale the number of concurrent users on the system allowing global access to inventory balances, transactions, and the key performance indicators that drive operators and supervisors to the work on the shop floor that requires immediate attention. Together, these factors can drive down cycle times in inbound and outbound logistics enabling the materials management department to scale to meet the volumes of modern business without additional staff or systems to support warehouse execution. User response times are quick and unaffected by high-volume cost processing runs that can be scheduled when they are needed to meet time-sensitive managerial and financial reporting needs. Deploying Oracle Fusion Inventory Management on Oracle Engineered Systems enables organizations to scale the breadth and depth of their materials management execution processes by dramatically increasing system performance, cycle time, and the amount of time the user needs to spend on the system (versus on the job). It can 14

15 even reduce the cost to implement an inventory management solution by reducing the need for extensive system configuration and performance tuning. Modern, enterprise-grade, materials management solutions require modern, enterprise-grade platforms for speed and scale. Oracle Fusion Inventory Management and Oracle Engineered Systems together provide applications that can move at the speed of your supply chain. Oracle Fusion Project Portfolio Management Business Requirements Organizations deploy Oracle Fusion Project Portfolio Management to transform the way they plan, execute, and manage project work. Organizations are faced with the need to improve the way they use existing resources in order to maximize productivity, align projects with the overall business strategy, and facilitate collaboration within the project team. Therefore, they look to enterprise applications that are responsive to a large number of users and scalable for growth. Business Benefits Oracle Fusion Project Portfolio Management is designed to integrate and collect data from Oracle and third-party systems, which in turn can translate into millions of transactions across the portfolio of projects for an organization. Engineered systems go beyond the capabilities of traditional hardware systems to accelerate the processing of these transactions, converting large volumes of data into insightful business intelligence. Project organizations have quicker visibility into near real-time project health and status, which in turn allows project managers to quickly react to adverse project influences before they can escalate outside the risk envelope. For service organizations, the preparation time for customer billing is reduced, which can have a direct effect on days sales outstanding and revenue recognition. As the growth of decentralized project teams has expanded in the last decade, the need to collaborate on project work has also seen a corresponding increase in the types of, and the amount of, unstructured data that is shared both within and outside the organization. Engineered systems are ideally suited and tuned to search though these volumes of data to extract the relevant discussion threads and content. That enhances the productivity of the project team and reduces the amount of time spent in meetings. Finding the most suitable available resource to fulfill a project need, based on skill set and availability is an area where Oracle Engineered Systems excel. Encompassing both structured and unstructured data for candidate comparison, ranking, and what if capabilities, the project manager can quickly filter through the candidate pool to match the need with the best available resource. Users have seen a 30 percent performance boost in the UI layer from Exalogic when it is deployed and optimized. Oracle Fusion Project Portfolio Management deployed on an engineered system improves end-user response times, batch processing times, and transaction scalability. Users see these benefits with up-to-date and reliable information after completing many complex project changes. They also can see it through quick visibility into changes in a project s health after processing transactions from across the enterprise or through support of future business growth with the scalability of an engineered system. 15

16 Oracle Fusion Financials Fusion Financials and Fusion Accounting Hub provide a complete and integrated financial management solution for the modern enterprise. When deployed on Oracle Engineered Systems, significant improvements can be realized by the Finance department. Accounting Hub Enterprises want an accurate view of the entire business. In order to achieve a complete an accurate view for external and legacy systems, a configurable rule-based accounting process for multiple data sources is a requirement. Fusion Accounting Hub as an integration platform meets this requirement and can process high volumes of accounting events when deployed on Oracle Engineered Systems by: Driving faster close cycles Improving business productivity Improving business insight Business Requirements Finance departments continue to be under increased pressure to close their books faster. For enterprises with large volumes of transactions in a global environment, insight into the close process can often be problematic. With its many features built specifically for the close process, Fusion Financials can provide valuable insight into the overall close status, identify problem areas, and expedite reconciliation. The period close work area in Fusion General Ledger immediately identifies which subledgers have not yet closed. A visual representation of the close process across the entire organization gives complete visibility and centralized control of the close status of subledgers, such as Projects, Payables, Receivables, Assets, and ledgers in General Ledger to accounting managers. In the Subledger Outstanding Transactions region, Oracle Fusion automatically displays the number of unposted transactions for each subledger that are unaccounted, accounted, but not posted, as well as any that have errors or are in a draft status. Direct links allow your account team to take action from this region to resolve issues and complete accounting immediately. Interactive reconciliation reports that compare open receivables and open payables balances to the corresponding balance in Fusion General Ledger expedites reconciliation in the close process. If differences exist, Oracle Fusion Financials automatically performs the labor-intensive process of matching each transaction to its respective accounting entry and finds all transactions and accounting entries that contribute to the out-of-balance total. Business Benefits When combined with the extraordinary performance of Oracle Engineered Systems, the close process can be dramatically reduced by accelerating the reconciliation and exception management process. Business Requirements In addition to process improvements focused on the close process, Fusion Financials has many features that increase productivity for users that are responsible for transaction processing. 16

17 Role-based dashboards that deliver information from multiple work areas, worklists, and watch lists serve as centralized cockpits to manage key accounting activities. They proactively monitor processes, raise exceptions that occur during processing, and push work to users. Historically, financial systems required users to navigate on their own to complete their daily tasks. With Fusion Financials, users simply need to log into their dashboards and work areas. Then their work tasks are presented to them with direct links to the transactions that require their attention. While processing transactions, contextual information is automatically displayed to eliminate the need for users to navigate out of the page to research additional information, which also increases productivity. Integrated invoice imaging in Fusion Payables reduces invoice entry times significantly. Supplier invoices can be scanned with intelligent document recognition of key invoice attributes and then automatically routed to the appropriate finance personnel for faster completion, approval, and payment processing. SmartReceipts in Fusion Receivables uses payment information to apply receipts and recommends matches for exceptions. A prioritized list of invoices is recommended, complete with a weighted reference score and reason, based on the matching rules you define. Using the calculated score, knowing which payments to apply and which exception recommendations to use, can quickly be determined. With extensive spreadsheet integrations throughout Fusion Financials, high volumes of transactions can be entered quickly in Excel and uploaded and processed with a single click. A few key examples of spreadsheet-enabled transactions are journals, supplier invoices, customer receipts, asset source lines, and expense reports. Business Benefits Engineered Systems provide the performance required to manage high-volume transaction processing and optimize business processes. Business Requirements Identifying and researching anomalies in account balances can be cumbersome and time-consuming. When exceptions are identified, it often might be too late to take corrective actions. The Account Monitor automatically detects unexpected changes in account balances based on user-defined thresholds. Oracle Fusion Financials and Oracle Fusion Accounting Hub, as a reporting platform, deliver a unique reporting platform that is built with a multi-dimensional data model embedded within Fusion General Ledger. Summarized balances are maintained in real time, making reports, online queries and multi-dimensional analysis extremely fast. This architecture allows for pivot and drilldowns to any level, as well as unlimited hierarchies for comparison and roll up. The Oracle Fusion Financial Reporting Center provides a single location to securely distribute and access reports based on real-time accounting information, complete with drilldowns to live transactions. Board-quality financial statements and departmental reports can be viewed the way you choose HTML, PDF, or Microsoft Office. Business Benefits For the modern enterprise that requires high-volume throughput of transactions, continuously strives to reduce their close cycles, and wants to gain better insight to their overall business, Fusion Financials and Fusion Accounting Hub deployed on Oracle Engineered Systems can provide excellent results. 17

18 Oracle performed an internal benchmark with Fusion Accounting Hub running on an Exadata Database Machine X2-2. With this benchmark, Fusion Accounting Hub processed 231 million accounting entries per hour. Oracle Fusion Procurement Spend Analysis Business Requirements Oracle Fusion Procurement streamlines the end-to-end procure-to-pay business process and drives superior savings by enabling organizations to practice smart sourcing, broaden end-user self service, and protect business interests. Supported processes include the ability to manage agreements, catalogs, requisitions, purchase orders, receipts, invoices, payments and supplier information. One of the keys to practicing smart sourcing is having timely and accurate access to spend analysis. Spend analysis is the process of analyzing corporate expenditures to identify saving opportunities and monitor compliance with contracts and corporate policies. Statistics show that organizations that make data-driven purchasing decisions save millions of dollars. On average, companies save between percent on total spend per year. For a company with $1 billion in spend, that equates to a yearly savings of $2.5 to $10 million. Despite the many benefits of spend analysis, many organizations find it difficult to overcome the challenges of obtaining good spend visibility. Whether companies are using a single ERP system or many, spend data typically resides in multiple disparate locations with different data structures and lacks sufficient detail needed to provide insightful analysis. The following section describes how an engineered system from Oracle helps to eliminate some of these challenges and reduce risk, which allows organizations to realize the benefits of on-going spend analysis. Business Benefits High performances of Oracle s engineered systems allow the extraction, transformation, and load processes required for data consolidation to be much faster and at reduced cost and effort. Internal comparisons have shown that resource intensive processes required to perform spend classification, like the Oracle Data Mining, are up to ten times faster on engineered systems. Oracle Fusion Procurement and Spend Analytics include pre-built data models, more than 100 metrics, and best practices enabling organizations to implement more quickly, with less risk, and at a fraction of the cost required to build traditional business intelligence (BI) solutions. Oracle s engineered system Exalytics can be configured to run these analytics as in-memory applications for faster execution. Oracle Fusion Procurement and Spend Analytics are available today for use in conjunction with Oracle Exalytics without application changes. This winning combination allows users to extract relevant business insight from massive amounts of data at the speed of thought. The Exadata Storage Server provides a very advanced compression capability called Hybrid Columnar Compression (HCC) for data warehousing applications. Hybrid Columnar Compression enables the highest levels of data compression and provides tremendous cost-savings and performance improvements due to reduced I/O. 18

19 This is especially useful for the many companies that like to maintain up to 10 years of data in their data warehouse. This eliminates the added storage costs incurred using traditional systems as the size of the database grows. Compressing data can provide dramatic reduction in the storage consumed. Fusion Human Capital Management Business Requirements Over time, the exponential growth of HR data and technical issues, such as aging HR infrastructure, have added risk and complexity to the already challenging process of managing human capital. Most companies have automated several aspects of their employee and manager self-service applications, such as employee training, new hire on boarding processes, benefit enrollment, time card entry, retrieval of employment history, expenses, performance appraisals, and recruitment applications that could be accessed by external recruiters or applicants. It is critical to ensure employees and managers are able to access all of these applications without delay. End-user response times are critical for employee satisfaction and productivity and lack of it will obviously impact overall company productivity and the bottom line. Globalization has increased the complexity of statutory reporting and regulatory compliance. Being required to distribute so much data to various agencies across multiple countries and regions has increased the effort needed to remain in compliance. Payroll processing requirements whether provided as an internal process or outsourced must be able to be completed within a pre-defined time window to ensure proper reporting of employees compensation. With the number of statutory requirements and the number of employees growing simultaneously, it becomes more and more difficult for companies to be able to complete payroll pro cesses. One system issue can leave no time to rerun payroll, leading to missed payroll obligations. There is an urgent need by C-level executives for instantaneous strategic information from the HR function to assess the company s talent pool, training needs, diversity, resource utilization, and other employee-related information. Statutory requirements call for data retention of several years and the ability to furnish this information to regulatory authorities at a short notice. The following section describes how these challenges can be met by deploying Oracle Fusion HCM applications on Oracle Engineered Systems. Business Benefits Employee and manager self service processes are the keys to employee enablement. They also free up HR professionals to work on more strategic HCM initiatives, such as alignment of employee performance with company goals and coordination of recruiting plans with growth forecasts. Engineered systems help with the adoption of self-service tasks by improving the user experience. This, in turn, speeds online transaction times by up to 47 percent when compared to the same transactions running on commodity hardware. And when users are able to complete their tasks conveniently and efficiently, it is proven they d prefer to perform them on their own. 19

20 Engineered systems can dramatically improve end-user response times to ensure large numbers of employees complete some of these following mandatory tasks during short periods of time. This will boost employee and manager productivity and reduce help desk calls and other administration overheads. Most global organizations have operations in multiple countries and many continue to run local human resource systems in multiple countries. Engineered systems can scale and deliver desired availability and performance levels to consolidate all these environments into a single global instance. This allows companies to operate shared HR service centers and reduce the overall IT costs, implement standardization across the company, reduce complexity and deliver critical information to C-level executives quickly from a single source of truth. Payroll is a resource-intensive process with very complex calculations, ideally suited for deployment on engineered systems with high CPU speeds and faster memory. Payroll processes running on Exalogic Optimized infrastructure ran over 2x faster than commodity platforms. Faster payroll cycles help to reduce costs, improve compliance, and keep employees happy. With Oracle Engineered Systems, reporting times and background processing of bulk data improves dramatically. As customers execute predefined, statutory reports and create and run their own reports in Fusion HCM, the optimized platform can handle greater amounts of data and can do so much faster than non-optimized platforms. This enables companies to use data to support active decision making. Fusion Customer Relationship Management The key requirements or expectations from an enterprise CRM solution are: Increase revenue while managing costs, a constant challenge for sales executives Maximize revenue potential with better sales planning Generate higher quality leads with smarter prospecting Increase productivity and enable more selling Over the years, traditional CRM software has fo cused on sales automation and transaction processing. However, little progress has been made in improving the performance of the entire sales organization. Priority should be placed on leveraging integrated technology to drive sales planning and close the performance-to-plan gap. To optimize sales performance and successfully compete in today s environment, sales executives should focus on three key areas: sales planning, sales prospecting, and sales representative productivity. These capabilities are provided by Oracle s Fusion CRM family of products. Fusion CRM applications are widely deployed for order management, tracking and managing services, and a host of other customer-centric activities. The largest banks, financial institutions, telecommunications, pharmaceutical companies and government agencies use Oracle Fusion CRM to ensure customers are better served by tracking every customer touch point. However, these deployments have high availability and low latency requirements where downtime or slow response time can result in lost revenue. In addition, there is a need to support elastic growth in customer demand, which often cannot be predicted. Fusion CRM applications are typically used by front-office users like call center agents to service customer interactions. These interactions result in business processes that span to back-office applications. These 20

21 integrations often need to be in real time; for example, a call center order-booking feature will make a lookup to back-office inventory application to check if a product is available to promise. Some examples of Oracle Fusion CRM applications are given below. These examples showcase the advanced capabilities of these applications and the business requirements for maximizing their value. Oracle Engineered Systems provide the ideal platform for addressing the availability, performance and scalability needs of such feature-rich applications. How Oracle s Engineered Systems address these business needs is documented in the benefits section for each CRM application. CRM Base Oracle Fusion CRM Base provides unique features that deliver critical sales visibility to sales managers and their teams. Some examples include Sales Dashboards and the Lead and Opportunity Management modules. Business Requirements Sales Dashboard: The highly configurable Sales Dashboard within Oracle Fusion CRM delivers a comprehensive, graphical view of sales activities. It lets sales teams quickly and easily perform and track progress against day-to-day sales activities. In addition, with sophisticated embedded analytics, sales managers can gain insight into the effectiveness of individual and team sales execution across every opportunity. Sales Dashboard enables the Sales organization to: Gain instant visibility through intuitive UI/dashboards Complete customer insight that is easily accessible and available in real-time Maximize sales pipeline Effectively leverage the enterprise knowledgebase(s) Lead and Opportunity Management: The goal of lead management and opportunity management solutions is to: Drive high-quality leads and opportunities with standardized assessments Maximize revenue with powerful and directed lead and opportunity management Identify upsell and cross-sell opportunities with critical customer information available in real time Shorten sales cycles and increase deal closure rates Adding Products and Opportunities, Quote Creation, Service Request Creation and Updates are high volume tasks and generate millions of transactional entries on a daily basis (contacts, lead and opportunity management) in a very short time frame. Business Benefits Deploying Oracle s Engineered Systems for such scenarios yield out-of-box benefits that directly address the needs of rapid response times by enabling: Faster, more frequent updates to the sales process Faster response for sales entry 21

22 Rapid adjustments for sales spikes, warehouse issues, shipping delays, and anything that might impact a customer s shipment Faster response times for a customer resulting in increased customer satisfaction, increased productivity, and better quality of service. Faster response time translates into immediate business value Significant improvements in efficiency of knowledge workers Delivery of rich, insight-driven, cross-channel customer experience Significant improvements in response times were recorded for some core CRM capabilities. For example: 24 percent improvements in Customer Sales Contacts and Activities flows response times 22 percent improvement in Opportunity Management flow 25 percent faster response times for Mobile Sales tasks Customer Hub Business Requirements Oracle Fusion Customer Hub is a comprehensive master data management (MDM) solution for customer data that unifies customer data across multiple business units and functionally disparate systems within the enterprise to be the source of truth for customer information. In order to understand the customer life cycle, Oracle Fusion Customer Hub captures complete history of all customer information, including versions of corporate hierarchies. This allows you to better understand the evolution of customer information and relationships, providing a foundation for more in-depth analysis and proactively respond to customer behavior and changes. This means processing and consolidating millions of customer records. Initial batch load consolidates initial customer data from all operational systems to Fusion Customer Hub, which involves extracting and loading data from one system to another. List import Workbench is an example of one such heavy duty import. This is followed by daily operational loads where the Fusion Customer Hub is used as the customer repository. Business Benefits Faster Response Time: With Exalogic and Exadata, Oracle Customer Hub deployments had unprecedented improvements of in their response time, which translates to business value. Customer 360-view reports were 26 percent faster on Oracle Engineered Systems infrastructure. Oracle Customer Hub running on Oracle Engineered Systems will significantly improve efficiency of knowledge workers and enable delivery of rich, insight-driven, cross-channel customer experience. Companies running Oracle Customer Hub on Oracle Engineered System can improve their bottom-line with enhanced user efficiencies and their top line with improved customer experience. Higher Throughput: Throughput performance on Exadata was 11X higher than customer requirements for complex read transactions, and 7X higher than customer requirements for medium -complexity read transactions. The faster response time through Oracle Customer Hub for all related transaction means that it is possible to 22

23 process more transactions through a core and support more users compared to the same on comparable hardware. Scaling for peak loads becomes easier, reducing the overall hardware footprint. Reduction in DB Server CPU Cycling: Scalability performance on Exadata for user loads scaled up by 3X for complex queries, translated into 2.3X higher throughput performance. This leads to increased scalability and reliability, particularly when paired with an appropriate back up and disaster recovery process added into the schema. Improved consolidation: Reduced number of instances by aggregating more business applications and databases. This may significantly reduce effort needed to administer and optimize databases. Operational efficiency: Reduced call handling time, data administration and cleanse/match/enhance tasks that are core to proper data governance tasks in Oracle Customer Hub. Reduced number of servers: This leads to major cost savings. Order Management Business Requirements The customer order management solution is used extensively in various industries, such as Telecommunication, High Tech, Industrial Manufacturing, Financial Services, and Retail. In some of these industries, especially for customers with global deployment, there is a need to process large numbers of orders in any given day. During peak hours, there could be a few thousand concurrent users. Besides processing large numbers of order/day, the system also should support many sync transactions, which can run into several hundred thousand. Yet, the expectation is that these transactions can be processed quickly often in sub seconds. To meet such high demands, customers often have to invest significantly in hardware resources. Call centers operating in high call volume environments will accumulate millions of transactional data throughout the day (contacts, opportunities, orders, activities, agent assignment, and field service engineer) in very short amounts of time. Oracle Engineered Systems are specifically designed to deal with these storage challenges. For instance, Exadata Hybrid Columnar Compression technology will reduce the size of data storage by providing significant reductions in cost over time. Additional business benefits include less frequent archiving and longer access to historical data. Business Benefits Extreme performance delivered by Exalogic and Exadata translates into concrete benefits across a number of categories for Fusion deployments. Faster Response Time: With Exalogic and Exadata, Fusion CRM deployments offer unprecedented response times, which translate to business value. Knowledge workers will be more efficient and customers, calling into a call center or use self service, will get a quicker response and be more satisfied. Operational efficiency helps the bottom-line and customer satisfaction is known to drive higher revenues. Higher Throughput: The faster response time means that it becomes possible to put more transactions through a core and scaled to support more users compared to comparable hardware. Scaling for peak loads becomes easier and there is a reduction in the overall hardware footprint. 23

24 Reduction in DB Server CPU Cycling leads to increased scalability. Improved Consolidation: Consolidations lead to a reduced number of instances by aggregating more business applications and databases and reduced effort needed to administer and optimize databases. Operational Efficiency: The business will be more efficient with reduced call handling time. Reduced Number of Servers: This reduction results in meaningful cost savings. Quota & Territory Management w/ Incentive Compensation Business Requirements Oracle Fusion Quota Management is fully integrated with Fusion Territory Management and Fusion Incentive Compensation to enable end-to-end sales performance management processes. This enables sales executives to efficiently develop and deploy sales plans ranging from territory alignments to quota setting to compensation management. Once the sales plan is deployed, the sales executives need to monitor results and make adjustments during the year. They can track current performance against sales plan by comparing forecast to actual to quota allowing sales managers to identify and correct performance issues early. The sales dashboard and many other reports and embedded analytics are available to help them track current quota achievement versus quota target. Quota adjustments are easy to implement. If a territory change occurs, quota revisions should be easy to make and the changes need to be reflected promptly. Incentive compensation analysts have to be automatically notified of quota revisions so the field is always aligned. The benefits of such state-of-the-art integration that enables ease of use combined with what-if analysis and predictive intelligence can only be harnessed by deployed hardware infrastructure that can handle the back-end complexity. It also needs to provide advanced processing capabilities that put relevant information in the hands of the sales executives in real-time. Accurate and timely change propagation of data across each functionality mentioned above is critical to ensure sales executives are maximizing their resources and properly covering all their markets and accounts. Business Benefits Oracle Engineered Systems provide unparalleled performance improvements in data processing times and UI rendering in these ways: Help reduce time and effort required in territory planning through high performance UI and backend processing High performance systems and faster processing allow the sales executives to test more what-if scenarios and perform more robust planning Faster propagation of changes and reconciliation of date in Quota Management, Territory Management, and Incentive Compensation ensure data consistency across all applications and avoids latency and confusion in the sales force. More time to sell versus plan The overall improvements in Fusion CRM performance and scalability are highlighted below: 24

25 Average 1.2x times faster (23 percent gains) using Exalogic optimizations ON versus OFF Range 1.03x 2.3x faster (3 percent to 132 percent depending on click) CPU of the Exalogic node hosting the CRM domain can handle 1.1x higher load (seven percent lower CPU) with all Exalogic optimizations enabled as compared to optimizations disabled (akin to commodity infrastructure - based configuration) Beyond the benefits in performance and scalability and increased customer satisfaction, significant TCO savings can be realized with Oracle Engineered Systems. Leveraging Oracle s deep expertise in managing Exadata/Exalogic-based deployments, the full value of your Fusion Applications and Oracle Engineered Systems can be unlocked. 25

26 Overview of Engineered Systems Oracle s engineered systems combine best-of-breed hardware and software components with game-changing technical innovations. Designed, engineered, and tested to work best together, Oracle s engineered systems can power the cloud or streamline data center operations to make traditional deployments even more efficient. The components of Oracle s engineered systems are preassembled for targeted functionality and then as a complete system optimized for extreme performance. By taking the guesswork out of these highly available, purpose-built solutions, Oracle delivers a solution that is integrated across every layer of the technology stack; a simplicity that translates into less risk and lower costs for your business. Only Oracle can innovate and optimize at every layer of the stack to simplify data center operations, drive down costs, and accelerate business innovation. Oracle Exalogic Oracle Exalogic is an engineered system on which enterprises deploy business applications, Oracle Fusion Middleware or third party software products. Exalogic comes pre-built with compute nodes, memory, flash storage and centralized storage; all connected using InfiniBand in a high redundancy architecture delivering five-nine availability, with fault tolerance and zero-down-time maintenance. Exalogic dramatically improves performance of Oracle Applications, Fusion Middleware and third party applications without requiring code changes and reduces costs across the application lifecycle, from initial setup to ongoing maintenance, as compared to conventional hardware platforms. Oracle has achieved unique optimizations and enhancements in Exalogic firmware, Exalogic software, and in Oracle s middleware and applications. These include on-chip network virtualization based on near zero latency InfiniBand fabric, high-performance Remote Direct Memory Access, workload management in Oracle Web Logic server and optimizations in Oracle Coheren ce and Oracle Traffic Director. Exalogic includes support for a highly optimized version of the Oracle VM, which significantly outperforms comparable virtualization solutions and is an ideal consolidation platform for Applications. Templates to simplify installation, deployment and configuration of applications on Exalogic are available. Oracle Exadata Database Machine Oracle s Exadata Database Machine is Oracle s database platform delivering extreme performance for database applications including Online Transaction Processing, Data Warehousing, Reporting, Batch Processing, or Consolidation of mixed database workloads. Exadata is a pre-configured, pre-tuned, and pre-tested integrated system of servers, networking and storage all optimized around the Oracle database. Because Exadata is an integrated system, it offers superior price-performance, availability and supportability. Exadata frees users from the need to build, test and maintain systems and allows them to focus on higher value business problems. Exadata uses a scale out architecture for database servers and storage. This architecture maintains an optimal storage hierarchy from memory to flash to disk. Smart Scan query offload has been added to the storage cells to offload database processing. Exadata implements Smart Flash Cache as part of the storage hierarchy. Exadata software determines how and when to use the Flash storage for reads and write as well as how best to incorporate Flash into the database as part of a coordinated data caching strategy. A high-bandwidth low-latency InfiniBand network running specialized database networking protocols connects all the components inside an Exadata 26

27 Database Machine. In addition to a high performance architecture and design, Exadata offers the industry s best data compression to provide a dramatic reduction in storage needs. Oracle Exalytics As analytic applications become more sophisticated and calculation-intensive, the use of mobile BI expands, user adoption increases, and data volumes explode, speed and efficiency is more important than ever. In-memory technology can dramatically accelerate analytic performance. Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine is the industry s first engineered system for analytics that combines market leading BI foundation, in-memory analytics software, and best-in class hardware engineered and optimized to work together to deliver extreme performance for Business Intelligence and Enterprise Performance Management applications. As a result, users can visually navigate and drill into information at the speed of thought, without limits on the complexity of their questions or the volume of the underlying data. Exalytics drives a new class of smarter and more powerful analytic applications that simply weren t possible using conventional BI software and generic hardware configurations. Oracle Business Intelligence Foundation running on Oracle Exalytics has been specially enhanced to take advantage of large memory, processors, concurrency, storage, networking, operating system, kernel, and system configuration afforded by the Oracle Exalytics hardware. Oracle TimesTen for Exalytics has been specially enhanced for analytical processing at in-memory speeds. With lightening fast scan speed of up to 100 million rows per second and up to 10x columnar compression, TimesTen for in-memory analytics delivers faster reports and dashboards for departmental as well as enterprise wide consumption. 27

28 Oracle s SPARC SuperCluster Similar to Engineered Systems such as Exadata and Exalogic, Oracle Fusion Applications can be deployed on Oracle s SPARC SuperCluster to achieve high availability, performance, scalability and environment consolidations. Here is a brief description of Oracle s SPARC SuperCluster s technical capabilities. Oracle s SPARC SuperCluster is the world s most efficient multi-purpose engineered system, delivering extreme efficiency, cost savings, and performance for consolidating mission critical applications and rapidly deploying cloud services. Oracle s SPARC SuperCluster represents a complete, pre-engineered, and pre-tested high-performance enterprise infrastructure solution that is faster and easier to deploy than a collection of individual database and application servers. The system combines innovative Oracle technology the computing power of Oracle s SPARC servers, the performance and scalability of Oracle Solaris, the Sun ZFS Storage Appliance, the optimized database performance of Oracle Database accelerated by Oracle Exadata Storage Servers, and a high-bandwidth, low-latency InfiniBand network fabric into a scalable, engineered system that is optimized and tuned for consolidating mission-critical enterprise applications. With SPARC SuperCluster, in one customer case study, an Oracle enterprise applications customer experienced a 34x improvement in batch processing with Oracle Database 11gR2 connected to Sun ZFS Storage 7320 storage in the SPARC SuperCluster. Oracle Database batch reporting improved by up to 153x and sales order processing resulted in a 2.5x improvement. In late 2011, a large Telecommunications and Media company deployed SPARC SuperCluster as a consolidation platform for its database and telecommunications applications running on SPARC servers. Leveraging the Exadata Storage, Infiniband network fabric and columnar compression, the performance testing results demonstrated a 10x compression improvement and a 7x performance gain with compressed data for Oracle Database (OLTP). Additionally, Oracle RMAN helped increase I/O throughput by 5x and backups took only one fifth the time. Finally, queries showed a 60x-90x improvement over the company s current servers. Oracle s SPARC SuperCluster provides both the capacity for growth, as well as the fine-grained server virtualization needed to isolate individual application components. Deployment speed, application performance, and availability can all be optimized with the multiple layers of enterprise application infrastructure consolidated onto a high-performance, highly available SPARC SuperCluster system. Designed as a pre-configured, pre-tested, and ready-to-deploy SPARC SuperCluster engineered system, the solution provides a complete and optimized infrastructure solution for applications, built around robust compute, networking, storage, virtualization, and management resources. The result is a system that is orders of magnitude easier to manage, and up to five times faster to deploy than alternatives, all while occupying considerably less real estate requiring less power. Furthermore, the SPARC SuperCluster system provides full built-in redundancy resulting in a highly reliable infrastructure without single point of failure. An issue with one component will not impact other components of the system offering true isolation. Customers can consolidate multiple Oracle Fusion Applications environments with minimum disruption, without fear of performance degradation, and the ability to achieve required service levels. 28

29 Technical Benefits of Oracle s Engineered Systems Overview Internal benchmarking indicates that Oracle Fusion Suite of Applications running on Oracle s Engineered Systems performs three to ten times faster for forms and self-service applications, depending upon the concurrency load profile. And linear scaling allows for very large deployments and multiple applications to run simultaneously while maintaining consistent response times. Oracle s Engineered Systems are architected to deliver maximum availability, high performance, and scalability helping Oracle Fusion customers to consolidate environments, and reduce server footprint resulting in an overall reduction in cost of application ownership. Here are some of the technical benefits delivered by Engineered Systems: Oracle Fusion applications consists of many batch processing programs that create large workloads. These workloads are highly CPU intensive. High concurrency of these workloads requires systems with large memory capacity with large Systems global area (SGA) and Program global area (PGA) capable of processing high speed disk input/output (I/O). Oracle s Engineered Systems are architected to deliver these superior technical capabilities to manage such large workloads. Engineered systems can handle twice as many users per core compared to other servers delivering the scalability required to add more application users during growth and expansion. Linear Scaling easily supports very large deployments. Resource Manager can help consolidation of database and application environments by controlling CPU usage, managing CPU contention via instance caging, controlling disk I/O usage, and managing contention via IORM s inter-database resource plans. Customers can achieve higher throughputs as more transactions can be processed using single Exadata core compared to other servers. Exalogic has been engineered to leverage a technique known as Single-Root I/O Virtualization to eliminate virtualization overhead and deliver maximum performance and scalability. Mission-critical server virtualization offers a whole new level of consolidation where multiple virtual machines are sharing a single physical server in order to maximize the utilization of server hardware, while minimizing associated cost. Oracle VM template for Exalogic reduces installation and configuration time and allows rapid deployment of Oracle Fusion applications. Oracle Fusion customers can load balance Web and application servers, configure parallel concurrent processing and configure Oracle RAC and Oracle Data Guard for high availability. Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control (EM) helps with Exadata manageability and provides a composite view of all health indicators of a cell or cell group to diagnose and troubleshoot performance problems efficiently. Exadata Oracle Fusion customers will benefit from using the following unique features of Exadata Database Machine: 29

30 Exadata Smart Flash Cache Exadata Smart Flash Cache uses Flash memory to dramatically reduce the time to read and write database and log records. The intelligence in Smart Flash Cache transparently moves active database blocks from disk to flash in real time, thus ensuring that "hot" data is in Flash memory when the next access occurs. Blocks that should not be in Flash are similarly recognized, maximizing the amount of space in Flash for active data. Internal benchmarks for Oracle Fusion Applications have shown the following results as a result of Smart Flash Cache: A ten-fold improvement in response time for reads over regular disk and a hundred-fold improvement in IOPS for reads over regular disks Average I/O latency reduced by 58 percent and no special tuning is required to achieve I/O performance improvement Log file sync events improved by 5 percent and no special tuning is required to achieve log file sync event improvements Exadata Smart Scan Exadata Smart Scan speeds up data-intensive queries by leveraging the processing power of Exadata Storage Servers to scan and filter out results. By moving queries to storage instead of moving the data to the database servers, long-running reports often complete 10 times faster than conventional systems. InfiniBand The use of InfiniBand as the networking fabric within Exadata ensures the lowest latency for messages and the highest bandwidth for data transfers. High-speed transactions, as well as data-intensive queries and reports, reap the benefits from InfiniBand. The benefits for Oracle Fusion Applications users resulting from InfiniBand are: percent lower CPU utilization and 100 percent or more throughput compared to Gigabit Ethernet 20 percent improvement in online transactions response times Easier scaling of Fusion Applications online transactional processing through low latency In case of Master Data Management, scalability performance on Exadata for user loads scaled up by 3X for complex queries, translated into 2.3X higher throughput performance Exadata Scale-Out Storage Exadata Scale-Out Storage enables the full performance of Exadata to be realized against large and growing databases, without fear of bottlenecks. As the database size grows and storage capacity is added to Exadata, storage performance and networking bandwidth scale in equal proportion. As a result, Backups and Clones can be executed at a rate of 20TB/hour Faster incremental backups can be performed Exadata Hybrid Columnar Compression 30

31 Exadata Hybrid Columnar Compression technology will reduce the size of data storage by providing significant reductions in cost over time. Hybrid Columnar Compression enables the highest levels of data compression and provides enterprises with tremendous cost-savings and performance improvements due to reduced I/O. Average storage savings can range from 10x to 15x depending on how HCC is used. With average savings of 10x, IT managers can drastically reduce and often eliminate their need to purchase new storage for several years. For example, a 100 terabyte database achieving 10x storage savings would utilize only 10 terabytes of physical storage. With 90 terabytes of storage now available, IT organizations can delay storage purchases for a significant amount of time. Additional business benefits include less frequent archiving and longer access to historical data. I/O Resource Manager (IORM) IORM allocates I/O bandwidth across different applications and databases, based on a prioritized allocation plan, to ensure that the most important applications get the performance they need when they need it. As a result, customers can consolidate database and application environments without worrying about resource contention and performance degradation. Oracle Exalogic Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud is an engineered system that consists of integrated hardware and software designed, optimized, and certified for deploying Oracle business applications, Oracle Fusion Middleware, and third -party software products. These enhancements range from on-chip network virtualization to operating system and Java Virtual Machine support for extremely high-performance Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) and Oracle Exalogic aware workload management in Oracle s Java EE application server. Oracle Fusion customers benefit from using following unique features of Exalogic: Exalogic Exabus 31

32 Applications running on Exalogic utilize Exabus, the underlying Infiniband fabric, which provides low latency and high throughput eliminating I/O bottlenecks in every application layer. Applications components are typically deployed in more than one server and Exabus provides low latency for I/O across nodes on same Exalogic rack. Access to ZFS storage device over Exabus greatly reduces latency for log file writes and other file access operations. For applications running on Exalogic and accessing the database tier on Exadata, Exabus delivers faster I/O, reduces CPU usage on both the mid-tier and DB-tier and providing higher connection pooling efficiency. This is possible because the same advanced communication fabric supports direct connection to the Oracle Exadata Database Machine. Oracle V M for Exalogic Exalogic Oracle VM can sub-divide a physical compute node into multiple virtual machines to increase application deployment efficiency while maintaining application performance. Oracle VM has been engineered for tight integration with Exalogic Exabus I/O backplane using a technique called Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV) ensuring Oracle VM significantly outperforms comparable hypervisors from other leading vendors. The benefit of this approach is unmatched application performance. In an Exalogic configuration, the impact of virtualization on application throughput and latency is negligible. Oracle Exalogic supports up to 63 VMs per physical server, with each VM configured for I/O across an adapter containing a pair of InfiniBand ports for redundancy. Many VMs can share the same redundant I/O device, allowing much higher levels of server workload consolidation. Oracle Exalytics Exadata and Exalogic are high performance engineered systems that address the enterprise needs of the database and storage tier and Applications and Middle tier respectively. Oracle Exalytics is part of the Oracle Engineered Systems portfolio that provides a high performance state-of-the-art BI platform. Exalytics is a engineered system comprising of memory optimized hardware, BI foundation suite software (OS, middleware, BI) and In-Memory software (TimesTen for Exalytics and Optimized Essbase). TimesTen In-Memory database is a 100 percent in-memory relational database, which is fully persistent and has new analytical functions, such as OLAP grouping operators (CUBE, ROLLUP, GROUPING SETS), WITH 32