oracle fusion applications on engineered systems

An Oracle White Paper

March 2013

Oracle Fusion Applications on Engineered Systems


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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.


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Executive Overview ................................................................................................................. 5

Introduction ............................................................................................................................. 5

Business Benefits of Deploying Oracle Fusion Applications on Engineered Systems ................ 6

Benefits Overview................................................................................................................ 6

Fusion Supply Chain Management ........................................................................................ 11

Distributed Order Orchestration.......................................................................................... 11

Product Hub ...................................................................................................................... 12

Materials Management and Logistics ................................................................................. 13

Oracle Fusion Project Portfolio Management ......................................................................... 15

Oracle Fusion Financials ....................................................................................................... 16

Accounting Hub ................................................................................................................. 16

Oracle Fusion Procurement ................................................................................................... 18

Spend Analysis.................................................................................................................. 18

Fusion Human Capital Management ...................................................................................... 19

Fusion Customer Relationship Management .......................................................................... 20

Customer Hub ................................................................................................................... 22

Order Management............................................................................................................ 23

Quota & Territory Management w/ Incentive Compensation ................................................ 24

Overview of Engineered Systems .......................................................................................... 26

Oracle Exalogic ................................................................................................................. 26

Oracle Exadata Database Machine .................................................................................... 26

Oracle Exalytics................................................................................................................. 27

Oracle’s SPARC SuperCluster ........................................................................................... 28

Technical Benefits of Oracle’s Engineered Systems ............................................................... 29

Overview ........................................................................................................................... 29

Exadata ............................................................................................................................. 29


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Oracle Exalogic ................................................................................................................. 31

Oracle Exalytics................................................................................................................. 32

Summary .............................................................................................................................. 34

References............................................................................................................................ 34


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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.


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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 ab le to retrieve all the relevant

information real-time to provide critical information that customers are looking for.


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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.


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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 accu racy 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.


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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 occu r 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.


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Faster extraction-transformation-load to populate data into business intelligence data warehouses

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 accu rate

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 efficiency of knowledge workers and enables delivery of rich, insight-

driven, 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.


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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, su ch 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 accu rate 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.


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Product Hub


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 accu racy 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.


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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


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 t rack 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 sys tems 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 processes are in contention for system resources with the real-

time, user-facing interactions, resulting in system response lags that decrease personnel efficiencies in all warehouse


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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


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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


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.


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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 accu rate view of the entire business. In order to achieve a complete an accu rate 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


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.


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.


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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.


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.


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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


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 0.25 – 1 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 stru ctures 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.


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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


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 processes. One system issue can leave no time to re-

run 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 ut ilization, 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.


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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


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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.


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


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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


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 consolidat es 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


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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


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.


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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


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 cu rrent 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. Accu rate 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:


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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.


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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


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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.


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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.


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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:


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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:

30-40 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 Hybr id Columnar Compression


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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


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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


33

clause and analytic functions like RANK, DENSE_RANK, SUM, AVG, ORDERBY NULLS, as well as columnar

compression.

Simply migrating OBIEE and BI Apps to Exalytics resulted in:

the solution scaling to 3X more users due to stack optimizations and In-Memory result cache

Adaptive In-Memory Data Marts resulted in 18X faster reports due to In-Memory Analytics, wherein the

Summary Advisor identifies hotspots and the BI server moves the data into memory

When combined with Exadata Infiniband provides superfast connectivity resulting in 23X faster reports.

Essbase, a powerful In-Memory database engine has been optimized for Exalytics for memory and concurrency.

Parallel data loads and data exports along with improved MDX query execution result in significant performance

improvements in applications, such as Financial and Operational Planning. Benefits include:

6X improvement in response times

5X more users

6X faster cycles

Migrating Custom Planning from Essbase to Essbase on Exalytics resulted in:

90X faster MDX queries

15X faster interactive calculations

10X more users

The following table shows some of the major technical benefits of deploying Oracle applications on Oracle’s

engineered systems, and how they translate to business benefits.

Technical Benefits Business Benefits High Availability Oracle’s engineered systems are architected with built-in redundancy to minimize downtimes

Maximum productivity from uninterrupted mission critical business processes

Reduced business disruption

Reduced risk of failures

Increased regulatory compliance

High Performance

Increased competitiveness through quick, informed decisions based on real-time access to business insights

Quick business problem solution and new opportunities development

New end user applications deployment that was not possible before, to improve business processes and employee productivity

Improved employee productivity by dramatically improving end user responsiveness


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Summary

Oracle Fusion Applications has become the backbone of hundreds of companies across the globe. Along with the

high availability and high performance levels of Oracle Fusion Applications to perform their day-to-day operations,

business owners expect instant business insights to make informed decisions. Oracle’s engineered systems such as

Exadata, Exalogic and Exalytics compliment the Oracle Fusion Applications to meet this need, by delivering

accelerated application performance to create new opportunities and business capabilities while reducing total cost

of application ownership.

References

This paper summarizes the benefits of deploying Oracle Fusion Applications and several performance sensitive

applications on Oracle’s engineered systems

Refer to the following for detailed information on Engineered Systems:

Ability to manufacture more products, fulfill more orders, react to changes quickly by reducing or eliminating the batch processing times for critical applications

Increased revenue opportunities by timely completion of orders or services

Customer retention by increased customer satisfaction by delivering on-time services or goods and complying with service level agreements

Reduced total cost of ownership due to reduced need for developers or third party consultants required for tuning custom applications

Scalability Oracle’s engineered systems can scale to increase in users and transaction volumes

Instance consolidation

Global expansions

Efficient, rapid, low cost assimilation during Mergers and Acquisitions

Increased business units, users or transactions without worrying about performance degradation

Standardization

Reduced total cost of ownership

Simplified deployments

Rapid deployments across enterprise in multiples business units and multiple regions

Storage improvements for Analytics Oracle’s engineered systems provide several advanced methods of compression technologies

IT costs savings by reduced storage costs

Reduced IT costs by consolidations


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Oracle Exadata Database Machine Brochures and Data Sheets

Oracle Tech Network Oracle Exadata Database Machine

Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud Overview

Refer to the following for the Technical Solution overview:

Oracle High Availability Architecture White Paper October 2012

This white paper has references to information that was published in the following Oracle white paper: Source

reference: Oracle Authors: Isam Alyousfy, Latha Krishnawamy, Elke Phelps, Nishit Rao, “An Oracle White Paper

- Benefits of Deploying Oracle E-Business Suite on Exalogic and Exadata”, Feb 2012.


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Oracle Fusion Applications on Engineered

Systems

March 2013

Author: Natalia Rachelson & Oracle Fusion

Applications Team

Oracle Corporation

World Headquarters

500 Oracle Parkway

Redwood Shores, CA 94065

U.S.A.

Worldwide Inquiries:

Phone: +1.650.506.7000

Fax: +1.650.506.7200

oracle.com

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