Honest review of challenges and advantages on Big Data.

“Big data: What’s your plan?” brings together learnings from actual analytics projects to show you how to get started. They’ve then produced 3 easy-viewing videos that:

• Explain the Big Data challenge
• Outline the human elements of implementing your Big Data plan, and
• Present the business case for such a profound data transformation

Should focus will still remain on 3 core elements: data, analytic models & tools?

Enjoy!

Oracle with Endeca plans to create a comprehensive technology platform to process, store, manage, search and analyze structured and unstructured information together enabling businesses to make stronger and more profitable decisions.

Therefore, Oracle Endeca Information Discovery (Formerly Endeca Latitude) is an enterprise data discovery platform for rapid, intuitive exploration and analysis of data from any combination of structured and unstructured sources.

Oracle Endeca Information Discovery enables organizations to extend their existing business analytics investments to unstructured sources – including social media, websites, content systems, email, and
database text - providing unprecedented visibility into data and business processes, saving time and cost, and leading to better business decisions.

With Oracle Endeca Information Discovery, users can:

• Easily combine structured and unstructured data and metadata to understand key metrics in their relevant context and evaluate new business situations.
• Ask unanticipated questions of any data through intuitive, flexible, and highly interactive online discovery applications.
• Mash up and recombine data and visualizations to compose discovery applications.
• Leverage all of the rich metadata of existing Business Intelligence data models and semantic layers as a basis upon which to build discovery applications.
• Unburden IT from the constant chasing of new requirements and non-traditional data sources for incorporation into the data warehouse, enabling them to deliver fast access to relevant data and selfservice to business users while maintaining security, governance, and quality.

The Architecture for Oracle Endeca Information Discovery

Let’s start by briefly reviewing the Endeca Information Discovery architecture. The architecture consists of 3 main components:

• Oracle Endeca Server. This hybrid, search/analytical database provides unprecedented flexibility in combining diverse and changing data as well as extreme performance in analyzing that data. Oracle Endeca Server has the performance characteristics of in-memory architecture however is not memory bound. Oracle Endeca Server is also used extensively as an interactive search engine on many major e-commerce and media websites.
• Studio is a Discovery application composition environment for the Oracle Endeca Server. Studio provides drag and drop authoring to create highly interactive, visually-rich, enterprise- class information discovery applications.
• Integration Suite. Oracle Endeca Information Discovery includes a set of tools used for loading and optionally enriching diverse information—including structured and unstructured content—into Oracle Endeca Server.

This can be best understood as fig 1 below:

Apart from this there are Extensible Value-Added Modules are

• Oracle Endeca Content Management System Connectors- This add-on module allows for integration of content stored in various enterprise content management systems.This is currently supported systems include: EMC Documentum, EMC Documentum eRoom, FileNet P8, FileNet Document & Image Services, Interwoven TeamSite, Lotus Notes/Domino, Microsoft SharePoint, and OpenText LiveLink.
• Oracle Endeca Text Enrichment. This add-on module includes text analysis capabilities for extraction of people, places, organizations, quotes, and themes as well as core summarization capabilities for automatic creation of abstracts or topical summaries.
• Oracle Endeca Text Enrichment with Sentiment Analysis. This add-on module includes all of the Text Enrichment capabilities as well as advanced text analysis for extraction of aggregate sentiment related to each extracted concept. Sentiment is extracted with a score indicating the positive and negative nature of a document or an entity in the document. These scores can be used within the faceted search experience by varying ranges of
  positivity and negativity.

What type of analysis is Oracle Endeca Information Discovery designed for?

Oracle Endeca Information Discovery is in supporting a users’ need to better understand the data. In expanding analysis inputs beyond structured content to unstructured sources, users can better understand the color and qualitative insights which support quantitative results.

Oracle Endeca Information Discovery enables this type of analysis through Oracle Endeca Server, a hybrid search/analytical database that is specifically optimized for discovery, not reporting or online transaction processing.

Highly scalable, column-oriented, and in-memory - without being memory bound - Oracle Endeca Server supports navigation, search, and analysis of any kind of information including structured, semi-structured, and unstructured content.

This also provide a broad suite of packaged analytic applications to extend corporate business processes to include unstructured data

• Integrate unstructured data into ERP, Supply Chain, Human Capital, CRM and EPM applications
• Integrate unstructured data into specialized edge applications – PLM, MDM, Web Commerce, Analytic applications
• Extend industry specific business processes and vertical applications to include unstructured data

Search capabilities of Oracle Endeca Information Discovery provide

Oracle Endeca Information Discovery provides two different, and complementary, types of search:

1. Value – or dimension – search provides type-ahead autocompletion that enables users to find attribute values and help disambiguate queries by identifying which attributes contain the search terms.
2. Record search provides advanced full text search across any single or combination of fields, leveraging a variety of configurable term matching and relevancy ranking algorithms to retrieve results for display and analysis.

Know the facts and dependecy with other Prducts

1. Oracle Endeca Information Discovery part of Not of Oracle BI Foundation Suite, this is a separate licensed product.
2. If you don’t run Oracle BI. You can still benefit from Oracle Endeca Information Discovery, beacuse the diversity of supported data sources is a strength of this product.
3. Oracle Endeca Server exposes web services for querying existing BI tools.
4. Oracle Endeca Information Discovery enhances existing business intelligence applications by extending analysis to unstructured sources and supporting exploratory data analysis.
5. Oracle Endeca Information Discovery is certified on Exalytics.
6. Oracle Endeca Information Discovery’s primary benefit with respect to Big Data (Read the previous post on Big data) is in solving the problem of Big Variety – relevant data sources for business analysis have never been more diverse, and an increasing share of this information is unstructured.
7. Oracle Endeca Information Discovery and Hadoop are highly complementary technologies

Resources for Oracle Endeca Information Discovery (OEID)

• Product Documentation
• Oracle EID Youtube channel
• Oracle Endeca Information Discovery Wiki

“Big Data” is an emerging & continues to be the topic of much discussion and hype.There are some staunch believers of this and there are some who dismiss this as a bubble destined to subside. Companies such as facebook and amazon are already using this. Lets try to understand this whole thing.

WHY BIG DATA?

Take a look on statistics first for Big Data

Web Scale

• 50 billion web pages
• 800 million Facebook users
• 1000 million Facebook pages
• 200 million Twitter accounts
• 100 million tweets per day
• 5 billion Google queries per day
• Millions of servers, Petabytes of data

Varieties of Data

• Video / Audio
• Images / Pictures
• Diverse internal and external data

Sources of Data

• News / Feeds / Blogs / forums
• Groups / Polls / Chats / Wiki

That means world today is generating data at a frenetic pace. Statistics are available on the net that the data is doubled in every X days. The good thing about this data is that it is available and potentially contains useful information. What’s not so good is how to process this information and use it effectively.

The market place has become competitive and will be becoming more in years to come. The key to growth (and survival) is innovation. Big Data can help in uncover the strategies which can help in making the difference. Big Data though, is not a “magic wand” or “one size fits all” approach, rather it will require careful strategising and planning to achieve something tangible. The following sections will discuss the various facets.

Big data can be defined as data which has:(Four V’s of Big Data Consideration)

1. velocity
2. volume
3. variety and
4. value.

The world is producing data with great velocity.Fact reported by IDC is Worldwide digital content will double in 18 months, and every 18 months thereafter.

We heard nowadays that petabytes do not amaze us anymore. As per The Economist In 2005, humankind created 150 exabytes of information. In 2011, 1,200 exabytes were be created

The data is varied today, as well, e.g. structured, semi structured and complex. As Gartner, 80% of enterprise data will be unstructured, spanning traditional and non traditional sources

The fourth one, value, is not so straightforward. The value is something whose unlocking is important.

THE BIG DATA DIFFERENCE

Big data is like traditional data in many ways: It must be captured, stored, organized, and analyzed, and the results of the analysis need to be integrated into established processes and influence how the business operates.

But because big data comes from relatively new types of data sources that previously weren’t mined for insight, companies aren’t accustomed to collecting information from these sources, nor are they used to dealing with such large volumes of unstructured data. Therefore, much of the information available to enterprises isn’t captured or stored for long-term analysis, and opportunities for gaining insight are missed.

USES OF BIG DATA

Typical Example of Big data usage are :

• Log Analytics & Storage
• Smart Grid / Smarter Utilities
• RFID Tracking & Analytics
• Fraud / Risk Management & Modeling
• 360° View of the Customer
• Warehouse Extension
• Email / Call Center Transcript Analysis
• Call Detail Record Analysis

WHICH KIND OF INDUSTRY IS DRIVERS FOR BIG DATA

• Finance
• Telecommunication
• Media
• Life science
• Retail
• Govt

CHALLENGE & OPPORTUNITY

Analysis of big data including new types of data that haven’t been analyzed before , challange is to provides a deeper level of insight into what customers are thinking and how the business operates. The potential payoffs are improving customer retention, selling individual customers more products, and producing items with higher quality and lower rates of return. Studies show that, with proper use, big data can really improve the bottom line to make an impact on overall profitability.

Organizations can well today with Big Data if they succeed in defining

1. What they want
2. They understand about the data they need
3. They understand the data that they have which can be used.
4. They know where to look for the data which they need.

The first and foremost on the list is defining the problem. Once you have this then the next stage of understanding and getting data can be achieved. This requires investment, intellectual, financial and time.

The next stage is analysis once you have your data with you. This analysis should be something which can aid you invgetting what you want and help you with the business.

BIG DATA VENDORS

Big Data is a $70 billion industry and growing at a rapid rate of 15% to 20% a year. In our view, this helps put to rest the notion that ‘Big Data’ is just a fanciful marketing term. Big Data developments will be perhaps the most critical new marketplace for storage solutions providers in the coming decade. [Reference EMC]

ORACLE & BIG DATA

Oracle offers integrated enterprise-ready big data platform, which includes the Oracle Big Data Appliance, Oracle Big Data Connectors, Oracle Exadata and Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine. By integrating and optimizing the technologies needed to acquire, organize, analyze and decide on big data, Oracle has made it very easy to jumpstart and maintain big data projects.

AT LAST

The World Economic Forum recently declared big data as an asset class.

What are the implications of making better sense of large amounts of unstructured data to uncover business opportunities, strategies, and more.

Is it really an emerging market with lots of innovation, startups, job creation? Or hype. The facts show penetration within the largest FMCG Consumer companies and Social Networks.

Why is it suddenly possible? What are the technical and organizational obstacles, and the most promising areas of opportunity?

What is Oracle doing?

How could we link Oracle Oracle Advanced Analytics BI with HADOOP?

Herewith look forward to start a discussion about BIG DATA .

According to a Frost & Sullivan survey of C-level executives and IT managers, 70% of respondents rely heavily on mobile devices for business purposes. Therefore gaining popularity with iphone and ipad , companies/IT are looking different options to extending user with usage of smart application. These mobile application that allows employees to access:

• Up to the minute reports
• Alerts with key performance indicators
• Workflow approvals
• Tasks and activities

Here is a consolidated list of apps that are available till date

• Oracle Business Indicators for iPhone provides access to Oracle Business Intelligence solutions and data in the form of requests, iBots, and alerts. Oracle Business Indicators works with Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE).

You must have an OBIEE setup before you can use Oracle Business Indicators. Certain features in Oracle Business Indicators can be accessed only if you have licensed the equivalent feature in OBIEE.

You can get this here.

• Oracle Business Approvals for Managers enables managers and executives to review key targeted tasks, access relevant business intelligence reports, make informed decisions and take immediate actions easily and securely while on-the-go.

This application allows managers to handle pending E Business Suite actions related to expense reports, purchase order requisitions, human resources vacancies, and HR job offers. Managers can also use this mobile app to evaluate pending EBS approvals, request more information, and approve or reject pending requests.

You can get this here.

• Oracle iReceipts is an enterprise application that is part of Oracle PeopleSoft Expenses, which allows users to create and submit expense lines for cash transactions in real-time.
  • This allow employees to capture cash transactions on the iPhone and iPod touch as they occur, then easily submit these transactions to Oracle's PeopleSoft Enterprise Expenses.
  • This allows users to capture receipt images with the iPhone Camera rather than having to deal with several paper receipts. The images are then processed as normal within the PeopleSoft Expenses solution. The app can also automatically tag transactions with a user's location using location based features

You can get this here.

For Sales guys who looking to convert their mobile phones into a productivity tool, where they can proactively work on their sales leads, sales forecasts, and opportunities these two application are most beneficial for them.

• Oracle Mobile Sales Assistant is a CRM application provides real-time, secure access to the information a sales organization needs on the mobile device.

Key features of the application are:

• Access to Leads, Opportunities, Contacts, and Accounts from CRM
• Update Appointments, Tasks, Notes, and Message Center in CRM
• Leverage native iPhone Services such as Contacts, Phone, Email
• Mapping & Directions Integration
• Contextual access to Social Networking Sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and Spoke

You can get this here.

• Oracle Mobile Sales Forecast is an easy-to-use application that provides real-time visibility into an individual or organization's opportunity (with details like deal size, close date, or close probability) pipeline.

Key features of the application are:

You can get this here

• Oracle Enterprise Asset Maintenance Workbench is an application available to help maintenance department to increase their productivity and effectiveness. The application will help field workers/maintenance engineers to take advantage of iPhone GPS capabilities to be location aware and respond to maintenance requirements in a more effective manner.

Key features of the application are:

1. Integration with existing Oracle eAM e-Business suite application.
2. Use GPS capability of iPhone to see current location and search assets in the Google Maps.
3. List all assets within the search radius.
4. View the list of released work orders for an asset and complete it remotely.
5. View the list of work orders assigned to the user and complete it remotely.

You can get free itune here.

Looks at Licensing requirement for these usage with Oracle Products.

Sofware & Licensing

Majority of Oracle Iphone apps are free and available from the Apple iTunes store, Oracle Business Approvals for Managers requires licensing of a server product called Oracle Business Approvals Connector for Managers. Also there is seperate licensing of Oracle e-Business Application Suite - Enterprise Asset Management 12.1.1 (Oracle eAM) and GIS Setup for Oracle eAM.

In Order to download the software , here are the steps.

1. Go to http://edelivery.oracle.com
2. Click Continue on the welcome screen
3. Fill out the form and check the boxes for the export restrictions.
4. Select Product Pack "E-Business Suite" and either platform of "Linux x86" or "Microsoft Windows (32-bit)". Click Go.
5. Click on the link towards the bottom of the page for "Oracle Business Approvals Connector for Managers 1.0 Media Pack for Linux x86" or "Oracle Business Approvals Connector for Managers 1.0 Media Pack for Microsoft Windows (32-bit)“

There will be downloads for:

6. Oracle Business Approvals Connector for Managers 1.0
7. Oracle Business Approvals Connector for Managers 1.0 : Required Oracle EBS 12.0 patch
8. Oracle SOA Suite 10g (10.1.3.1.0) (32-bit) (CD)
9. Oracle Application Server 10g (10.1.3.3.0) Patch set (32-bit) (CD)

Similar Post

• EBS Approval Goes Wireless

This focus on the Product (product innovation…product profitability…product decisions…product lifecycle…product network)

"Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) is the business activity of managing a company's products all the way across the lifecycle in the most effective way.” (source -*2PLM - Product Lifecycle Management Magazine)

In other word:

• PLM enables companies to accelerate product innovation and maximize product profitability
• …through the management of the information, processes and decisions about their products…
• …throughout the product lifecycle and across the global product network

Which kind of industry needs PLM

• Industrial manufacturing industry to track and manage engineering change orders .
• High technology
• Life sciences and pharma industry
• Food & beverage
• Retail

Wireless Approval : What is meant for EBS user community

Oracle Business Approvals for Managers is a new class of task focused built mobile application to enhance productivity via immediate notification of key tasks needing review /action, with relevant analytics provided to support and better decision-making.

This allow you to secure access to business information on the go

• Performance Indicators
• Contact Information
• Sales data

This can be carried out Apple iPhone through flexible user interface features.

Benefits in Oracle EBS

This allows executives and managers to respond quickly and easily to common tasks such as approvals for Finance, Purchasing,HR and Sales. These are the some of activity that they can do..

• Expense approval
• HR Job Offer & Vacancies
• Purchase Requisition
• Sales Quotes

Other key features are:

• Oracle BI Apps pre-built Analytics : Oracle Business Approvals for Managers allows users to view and interact with approval tasks that include expenses,purchase requisitions, job vacancies and job offers that originate from Oracle enterprise applications. Additionally,related business intelligence from Oracle Business intelligence enterprise Edition Plus or Oracle Business Intelligence Applications can be associated with approval tasks as an option to provide insight to support approval decisions.
• Oracle SOA / BPEL technology :Oracle Business Approvals for Managers is tightly integrated with Oracle enterprise applications through the deployment of flexible and powerful Oracle SOA Suite technologies in a companion product called Oracle Business Approvals Connector
  for Managers.This also leverages the Identity Management facility within Oracle SOA Suite to authenticate user security which supports Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protocol.

System Requirement

These are versions of software required.

• Apple iPhone 2.1 Software
• Oracle Business Approvals Connector for Managers 1.0
• Oracle E-Business Suite 12.0.4 (Purchasing, iProcurement, Financials, Human Resources or iRecruitment)
• This is currently supported only in english

iPhone + Apps R12 Integration Architecture

Check it out Steven Note, details post for iPhone + Apps R12 Integration Architecture

How much you have to pay

• With assumption if you are using R12.0.4 with pre-requisite product, You have to pay extra for licensing cost for Oracle Business Approvals Connector.
• Managers iPhone client application can be downloaded for free of cost from iTunes App Stores sites.

Moving Forward

As per Oracle Datasheet Oracle plan is to extend this feature in CRM area in near future and will be supported in other language.

Reference Notes

Check it out some of official documents from Oracle.

• Oracle Business Approvals for Managers
• Oracle Business Approvals for Managers Datasheet Download
• Oracle. Business Approvals Connector for Managers Configuration Guide Download

There was lot many news for Oracle AIA this year during OOW ,as foundation pack announcment was made by Charles Phillips in his OOW's keynote during this gala event.Since then this was a huge interest in the subject.

In April this year the first announcement for the AIA was made which was industry-specific business process templates (BPMN) to provide Industry Reference Models (IRM), Oracle EBS, Siebel and Oracle Applications products between the actual move business processes (BPEL) to provide Process Integration Packs (PIP) from it.

Lets take a quick look what is all about and what's makes so hot?

What is Oracle AIA Technology?

This is a framework in which the functionality of Oracle's vast application portfolio - Oracle E-Business, PeopleSoft, Siebel, and JD Edwards - can be recombined and tailored to enterprise needs.

In simple words :A smart integration mechanism , that can support & intergrate the whole bunch of oracle products with EBS or non-EBS products(like SAP) and in this middleware is used to stitching .

The AIA has three components:

• Industry reference models. These are best practice guides so that the final deployed processes are optimized.
• Processes Integration Packs which contain out the necessary code to create business process required without risk.
• Pre built SOA that will run out of the box on Fusion middleware.

figure : Oracle AIA (Source www.oracle.com)

Oracle have now published a foundation pack which is series of templates and vanilla processes which can be adopted by a 3rd party to meet their requirements.

Technical products inside Application Integration Architecture

1. BPEL Process Manager
2. BPEL Repository
3. E-Business Suite
4. Siebel
5. Adapters
6. Oracle Warehouse Builder

The latest version comprised of the following products

• Siebel CRM to Portal Billing - Siebel CRM, FMW, BRM & EBS/Oracle Financials
• Portal Billing to General Ledger - Siebel CRM, FMW, BRM & EBS/Oracle Financials

Summary

Automating business processes across the application running at multiple plaform is normally a very laborious, complex ,costly and time consuming task.Hoping ,AIA seeks to simplify this process and make it more seamless.

Supporting Resources

While researching more about Oracle AIA , these are some interesting links:

• General information on Oracle Application Integration Architecture :
  http://www.oracle.com/applications/oracle-application-integration-architecture.html
• AIA Documentation
  http://www.oracle.com/technology/documentation/intarch.html
• Oracle AIA Foundation Pack
  http://www.oracle.com/applications/oracle-foundation-pack.html
• Linda Fishman Hoyle Blog :Top 10 benefits to AIA
• Process Integration Packs
  http://www.oracle.com/applications/process-integration-packs.htm
• List of validated integrations
  http://www.oracle.com/partnerships/isv/integration/search.html
• Oracle Extends Application Integration Architecture

Some AIA News from Oracle:

1. Oracle Delivers Communications Industry’s First Pre-Built Integrations Across Enterprise Business Applications
   http://www.oracle.com/corporate/press/2007_nov/111207aiacomms.html
2. "Oracle Introduces the Application Integration Architecture for SAP Initiative; Enabling Customers to Unify SAP Enterprise Applications" Why It's Hot!Why It's Hot!
   http://www.oracle.com/corporate/press/2007_nov/sap-aia.html