Accenture Technology Vision 2014 Every Business …...Big companies are back in the digital game...

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From Digitally Disrupted to Digital Disrupter Accenture Technology Vision 2014 Every Business Is a Digital Business Accenture Technology Vision for Oracle

Transcript of Accenture Technology Vision 2014 Every Business …...Big companies are back in the digital game...

Page 1: Accenture Technology Vision 2014 Every Business …...Big companies are back in the digital game With that bold vision, Accenture kicked off its Accenture Technology Vision 2014 report.

From Digitally Disrupted to Digital Disrupter

Accenture Technology Vision 2014

Every Business Is a Digital Business

Accenture Technology Vision for Oracle

Page 2: Accenture Technology Vision 2014 Every Business …...Big companies are back in the digital game With that bold vision, Accenture kicked off its Accenture Technology Vision 2014 report.

Big companies are back in the digital gameWith that bold vision, Accenture kicked off its

Accenture Technology Vision 2014 report. It’s a

vision that is shared deeply by Oracle, Accenture’s

long-time partner in helping so many of those large

companies vault toward the next levels of growth

and become truly digital businesses.

Together, Accenture and Oracle see a major shift

under way in the marketplace. We see the new

momentum in digital innovation being driven not

by the Instagrams and TripAdvisors and Airbnbs

but—for the first time in a long time—by the Tescos

and GEs and Disneys. Big really is the next big thing:

backed by their deep resources, enormous scale, and

process discipline, many of the traditional Global

1,000 are rewriting entire chapters of the digital

playbook.

Large companies are making a concerted push to

transform themselves from followers to leaders

in digital. For business leaders everywhere, the

next three years will be about determining their

organizations’ pace in this digital race—and their

place in the new digital world. The first movers

are already poised to take advantage of the many

recent technology advances in ways that promise to

upend the expectations of industry observers and

consumers alike.

Accenture and Oracle see eye to eye on how

to help accelerate the digital directions of the

biggest companies. It’s not important whether that

alignment is best demonstrated by the Accenture

Foundation Platform for Oracle, or by Accenture’s

embrace of pre-engineered solutions such as Oracle

Big Data Appliance, or by the cutting-edge work of

the Accenture Analytics Innovation Center. What

really matters is that both partners share a vision

of a digital future that is broader still than that

glimpsed by the new breed of corporate digerati.

That nuanced vision is expressed perfectly in this

document. Building on the Accenture Technology

Vision 2014 report from Accenture Technology

Labs, we apply the lens of Accenture’s and Oracle’s

blended expertise to demonstrate how our

combined approach maps to the six technology

vectors described in the report—from its spotlight

on the digital-physical blur to the push for

architected resilience.

Just as the Accenture Technology Labs’ report

every year provides a richly detailed view from

which business leaders in every industry can draw

insight, inspiration, and excitement about where

digital technologies can take their organizations,

this Accenture-Oracle summary points to the many

practical ways in which those leaders can act now

to realize their digital aspirations.

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Accenture and Oracle have one of the strongest

and most strategic alliances in the global IT-

services sector. Accenture has been delivering

Oracle-based solutions in almost every industry

for more than 23 years.

With deep insights, proven experience,

industrialized delivery capabilities, and more

than 52,000 skilled Oracle professionals around

the globe, Accenture is uniquely qualified to

provide strategy, implementation, upgrade,

and application-outsourcing solutions across

the entire Oracle suite of products. This suite

includes products such as Oracle E-Business

Suite, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, Oracle Retail,

Siebel, and Oracle Fusion Middleware.

Accenture also brings innovative methodologies,

tools, and accelerators that enable rapid

implementation of quality solutions that are

sustainable, affordable, and predictable, while

mitigating risk. Accenture demonstrates its

innovation by providing strong points of view,

leading practices, and assets that are unique and

highly differentiated across industry, function,

and technology.

Central to the strategic nature of the Accenture-

Oracle relationship is each side’s commitment

to investing in significant resources to address

their joint customer needs. Two examples of

Accenture’s activities include the Accenture

Foundation Platform for Oracle, a development

accelerator for Oracle Fusion Middleware, and

the Accenture Oracle Engineered Systems

Center of Excellence, which lets clients “try

before they buy” by assessing proof-of-concept

demonstrations.

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Page 4: Accenture Technology Vision 2014 Every Business …...Big companies are back in the digital game With that bold vision, Accenture kicked off its Accenture Technology Vision 2014 report.

Digital blurs with physical as intelligence moves to the edgeThe installed base of the Internet of Things is estimated to

reach approximately 212 billion in 2020. About 30 billion

of those will be connected things—devices that operate

autonomously, whether they are surveillance drones, smart

watches, or intelligent sensors in remote oilfields.

That is a whole lot of intelligence moving to “the edge.”

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The fact is that the physical world is coming online

as objects, devices, and machines acquire more

digital “smarts.” The Accenture Technology Vision

2014 report from Accenture Technology Labs notes

that this wave of intelligent interfaces allows more

and more decisions to be made on the edge—at the

point where digital and physical worlds converge—

rather than in a centralized manner.i The decisions

can be made when and where they’re needed

in informed, social, easy-to-use ways, allowing

companies and governments to reimagine the

possibilities for engaging with their customers

and citizens.

Accenture and Oracle are well placed to help

businesses take advantage of this digital-physical

blur. At a minimum, Oracle’s integrated and

engineered solutions help simplify the architecture

and infrastructure of business analytics, allowing

data and insights to flow to users, partners, and

consumers as simply as possible.

So what does the digital-physical blur look like

in everyday life? A few examples: Smartphones

have turned their owners into digitally augmented

versions of themselves—able to catalog and

quantify actions throughout the day and access,

create, and share an astonishing array of pertinent

information that can enable faster, better decisions.

“Wearable” computers—think of fitness monitors

such as Nike’s FuelBand and Adidas’s miCoach—

give users the on-the-spot information they need

to make decisions about running another lap or

pushing for a personal best. Autonomous drones—

once the sole province of the military—are being

used by police precincts across the U.S. And devices

such as Google Glass will add many more layers of

intelligence to everyday experiences.

Accenture helps extend intelligence to the edges of the organization• As more and more objects, devices, and machines

acquire digital “smarts,” intelligence moves to the

edges of the organization.

• Autonomous devices, such as sensors and

drones, are not the only instances of this digital-

physical blur. With so many people now carrying

smartphones and tablets, employees have the

capabilities to make bigger business decisions on

their own.

• As intelligence moves to the edge, decisions can

be made exactly when and where they’re needed

in informed, social, easy-to-use ways, so that

organizations can reimagine the possibilities for

engaging their customers.

• Accenture sees that as intelligence moves to

the edge, analytics must be centralized and

personalized so that employees and customers

can readily get the information they need to

make quick decisions.

• Accenture’s and Oracle’s delivery of easy-to-

build mobile business-intelligence applications

can dramatically improve decision making at the

point of customer contact.

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What’s emerging is more than just an Internet of

things; it’s a new layer of connected intelligence

that augments the actions of individuals, automates

processes, and incorporates digitally empowered

machines into our lives. These cyber-physical

systems sense their environments and respond

appropriately in real time, making it possible for

users to make better-informed decisions within

windows of opportunity that can create competitive

advantage.

The pivotal point is that the sheer quantity of these

edge devices is increasing as dramatically as their

prices are dropping. In tandem, available bandwidth

is soaring, global IP traffic is expected to nearly

double from 2013 through 2016, and broadband

speed is expected to more than double. Real-time

analytics are proliferating, too. By 2017, more than

50 percent of analytics implementations will use

event data streams generated from instrumented

machines, applications, and individuals.

Employees can now add more intelligence to the edge But autonomous devices are not the only

manifestation of the digital-physical blur. Given

that so many people now carry intelligent devices

such as smartphones, employees have the capability

to sense and respond in unprecedented ways—and

to make more significant business decisions on

their own.

As the line between the digital and physical

continues to blur, new windows of opportunity

are opening for the enterprise. Many traditional

companies are looking at these opportunities

as ways to leapfrog online competitors, create

immersive real-world experiences for consumers,

and gain market share. In addition, every company

now has the opportunity to not just gather insights

for making smart business decisions but also to turn

those decisions into actions—in real time, in the

real world. The explosion in intelligent capabilities is

rapidly reshaping established operations, paving the

way for industry disruption on a massive scale.

Both Accenture and Oracle recognize that if

intelligence is to be extended to the edges of the

organization, information must be contextual

and performance must be just-in-time. As such,

analytics are often centralized to provide contextual

relevance by using diverse data sets that provide

aggregated insights to decision makers.

Specifically, the Oracle Real-Time Decisions (Oracle

RTD) platform uses adaptive and predictive analytic

models to determine the right information for the

right person and context, while the company’s

in-memory databases and Engineered Systems

provide performance that matches the window of

opportunity for that data to provide the insights

necessary to make decisions.

The Oracle RTD platform combines rules and

predictive analytics to power solutions for real-time

enterprise decision management, enabling real-time

intelligence to be built into any business process

or customer interaction. Oracle RTD is adaptive: it

can learn over time, which significantly increases its

long-term value to the enterprise.

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In parallel, businesses can test new combinations

of traditional and nontraditional data sources using

Oracle Endeca Information Discovery (OEID) to

unlock new analytical opportunities. OEID enables

“self-service” business intelligence: users can upload

their own data into the application in addition

to the sanctioned data—or even create their own

applications from scratch. In effect, OEID enables

faster decision making by pushing data access and

control to the edge.

Improving decision making at the point of customer contactAt the same time, Accenture’s and Oracle’s delivery

of easy-to-build mobile business-intelligence

applications can markedly improve decision making

at the point of customer contact. Oracle has

recently introduced Oracle Business Intelligence

Mobile App Designer, a solution that allows business

users to very quickly create interactive analytical

apps and share with any mobile device, without

needing to know how to code or use HTML5.

It is still early days for organizations that see benefit

in extending intelligence to the edge. However, the

City of New York provides one of the most positive

examples to date. Its integrated 311 solution,

created with Accenture’s help, provides a single

point of entry to city government for all residents,

visitors and businesses. A full 85 percent of 311

callers have their inquiry resolved during their initial

call. (See sidebar.)

Must-ask questionsHere are the kinds of questions that business

leaders must ask if they want to get the benefits

of intelligence moving to the edge.

• What are businesses in other industries (and

perhaps in our own industry) doing to extend

intelligence to the edge? Are they, for instance,

enhancing consumer experiences, enabling field

workers, and embedding intelligence in their

physical assets?

• How could our organization benefit from

more data about daily operations—either from

automated sensing devices or from enabled

workers in the field?

• Do we have an inventory of the intelligent

devices or better-enabled workers already at the

edge of our network? If not, how can we create

one?

• What can we learn from our customer-facing

business units about the types of edge decisions

they already make? How could these business

units benefit further with real-time analytics at

the point of action?

• What do we need to do to extend our

infrastructure to support enterprise mobility for

core business functions?

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In general, though, most organizations will take

a more cautious approach. Accenture anticipates

that businesses will first expand their use of edge

intelligence to make current operations more

efficient. Then, some of the pioneers will see ways

to disrupt their industries (or other industries)

using cyber-physical systems—by changing users’

expectations of what is acceptable and normal.

These organizations are likely to adopt hybrid

data architectures that use solutions such as the

Oracle RTD platform to leverage traditional and

nontraditional automation in operational decisions.

The businesses that can properly leverage the

strengths of machines (precision and scale)

alongside the strengths of people (insight and

decisions) will be setting themselves up with

market-leading advantages. Together, Accenture

and Oracle can provide what’s needed to develop

that leverage.

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New York City goes to the edge

When Michael Bloomberg, New York City’s

former mayor, took office, one of his priorities

was to offer New Yorkers better government

service, including systems and processes through

which residents could easily interact with city

agencies to receive information, file complaints,

and resolve issues. As it was, customers looking

for government assistance were confronted

with more than 4,000 entries covering 11 pages

in the city’s telephone book, and more than 40

resource-intensive call centers were required to

direct inquiries to the right city offices.

Mayor Bloomberg envisioned a high-performance,

centralized, all-purpose call facility, accessible

through the simple-to-remember 311 phone

number. Calls would be answered by live

operators who would quickly direct callers to the

information or resources they needed, at any

time of the day or night. This single, integrated

communication channel would manage all of

the city’s nonemergency service and information

requests.

Working closely with the city’s Department of

Information Technology & Telecommunications

and the mayor’s Office of Operations, Accenture

led multiple teams in the efficient building

and launching of the new Customer Service

Center and 311 hotline. With Accenture’s help,

the city has applied best practices in customer

relationship management to transform

service delivery and, ultimately, achieve high

performance.

The 311 initiative has been highly successful.

The center represents nearly 300 city, state,

and federal agencies that offer nearly 4,000

services—with more than 400 representatives

answering calls around the clock and

information available in 170 languages. Visits to

311 Online, launched in 2009, total nearly 7

million, and more than 300,000 text sessions

have been supported since 2011; 85 percent of

calls are answered in 30 seconds or less. Overall,

New York City has saved money from the

consolidation of agency call centers and expects

to save millions more over the long term.ii

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Tapping the workforce you never knew you hadImagine a “dream team” workforce—one that can deftly

handle virtually every task your organization needs done

and that comes without the challenges of the traditional

employer-employee arrangement.

That dream team can be assembled now.

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In fact, companies such as Procter & Gamble

and Eli Lilly already make wide use of Web-based

innovation networks to augment and accelerate

market research and product development. Similarly,

GE and MasterCard are harnessing crowdsourcing

companies such as Kaggle—a global network of

computer scientists, mathematicians, and data

scientists who compete to solve problems ranging

from airline flight optimization to optimization of

retail-store locations.

Welcome to the new world of crowdsourcing, as

depicted in the Accenture Technology Vision 2014

report.iii Consider almost any challenge—early

detection of driver drowsiness or the predictability

of drug targets or electric-only updates to hybrid

cars—and it’s likely there are already communities

of shared interest that can competently address

that challenge.

The individuals involved may be around the corner

or on the other side of the world; what they have

in common is the experience and expertise to solve

the problem, as well as the motivation (and, in

some cases, the passion) to do so. This expanded

workforce also offers real scale and speed; it can be

put to work on problems that may be too large or

too expensive to solve internally.

The tasks involved may be as simple as data

entry or as complex as predictive modeling. The

individuals—the problem solvers—may work on a

project for its duration or participate in just a part

of it. They may be paid, or they may compete for

prizes or recognition. But whatever their incentives

and spheres of interest, there is a unifying feature:

their contributions are made possible by digital

technology—specifically the cloud and social and

collaboration tools.

“There are two ways to build things,” the chief

executive of one crowdsourcing company told an

industry publication. “You can hire the relevant

Accenture helps tap the “expanded workforce” using Oracle technologies• Cloud, social, and collaboration technologies

allow organizations to tap into vast pools of

human resources around the world.

• Channeling these efforts to drive business goals

is a challenge, but the opportunity is enormous.

• Organizations need to develop an approach

that can help them access the immense, agile

workforce.

• Accenture can help accelerate the

implementation of new communities and provide

the control that’s required to engage the crowd.

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Marketing moves toward perfect information With effective digital tools now at their disposal,

enterprises can segment markets much more finely.

Accenture has developed an asset—the Customer

Operations Services Portal of the Future—that

integrates more than 20 of Oracle’s products across

its customer-experience portfolio. It demonstrates

how fine-grained segmentations, utilizing data from

a variety of sources (including social), can create

a personalized experience to drive engagement

and revenues. Crucially, the benefits from such

personalized customer interactions can extend

beyond immediate engagement to additional profit

resulting from commerce, loyalty, and advocacy.

For its part, Oracle provides solutions that enable

companies to perform those granular segmentations

and apply them across interactions with customers.

Marketing can use crowdsourcing to test ideas in

these segments. The tests can be created using

combinations of demographic information, purchase

history, interaction history (for example, Web site

visits and products viewed), and data from social

media. It’s also possible to personalize interactions

across channels and customer touch points using

these same segments.

Taking innovation off its leashInnovation is happening organically everywhere,

whether business leaders are aware of it or not.

As with marketing activities, Oracle’s suite of SRM

tools allows companies to follow very specific

people to solve a problem, or you can organize in

the cloud to get better ideas faster.”

This is where Oracle and Accenture come in.

The solutions they provide can help make

crowdsourcing a practical, easily implemented

reality for enterprises everywhere. For instance,

Oracle Service Cloud (RightNow) allows companies

to put the crowd to work in customer service.

By creating communities across digital channels,

including Facebook, customers can help each other

and collaborate. Furthermore, Oracle WebCenter

allows companies to create innovation communities

through which members can share ideas and

drive innovation.

One of the first steps toward better engagement of

the crowd is to understand what already exists—

what communities exist, what conversations and

ideas resonate, and where there is momentum. The

Oracle Social Relationship Management (SRM) suite

is a cloud service that can quickly enable a business

to make such assessments. First, through social

listening, the business can better understand what’s

out there today—what topics people are engaged in,

what’s the sentiment, and, to some extent, what’s

the intent behind these topics. Social listening is a

key source of input for formulating a crowdsourcing

plan, and it can be a quick win.

The Oracle Endeca Information Discovery (OEID)

platform creates more opportunities for quick wins.

By combining different types of data (for example,

unstructured data from social media and existing

external communities combined with internal

data), an enterprise can iteratively test and explore

theories in the data without needing to create data

warehouse reports.

The crowdsourcing theme is bigger and broader

than there is space to cover in this report, but two

areas merit a closer look.

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conversations about innovation on social media and

then to engage with the pertinent communities.

The same suite of tools can help a company to

develop new social-media properties and begin

to incorporate all of them into the enterprise

(for example, by integrating them with existing

customer-support processes). The Oracle SRM suite

not only enables a business to understand what’s

happening within communities of interest but it also

makes it easier to engage the crowd and put it to

work solving problems.

Of course, enterprises cannot depend solely on

existing or even emerging innovation solutions.

They must be willing to create platforms and

communities themselves. Here too, the solutions

from Oracle and Accenture can help design, build,

and nurture those communities, whether they

“meet” on social-media channels or through

company-owned Web sites.

Dealing with the increased security risksLast, Accenture and Oracle have the resources

and tools necessary to deal with the new levels

of complexity and risk generated by the widening

workforce. To engage the crowd is to require more

control over who accesses organizations’ multiple

systems. Oracle’s Identity and Access Management

Suite Plus, bolstered by Accenture’s Identity and

Access Management services, helps enterprises

reduce costs, minimize risks, and meet regulatory

compliance by implementing processes and tools

to centralize and streamline the management of

users’ access and entitlements within the extended

enterprise.

Must-ask questionsThe companies that get crowdsourcing right will

equip themselves with better customer insight

and more innovative products and services, and

they will have an unprecedented array of talent

and skills at their disposal. Here are some of

the questions that business leaders should ask

themselves.

• How might our market research, product

development, and innovation functions benefit

from using expanded workforce platforms?

• How can we engage with existing online

communities in support of our core business

functions? Can we create a catalog of the online

communities that are specific to market research

and product development?

• Which of our business activities are most easily

broken into smaller independent tasks that are

suitable for crowdsourcing? Who will lead the

pilot programs for those tasks?

• Can we develop an authorized and trusted-talent

cloud that encompasses an expanded workforce

community?

• In which areas can we achieve quick wins and

create business value to prove that this approach

can work?

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Unlocking value from the data supply chainFew business leaders today can say that their organizations

are starving for data. Quite the opposite: most businesses

are wallowing in more data than they can effectively

utilize today. Few observers see that more clearly than

Oracle, which has 60 percent of the world’s data stored on

its databases, and the Accenture Technology Vision 2014

report observes that many businesses are in fact struggling

to access, share, and analyze much of the data they

already have.

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The truth is that enterprise data is vastly

underutilized. Data ecosystems are complex and

littered with data silos, limiting the value that

organizations can get out of their own data because

it is so difficult to access. Few companies have

mastered the concepts at the foundation of modern

data management—for example, the mobility and

portability of data, its structure and velocity, data as

a “saleable” product, and its valuation in open data

exchanges.

To truly unlock that value, companies must start

treating data more as a supply chain, putting it into

circulation by enabling it to flow easily and usefully

through the entire organization—and eventually

throughout their ecosystems of partners too.

The Accenture Technology Vision 2014 report notes

that the challenge of unlocking the value of data

is exacerbated by rising data volumes.iv The size

of the digital universe is doubling every two years

and is set to grow to 40 trillion gigabytes, or, to put

this into perspective, more than 5,200 gigabytes

for every man, woman, and child by 2020. Data

from external sources such as social media, mobile

devices, and point-of-sale sources can add new

decision-making dimensions to the analytics mix,

with the most powerful insights emerging when a

company can effectively blend external and internal

data. Yet observers say that most companies won’t

be able to get competitive advantage from the big

data at their disposal—not, at least, anytime soon.

Until recently, much of this external data did not

exist. Where big-data sets could be identified, high

storage costs and a dearth of mature processing

tools were barriers to realizing its true value. The

good news, though, is that the tools and technology

required to build a data platform, ensuring data

access and velocity, are available and in use.

Accenture helps extract hidden value in the data supply chain• Complex data ecosystems, siloed data, and

rising data volumes are limiting the value that

organizations can get out of their data.

• Companies can achieve powerful insights

when they can blend external and internal data

effectively.

• The introduction of Oracle Big Data Appliance

changes the game by allowing companies to

handle data volumes at scale.

• A seamless, integrated data supply chain

experience can be realized by leveraging Oracle’s

Master Data Management Architecture.

• Accenture has a dedicated data practice of more

than 1,300 practitioners who help plan, drive,

and deliver an individualized data journey for

each client.

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For example, 20 percent of enterprises are reported

to be using NoSQL already, and tools such as Oracle

Big Data Appliance are engineered to process data

volumes at scale. Coupling these technologies with

the more traditional master data management

(MDM) solutions, the integrated, end-to-end data

supply chain is finally possible.

So what exactly does a data supply chain look

like? It begins when data is created, imported, or

combined with other data. The data then moves,

flows, and transforms through the supply chain,

incrementally acquiring value. And although there

may be diversions along the way, such as when

a data “product” is removed for repairs (in other

words, data cleansing), the supply chain ends

with a valuable insight as its output. Guiding

this movement is a data services platform.

Analogous to the blueprint of a factory floor, this

platform provides the structure for the intelligent

transportation of data throughout the organization.

It enables the effective supply chain—fit to strategy

and designed to drive outcomes.

Oracle recognizes that data must move seamlessly

and quickly throughout the information supply

chain, maintaining the quality and integrity of the

data. The Oracle MDM Architecture addresses the

end-to-end information supply chain, from data

creation to distribution to analytics. Also, Oracle

Data Relationship Governance is typically involved

in the first element of the data supply chain—the

creation of data. Its workflow and collaboration

features enable end users to create and modify

master data.

The journey to an optimized data supply chain

begins with a clear, cohesive data strategy. A key

component of this strategy involves development

of an understanding of the place from which the

journey is beginning—or the “current state” of

data and information. Oracle provides two primary

solutions for accelerating this understanding: Oracle

Enterprise Data Quality Profile and Audit (as part

of the Enterprise Data Quality Family) and Oracle

Endeca Information Discovery.

The Oracle Enterprise Data Quality Profile and

Audit solution provides the capability to quickly

and easily audit data for potential anomalies in the

data. Business and IT can leverage the results to

identify root cause issues in the data supply chain

and the business impacts of those deficiencies.

Complementing that solution is Oracle Endeca

Information Discovery (OEID), which enables

business users to combine, explore, and visualize

information—both structured and unstructured—

from a wide variety of disparate sources. This

provides a powerful platform for gaining insight

into information relationships that might have been

unrecognized previously.

But arguably the most powerful response to

the data-supply-chain concept is Oracle’s big

data solutions. Oracle describes big data as “the

electricity of the 21st century—a new kind of power

that transforms everything it touches in business,

government, and private life.” In business terms,

it refers primarily to data that businesses do not

control or own. Recognizing that companies need

solutions to acquire, organize, and analyze those

volumes of data from disparate sources, Oracle has

developed its big-data solution, with a portfolio

of powerful products comprising Oracle Big Data

Appliance, Oracle Big Data Connectors, Oracle

NoSQL Database, and in-Database Analytics.v

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For its part, Accenture translates the enterprise’s

larger questions about big data into the

practicalities of what data is needed where and

when, and by which users. Accenture properly and

promptly identifies the enterprise’s requirements for

specific Oracle solutions and ensures that not only

are those solutions properly implemented and run

but also that the enterprise has the skill sets and

support needed to maximize its investments in

the solutions.

Specifically, Accenture works closely with Oracle

and its clients to design, build, and run the

underpinning information strategy, architecture,

and governance that enable a “single source of the

truth” for all data, wherever it resides. Accenture

empowers executives, giving them the tools they

need to analyze that data effectively and deliver

the intelligence and insights that enable smarter

decision making, actions, and outcomes. Just one

snapshot: the Accenture Analytics Innovation

Center for Oracle develops analytics solutions that

are helping organizations maximize the power of

Oracle Exalytics and Oracle Business Intelligence

Suite Enterprise Edition (OBIEE) and move to a new

level of performance.

Must-ask questionsAny initiative to get data into circulation—to

realize its full potential across an enterprise’s

business ecosystem—has to start with the right

decisions, which are the product of thoughtful

debate, sparked by the right kinds of questions.

• Do we have a detailed inventory of our data,

beginning with our most frequently accessed and

time-relevant data?

• What will it take to identify the data silos in our

organization (for example, human resources,

finance, and engineering) and to pinpoint other

areas in our organization in which data could be

useful?

• How can we identify sources of external data

that will complement the data that we “own”

already?

• How can we empower our business users to be

value creators in the data supply chain? Where

could we sell our data? Who should investigate

opportunities to monetize it?

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Hardware matters again (a lot) Facebook designed and built its own servers, claiming

that it can build its data centers at one-fifth the cost of

a traditional data center. That statistic points to the need

for all CIOs to get smart about the advantages and trade-

offs associated with the hardware that powers their

data systems.

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After at least a decade out of the spotlight, the

hardware world is once again a hotbed of new

development as demand soars for bigger, faster,

lower-cost data centers. In fact, hardware is

becoming a crucial consideration as businesses

strive to “go digital,” as discussed in the Accenture

Technology Vision 2014 report.vi

As more and more businesses come to rely

on supersize, superscalable data centers—the

“hyperscale” systems run by the major cloud-service

providers such as Amazon and Google, as well as

the growing number of systems that companies

are building themselves—their IT leaders must keep

track of innovations in hardware technologies

such as low-power CPUs, solid-state data storage,

and in-memory computing. Current and future

innovations will augment the performance of every

enterprise’s servers and data centers, enabling the

next generation of infrastructure to support their

digital transformation.

The name of the hyperscale game is total cost of

ownership (TCO)—the collective push for higher

compute densities, increased modularity, greater

utilization, less custom development, and greater ease

of use. Oracle translates this into the basic idea of

“simplifying IT”—a strategic directive that emphasizes

simplified systems design, where software and

hardware are engineered together. (This model is

widely recognized in the Apple ecosystem, and such

integration is also central to the effectiveness of

Google’s and Facebook’s data centers.)

It is Oracle’s and Accenture’s belief that the next

wave of data center computing will be characterized

by purpose-built machines that optimize for

particular types of workload and tackle traditional

bottlenecks in system performance. This belief is

echoed by the analyst community. One leading

analyst firm predicts that by next year, more than

a third of total server shipped value will be in the

form of integrated systems.

Accenture ensures the best hardware performance as demand soars for bigger, faster, lower-cost data centers• The name of the hyperscale game is total cost of

ownership. TCO is the collective push for higher

compute densities, increased modularity, greater

utilization, less custom development, and greater

ease of use.

• Companies will see the benefits of hyperscale

innovation trickle into data centers in the form of

cost reduction.

• As companies digitize their businesses, these

systems become essential to enabling growth

and reducing complexity.

• Hardware is a crucial consideration as businesses

strive to go digital.

• Organizations need to develop approaches that

cut implementation time to a matter of weeks.

• Accenture’s implementation of Oracle Engineered

Systems emphasizes delivery of the highest

possible performance, removing bottlenecks in

systems and applications.

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The idea is warmly welcomed by enterprises

themselves: in industries ranging from hospitality

to banking, there is recognition (and proof from

clients) that optimized systems such as Oracle

Engineered Systems can reduce data-center

operating costs by at least 20 percent, freeing

up resources that can be applied to higher-value

business activities.

Oracle and Accenture are ratcheting up the

TCO argument. For its part, Oracle is achieving

unprecedented levels of interoperability across its

expanded product lines because the company can

now provide what amounts to vertically integrated

systems. The objective of offering preintegrated,

workload-optimized systems is to strip out

significant amounts of labor—not just upfront

but also throughout the life cycle of the services

delivered to the business.

Integration happens at multiple layers of the

technology stack, starting with best-in-class

component technology, databases, middleware,

and applications, expanding to tightly integrated,

highly optimized, engineered systems for specific

and general-purpose workloads. Users benefit since,

for instance, Oracle software runs faster and more

efficiently on Oracle storage: it enables integrated,

automatic provisioning and management, with

on-demand storage performance and streamlined

end-to-end data movement and protection. Another

good example: Oracle storage is being integrated

with Oracle VM and storage-management tools to

reduce traditional storage-management workloads.

It is important to point out that Oracle is unique

in owning IP in each layer of the technology

stack—applications, middleware, and hardware.

Oracle owns the source code, and, as a result, it

can optimize its hardware around its software—an

exceptional advantage that brings substantial

benefits for clients. Furthermore, it helps that Oracle

has products in each layer of the stack that have

achieved supremacy in their markets. (For example,

the company’s database products have claimed

more than 48 percent of the global database

market.vii) Accenture brings its integration strengths

to bear by turning Oracle’s whole-stack positioning

into practical, rapid benefits for the complex

challenges of clients in a host of industries.

Accenture’s implementation of Oracle solutions

emphasizes delivery of the highest possible

performance—removing bottlenecks in systems, in

applications, and between systems and applications.

In the storage arena, for instance, this involves

Accenture’s continued development of application-

aware storage. Accenture’s continual push for

efficiency means that users can purchase less

storage for their needs and run the storage systems

with leaner resources.

The benefits are apparent at one leading national

retail chain whose aggressive expansion has

required rapid, comprehensive responses to

provision the IT systems for each new store.

Previously, the retailer’s best-of-breed approach

meant that it took up to four months to provision

each new retail footprint. Using the Oracle Exadata

Database Machine—central to Oracle’s integrated

Engineered Systems approach—the retailer has cut

implementation time to a matter of weeks.

Of course, enterprise customers are just as eager to

realize the benefits of raw performance gains. That

is especially so as they access increasing quantities

of data and strive to apply analytics tools to derive

real-time business insights, and many more of

them. This is where the most recent innovations in

hardware performance promise the biggest payoff.

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A case in point: last September, Larry Ellison

announced an in-memory option for Oracle’s

flagship 12c database. The option is designed for

both transactional and analytic workloads; Oracle’s

targets are analytics queries that run 100 times

faster with a doubling in throughput for transaction

processing.

At the same time, business users, who care deeply

about system stability and reliability, are acutely

aware that any downtime means huge opportunity

costs—not to mention the possibility of lasting

damage to relations with key customers and

perhaps to the company’s brand itself. Together,

Accenture and Oracle are working hard to ensure

that downtime is very rare. A few snapshots: Oracle

Engineered Systems are designed for no-single-

point-of-failure redundancy and built-in disaster

recovery. And all Engineering System patch bundles

are delivered fully tested and containing firmware,

device drivers, OS patches, management agent

patches, system software, and middleware or

database patches.

Accenture is in lockstep: in 2013, it debuted the

Center of Excellence for Oracle Engineered Systems,

a virtual center in which clients can test process-

specific Engineered Systems products. The center

seeks to address enterprise performance, reliability,

and scalability concerns when deploying such

offerings. Each environment is built to run Oracle’s

Exadata database machine, Exalogic elastic cloud,

and Exalytics in-memory systems through an

Oracle-powered cloud platform.

The approach is paying off. In candid conversations,

Exadata customers routinely discuss improved TCO

and ROI. But the surprise benefit is in what those

customers volunteer about their systems’ improved

stability and reliability.

Must-ask questionsToday’s IT leaders must fully evaluate the hardware

behind the hyperscale systems on which their

companies increasingly depend. Clearly, the

choice of hardware will rest very much on each

enterprise’s specific application needs and what

its usage patterns will look like. But the following

questions are typical of what CIOs should be

asking now.

• Can our applications run on low-power CPUs, or

would GPUs be more efficient for computation?

• Does the code for our critical business insights

need to be rewritten to take advantage of new

technologies?

• To what extent can the data center scale up for

a pharmaceutical client, say, if the client starts

putting most of its clinical-trial simulations in the

cloud?

• Do our business requirements mean we are

better off with flash, in-memory, or hard-disk

storage?

• Have we looked at how we can optimize simple

layers of the architecture, such as the database

layer, to perform 50 percent faster for half the

cost, while providing business value that drives

new decisions and behaviors?

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Business software that’s more like apps? Users of Android phones have access to more than

1.1 million apps—more than 900,000 of them free and

nearly 60,000 of those categorized for “business.”viii Imagine

the possibilities if enterprises had comparable access to

such low-cost, easily deployed applications.

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In fact, there is real movement in that direction,

according to the Accenture Technology Vision

2014 report from Accenture Technology Labs.ix The

way that businesses build software is changing:

mimicking the shift in the consumer world,

organizations are rapidly moving from enterprise

applications to apps. Eager for relief from some of

their biggest pain points—especially their systems’

lack of agility—business leaders have been searching

for software that is far more nimble than the legacy

systems they’ve relied on for decades.

There will always be big, complex enterprise-

software systems to support large organizations,

but there is a marked shift toward simpler, more

modular, and more customized apps. The push is

coming from the accelerating pace of IT change:

the faster businesses can create and launch new

applications in today’s turbulent markets, the better

they can innovate, collaborate, improve customer

experiences, and enrich personal interactions.

Users are raising the temperature too. Customers

and employees are looking for consumer-grade

experiences. They are pressing IT to give them, in

the workplace, the kinds of low-cost, accessible, and

often intelligent apps that they use every day on

their own mobile devices.

Separating front-end applications from back-end servicesAccenture and Oracle are geared to help enterprises

move toward this new realm of enterprise

applications. The Accenture Technology Vision

2014 report makes it clear that the future lies in

separating applications from the back-end services.

(The outcomes are wins for both the IT side and the

business side: IT can concentrate on building solid

Accenture is helping clients address the shift toward simpler, more modular, and more customized apps • Adoption of mobile devices has changed the way

we think and work.

• The faster businesses can create and launch

new applications, the better they can innovate,

collaborate, improve customer experiences, and

enrich personal interactions.

• Users demand the same level of functionality,

access to services, and user experience that they

have become accustomed to on their personal

devices.

• To embrace mobility, businesses need to create

applications that satisfy all aspects of the

corporate environment.

• Accenture can implement a solid foundation for

building applications quickly across platforms

while addressing security, interface flexibility,

and time to market.

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foundations for complex systems; the business gets

to focus on custom software that is flexible enough

to adapt to fast-changing market conditions.)

Oracle’s solutions use a service-oriented

architecture (SOA) to provide a modular approach

in which back-end tools and applications can offer

data and services through flexible middleware

solutions such as Oracle Fusion Middleware.

Those solutions can be provided to employees

and customers in forms that are appropriate to

their needs—on a mobile device or as a flexible

application running on a traditional desktop.

“Accelerator” tools such as Accenture Foundation

Platform for Oracle (AFPO) can make it easier to

connect a wide range of back-end services and

applications to mobile applications. Here’s a good

example of such connections in action: using

solutions that include Oracle E-Business Suite,

Oracle Identity & Access Management, and Oracle

WebCenter Portal, Accenture has created a human

capital management (HCM) mobile suite to support

time and expense reporting together with approval

processes that run on mobile devices (smartphones

and tablets) and desktop platforms.

For instance, an employee using her mobile device

to access her employer’s HCM system might want

to book vacation time and also record her time

using specific job codes. It’s easier to do both on the

fly when the architecture abstracts the front-end

application away from the back-end services: the

mobile app can record the time and send the data

to the back-end processing services. The same app

can record the vacation request and send that to a

different service.

Then a supervisor—based in the office or working

remotely using another mobile app—can review and

approve the time report and the vacation request.

At the same time, an HR analyst can use yet another

app to track employees’ vacation requests in

aggregate and create reports of future capacity for

management. In each case, the abstraction between

the back end, middleware, and application makes

the appropriate functionality available to fit each

user’s needs with a simple-to-use interface—much

like apps consumers use regularly on their mobile

devices.

The march toward mobileThe push toward flexible, app-like enterprise

software must—almost by definition—accommodate

the fast-expanding use of mobile devices. Accenture

and Oracle are striding ahead here, leveraging the

powerful capabilities of the Oracle Mobile Platform

to create and customize applications that run on

many types of mobile devices. Using cross-platform

and multichannel development tools, individual

applications can be built very quickly—very much in

sync with how most mobile apps are created today.

Crucially, key features such as security, interface

flexibility, and multiple-device support are built into

the core of the platform rather than added later.

Applications are created in a container form. That

is, all data associated with an application is not only

encrypted on the device but is also isolated from

other applications on that device. This capability is

what enables vital business practices such as bring-

your-own-device policies.

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Over the longer term, Oracle’s solutions allow IT

systems to grow and evolve to fit the market’s

changing requirements. The SOA foundation of

those solutions means that other services can

be added to the back end with no impact on the

user-facing services. The middleware part of the

architecture allows existing back-end services to be

completely updated or replaced simply by modifying

the middleware interface—again without affecting

the user. Conversely, applications can use a simple

application-programming interface (API) to connect

to a wide range of services with no impact on the

back end. The upshot: regardless of the evolution

of mobile platforms and cloud computing, Oracle,

teamed with Accenture and using solutions such

as AFPO, can support an enterprise through the

entirety of its digital transformation.

The shift in business software development will

reverberate for IT leaders and business leaders alike:

they must soon decide not just who plays which

application-development role in their new digital

organizations but also how to transform the nature

of application development itself.

Accenture anticipates something of a resurgence

in custom development. Leading companies view

custom development as their best option for

pursuing the objectives of a digital business. We’re

confident that we’ll see more and more CIOs and IT

leaders sitting down with their business colleagues

to discuss how they can help facilitate the new

application-development trend.

Must-ask questionsWhat will it take to lay the foundation for

enterprise application development? Before

that overarching question can be answered, it’s

necessary to agree on responses to questions

like these.

• How well can we map cloud and mobile

apps against our existing service-oriented

architecture, application-programming-interface

management, and platform-as-a-service

investments? If we can do this fairly easily, how

soon can we create a strategy to separate our

back-end services from the front-end apps?

• How soon can we review and start updating our

app-process and app-governance strategy?

• What’s needed to design and pilot an enterprise

app store for distributing mobile and desktop

applications?

• Assuming we get good pilot results, how do

we create a multiyear road map to deliver the

remainder of our high-priority apps?

• How can we extend our ERP and custom back-

end systems using simple mobile interfaces

to reduce training costs and increase overall

employee efficiency?

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Trying before buying

Accenture runs a network of labs in which clients

can try Oracle solutions without committing to

buy. The Accenture Analytics Innovation Center

for Oracle is a collaborative network of facilities

that help companies understand how to optimize

their use of data and analytics to produce better

business outcomes.

At each innovation center, Accenture specialists

start by helping visitors assess their own

business-intelligence challenges. They then help

them develop an analytics strategy, a proof of

concept, and a technology road map to get

the most value from their data. Accenture has

developed day-in-the-life scenarios for the

financial services, utilities, and communications

industries to help executives envision what is

possible for their companies’ business situations.

Most recently, Accenture launched an Oracle

Engineered Systems Center of Excellence—part

of the Innovation Center network. The center

hosts Oracle Exadata, Exalogic, and Exalytics

environments to allow companies to “try before

they buy.”

This new center brings together Accenture’s

functional and industry experience with leading

Oracle technologies. Before making significant

investments, clients can test their workloads

on Oracle Engineered Systems to get a picture

of how a similar setup could accelerate their

enterprise applications and strengthen their

analytics capabilities for performance and

business benefits.

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Resilience is about having no downtime (none)Downtime in data centers costs 41 percent more than it did

just four years ago. That statistic alone ought to be enough

to stop most IT leaders in their tracks.

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This statistic, one of the markers used in the

Accenture Technology Vision 2014 report, makes

a forceful argument for engineering resilience in

IT systems from day one.x The report explains that

resilience does not mean simply implementing

robust cyber-security structures and deploying

best-of-breed highly available systems. Instead,

it calls for a wholesale shift in mindset to the

idea of 100 percent uptime—a mindset shaped by

the wider context of business risk and by a deep

understanding of the constant threats of disruption

caused by everything from hurricanes and hackers

to internal upgrades.

Oracle and Accenture understand that resiliency

is the new high ground for CIOs who take their

strategic business roles seriously. A resiliency

mindset is all the more critical in the digital

era. Transforming to a digital business implicitly

increases a company’s exposure to risk through

IT failures. The more that business processes are

interconnected and automated, the more potential

points of failure there are.

A steep increase in cyber threats is piling on the

pressure. This is not just about gaining access to

systems; cybercriminals are also trying to bring

them down. Distributed denial of service (DDoS)

attacks are increasing in frequency and size; the

number of attacks has increased by more than

50 percent in 2013. At the same time, there is the

expectation of “always on” from business stakeholders.

In a digital world, whether your system is under

attack, hit by a storm, or just being updated, the

expectation is that it always works.

This is a reality that IT leaders everywhere must

grasp: failure is a normal operating condition. It

must be anticipated, accommodated, and designed

into IT systems.

Accenture is helping digital businesses succeed in an always-on world • A resiliency mindset is essential in the digital era

and is critical to the nonstop demands of the

digital business.

• Digital businesses must implement resiliency

practices to protect themselves from cyber

attacks and to prevent downtime

• A reality that IT leaders everywhere must grasp:

failure is a normal operating condition and must

be planned for.

• The Accenture Foundation Platform for Oracle

helps clients implement Oracle technology

to secure their businesses and maximize the

availability of their IT infrastructures.

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Today, the idea is no longer about designing for

“five nines” (99.999 percent) uptime; it’s about

supporting the nonstop business—literally 24 hours a

day, 365 days a year. If systems are to be as nonstop

as businesses need them to be, they can no longer

be designed just to specification or engineered to

handle only particular incidents. They must be

designed to work during failure and under attack.

Above all, the resiliency mindset is categorically not

about compliance. Compliance implies complacency.

In an always-on world, it is not enough to check the

Sarbanes-Oxley boxes, declaring that a particular

risk-management process is being followed.

Accenture implements Oracle solutions that are key

enablers of architected resilience. The solutions fall

into three buckets.

Always onAccenture’s Oracle Solutions enable an always-

on digital business with, for example, Oracle’s

public- and private-cloud offerings, which provide

elastic capability that can be available around

the clock and all over the globe. Accenture’s

private cloud for Oracle provides infrastructure

for custom applications as well as off-the-shelf

applications. It also opens the door to software-as-

a-service solutions that simplify the management

of applications and also increase availability by

leveraging shared infrastructure.

As part of this private-cloud offering, Accenture

has leveraged the Oracle Maximum Availability

Architecture (MAA) best-practices blueprint

(representing Oracle’s mandate to provide always-

on service), which spans Oracle Exadata Database

Machine, Oracle Database, Oracle Fusion Middleware,

Oracle Applications, and Oracle Enterprise Manager

Cloud Control, as well as third-party partner solutions.

The objective of MAA is to achieve the optimal

high-availability architecture at the lowest cost and

complexity.

SecurityBolstered by solutions from many of its recent

acquisitions, Oracle has steadily built security into

every layer of its stack, ensuring protection for

applications, middleware, and servers. Working with

Accenture’s widely recognized security experts—

professionals who have been championing active

defense systems for some time now—Oracle offers

active security and “defense in depth” features that

can be tuned and tested independently to ensure

the right amount of security rigor.

The Oracle Identity Management Suite (IdM)

covers the range of requirements needed for a

digital business, from managing user identities

(internal and external to the enterprise) to identity

governance, managing access to resources, and

storing identities through directory services. And

Accenture has taken Oracle’s portfolio of security

products and created AFPO, an accelerator that

stitches these products together and wraps them

with more than 200 successful implementations

to help accelerate the time to market of clients’

new solutions.

Clients now expect resiliency to be extended to

security beyond the core application. Accenture

addresses this by leveraging the AFPO Cluster

Configuration Guides as a starting point for each

product in the Oracle IdM suite. Accenture has used

these to install and configure the components for

high-availability architecture. The AFPO guides are

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based on Oracle’s Enterprise Deployment Guides,

which include an integrated set of high-availability

solutions and best practices for improving resiliency

while reducing or eliminating both planned and

unplanned downtime.

Security is also central to Oracle’s core database

solutions, which use defense-in-depth features

to provide layered security: features such as a

database firewall, transparent data encryption, a

database vault, and data redaction. The security

characteristics also include securing APIs and

services with DMZ-class protection that defends

against cyber criminal activity including DDoS

attacks. These APIs and services are increasingly

important to businesses that see just how

interconnected their business ecosystems really are.

This layered approach provides multiple checkpoints

for security, minimizing the dangers of having

security risks including even a single point of

failure. Having this flexibility is crucial for securing

information, identifying vulnerabilities, and adapting

to ongoing and changing security environments.

Resilient practicesOracle’s own go-to-market approach resonates

strongly with Accenture’s framework for a resilient

future. This includes supporting interconnectedness

by investing in Oracle Fusion Middleware that

supports all the required technology for integration

within and outside the enterprise.

At the same time, Accenture’s AFPO offering

is designed to be very resilient. It takes Oracle

Fusion Middleware and Oracle Database stacks

and integrates them—clustered, in a cloud, or

in sections, according to what the client wants.

Must-ask questionsHere are the kinds of questions that should be

on the agendas of all executives who see why

resilience is so important.

• Does our top-management team have a clear

understanding of what it means to design our

systems for failure? If not, what’s needed to

create that understanding?

• What is our plan for mapping and prioritizing

security, operational, and failure-scenario

threat models to existing and planned business

operations?

• How quickly can we bring in an outside security

firm to attack our infrastructure? How readily

can we then monitor the events internally and

reconcile with logs from the security firm to see

where our defenses are deficient?

• How are we addressing risks that we know

about? And how quickly can we adapt to the risks

we don’t know about?

• What will it take to create a governance model

for auditing and testing the entire ecosystem

of IT system and process dependencies—both

internally and externally?

• Can we mitigate downtime risks by shifting

compute loads to public-cloud infrastructure—

either during peak times or at least when we are

under attack?

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Accenture’s experience over several hundred

successful projects allows a client to base the entire

enterprise on a foundation that is built right the

first time.

The time to start architecting for resiliency is

right now—not when customers expect it or when

losses in trade secrets, revenues, or brand value

have reached painful levels. After the necessary

discussions about risk with the organization’s senior

executives, IT leaders must start to map out the

threat models specific to their businesses. With

this information, they can use business process

economics to identify the services most critical to

the organization’s strategic direction and thus those

most in need of resiliency.

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Putting Oracle Fusion Middleware to work faster than ever Accenture’s long-time support for Oracle

implementations is helping clients become

productive much faster. One recent example: the

Accenture Foundation Platform for Oracle (AFPO)

is a development accelerator for Oracle’s Fusion

Middleware portfolio of products that can help

cut development time and costs by up to 30

percent. By tapping Accenture’s experience and

advanced tool sets, clients can worry less about

getting the implementation right and focus

more on achieving the best business outcomes.

AFPO is a prebuilt and tested reference

application that includes best-practice

documentation, day one deliverables, and

quick-start virtual-machine images, along with

access to a team of skilled resources.xi AFPO can

be delivered all at once or in stages, and it can

run on-site, hosted, or as a cloud solution. It

has already helped simplify and speed up the

installation of Oracle Fusion Middleware at more

than 120 clients worldwide.

The platform addresses common integration

gaps that Accenture has found in enterprise

implementations. AFPO’s design is based on best

practices from hundreds of Accenture client

projects over the past five years. Instead of the

client having to spend weeks or months on

architecture design and build, AFPO provides a

deployable architecture on day one. On day two,

Accenture can start customizing client needs

and delivering key business benefits sooner.

AFPO supports Oracle SOA Suite, Oracle Business

Intelligence, Oracle Identity Management

Suite, Oracle Database, and other solutions—

more than 30 Oracle products in all. The latest

version adds capabilities that help clients with

new challenges presented by the proliferating

use of mobile devices—challenges such as

device management and security. This new

version—version 7—includes integration with

Oracle Mobile Application Framework, Oracle

WebCenter, Oracle Engineered Systems, and

Oracle’s Customer Experience portfolio.

ACCENTURE TECHNOLOGY V IS ION FOR ORACLE

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USPS excels at always-on tracking of parcel post The vigorous expansion of e-commerce is

accelerating demand for parcel shipping, and

the United States Postal Service (USPS) is in hot

competition for a larger share of that market.

But until recently, the service’s parcel-tracking

system had not been up to the job—a significant

disadvantage, when today’s customers place

such a high premium on tracking visibility.

To set clear standards for parcel tracking,

the postal service had committed to placing

a barcode on every package, with 11 to 16

scan events per package. With the knowledge

that its aging mainframe infrastructure could

not support these activities (the system was

outdated and expensive to maintain, and it

was receiving more data than it could process

and store) the USPS opted to invest in a new

product-tracking system that would provide

superb tracking capabilities, expand with the

business, and provide better data—faster—to its

commercial-shipping customers and consumers.

Together, Accenture and Oracle have helped the

USPS build and launch its Parcel Tracking System

2 (PTS-2) Not only was PTS-2 designed for high

performance and scalability, but also it was

developed as an always-on system. To ensure

that USPS customers never experience service

disruptions, the PTS-2 project-design team

created a physical clone of the main database in

the primary data center. The database includes

both a 15-terabyte operational data store for the

most recent 45 days of data and a 70-terabyte

data store containing two years of archived and

reporting data. By using this approach, the USPS

can make changes to PTS-2 with zero downtime.

In less than six months in 2011, the core

PTS-2 infrastructure—88 servers across five

environments—was in place. By March 2012,

inbound-data interfaces had been turned on

and significant testing had begun. PTS-2 began

to ingest data from commercial manifests,

retail parcel transactions, and parcel sorting

and delivery events. In December 2012—peak

holiday-mail season—PTS-2 went live in a

production-like environment, processing both

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inbound and outbound data. At its busiest, the

system processed 150 million inbound records

and 80 million extracted records each day.

From January to April 2013, PTS-2 ran in parallel

with the legacy system so that the project team

could compare the processing and output of

both systems, fine-tune the new system, and

validate the reliability of the infrastructure and

functionality. When PTS-2 went live in April, it

had an immediate and positive impact on USPS

operations. At peak, PTS-2 took on 5 percent

more parcels and tracking events than the

legacy system had been able to support.

The successful implementation has delivered

other important benefits to the USPS.

Implementing PTS-2 allows the USPS to retire

its mainframe-based system—and get back

about $20 million in costs related to software

and hardware licenses. And customers can get

more detail about the status of their shipments

far faster than before. Despite an increase in

the number of scans per package, end-to-end

processing time has been halved: 95 percent of

Web requests are handled within 0.2 seconds,

compared with 0.5 seconds under the old

system.

At the same time, the system is highly scalable.

Previously, the USPS could scale its parcel-

tracking work only by increasing the mainframe

hardware footprint and related costs. PTS-2,

on the other hand, was built to handle the

USPS’s anticipated load, and the leading-

edge technology used in the solution was

designed with expandability in mind. Rules can

be changed on the fly to respond to shifting

demand, and new capabilities can be piloted

without compromising normal functions.

ACCENTURE TECHNOLOGY V IS ION FOR ORACLE

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Oracle is a registered trademark of Oracle and/or its affiliates.

Copyright © 2014 Accenture All rights reserved.

Accenture, its logo, and High Performance Delivered are trademarks of Accenture.

NOTES

i http://www.accenture.com/Microsites/it-

technology-trends-2014/Pages/home.aspx.

ii http://www.accenture.com/us-en/company/

overview/awards/Pages/nyc-311-wins-un-public-

service-award-solutions.aspx.

iii http://www.accenture.com/Microsites/it-

technology-trends-2014/Pages/home.aspx.

iv Ibid.

v http://www.oracle.com/webapps/dialogue/ns/

dlgwelcome.jsp?p_ext=Y&p_dlg_id=14760732&s

rc=7878540&Act=64&sckw=WWMK13048931M

PP004.

vi http://www.accenture.com/Microsites/it-

technology-trends-2014/Pages/home.aspx.

vii http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/features/

number-one-database/index.html.

viii http://www.appbrain.com/stats/android-market-

app-categories.

ix http://www.accenture.com/Microsites/it-

technology-trends-2014/Pages/home.aspx.

x Ibid.

xi www.accenture.com/afpo.

ABOUT ACCENTURE

Accenture is a global management consulting,

technology services and outsourcing company,

with approximately 289,000 people serving clients

in more than 120 countries. Combining unparalleled

experience, comprehensive capabilities across all

industries and business functions, and extensive

research on the world’s most successful companies,

Accenture collaborates with clients to help them

become high-performance businesses and

governments. The company generated net revenues

of US$28.6 billion for the fiscal year ended

Aug. 31, 2013. Its home page is www.accenture.com.

CONTACTS

For more informationDerek Steelberg Managing Director, Oracle Practice

[email protected]

Patrick Sullivan Managing Director, Oracle Technology

Practice

[email protected]

www.accenture.com/technologyvision