A PROJECT REPORT On Competitor Analysis for Oracle Software Products" at

Oracle Financial Services Software Limited In partial fulfilment of Masters degree in Business Administration By Dnyaneshwaree Shrikant Jawale (Marketing) Under the guidance of Prof. Sonal Muluk M.A.E.E.Rs MAHARASHTRA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY MBA DEPARTMENT KOTHRUD, PUNE 411038 2009-2011

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Declaration

I, Dnyaneshwaree Shrikant Jawale, a student of The Maharashtra Institute of Technology (MBA Dept.), Kothrud, Pune, hereby declare that this project report is a result of culmination of my sincere efforts. I declare that this submitted work is done solely by me and to the best of my knowledge; no such work has been submitted by any other person for the award of post graduation degree or diploma. I also declare that all the information collected from various secondary sources has been duly acknowledged in this project report.

Date:

Place: Pune

Dnyaneshwaree Shrikant Jawale (MB09027)

Acknowledgement2

It is a great pleasure and a moment of immense satisfaction for me to express my profound gratitude towards my guide. I am extremely thankful for the invaluable guidance and untiring attention of my project guide MR. ATUL KAHATE (Senior Consultant, Oracle Financial Services Software Limited). I would also like to thank Ms. SAYALI SHAH & MR.UMESH AERWADIKAR for valuable guidance at each and every step of the development of the project. Without their constant support and encouragement, this project will not have been possible. I extend my sincere thanks to all the staff members of ORACLE Financial Services Software Ltd for supporting me and providing a helpful work environment. A due thanks to Prof. Dr. Mahesh Abale (HOD, MIT MBA,PUNE), my project guide Prof. Sonal Muluk and my institute MIT MBA for allowing this experience of summer training in an esteemed organization like ORACLE Financial Services Software Ltd. Last but not the least; I would like to express my sincere thanks to my family members and friends for their cooperation and support throughout the course of the project. I am indebted to them for their constant encouragement, which boosted my confidence and helped me to complete the project.

Dnyaneshwaree Shrikant Jawale Maharashtra Institute of Technology, Kothrud, Pune - 38.

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Index

Chapter No.

TOPIC

Page No.

Executive Summary 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Introduction Objective & Scope Company Profile Research Methodology Data Analysis Findings & Observations Recommendations Limitations Conclusion Bibliography References

Executive SummaryCompetitor analysis in marketing and strategic management is an assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of current and potential competitors. This analysis provides both an offensive4

and defensive strategic context through which to identify opportunities and threats. Competitor profiling coalesces all of the relevant sources of competitor analysis into one framework in the support of efficient and effective strategy formulation, implementation, monitoring and adjustment. The products which are discussed in the project are called as Oracle WebLogic, Oracle ADF, Oracle WebCenter and OBIEE which are products of Oracle Fusion Middleware consists of several software products from Oracle Corporation. It spans multiple services, including Java EE and developer tools, integration services, business intelligence, collaboration, and content management. As an introduction there is detail background about the company profile and its range of products, and then there is discussion regarding the competitor analysis process & how it requires prior study of the software products and their features. Then comes detail study regarding the competitors of the given products. After the Research Methodologies are conducted, the systematic plan is drafted regarding the competitors features, pros and cons of the products and area for improvement and recommendations so as to attract wide customer base and make it stronger as the time progresses.

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Introduction

In formulating business strategy, managers must consider the strategies of the firm's competitors. While in highly fragmented commodity industries the moves of any single competitor may be less important, in concentrated industries competitor analysis becomes a vital part of strategic planning. Competitor analysis has two primary activities: 1) Obtaining information about important competitors 2) Using that information to predict competitor behaviour. The goal of competitor analysis is to understand:

With which competitors to compete Competitors' strategies and planned actions

Casual knowledge about competitors usually is insufficient in competitor analysis. Rather, competitors should be analyzed systematically; using organized competitor intelligencegathering to compile a wide array of information so that well informed strategy decisions can be made. A competitor analysis should include the more important existing competitors as well as potential competitors such as those firms that might enter the industry, for example, by extending their present strategy or by vertically integrating. Competitor Analysis for Product Software By knowing what is happening with competitors, a software company can adjust strategies to be more successful in the marketplace. Companies should know about market share percentages, strength and weaknesses, industry structure, and strategic groupings among other things to get a good picture of what the competitive environment is like. Strategic groupings can be in the form of alliances between product software firms. Competitor analysis is especially important when it comes to new product introductions. There are many advantages, especially for revenue, for a software company that can show major enhancement to software or be first to market. This makes competitor analysis

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particularly important because it can help a firm decide which new product opportunities to pursue by what the market size will be following the actions of other competitors. Research has shown that knowledge about the competitors strategies is very important to help distinguish failures from the successes in product software. Knowing what is going around in the software industry is essential for software firms to be successful. Firms need to know which other software products their product must work with (e.g. operating systems) to provide the most usability for the customer. Therefore, developing and sustaining of architectural control can lead to competitive advantage .Industry characteristics for product software that affect marketing strategies are: emerging fragmented industry, end user competition and imitation, high level of research and development intensity, high degree of integration with hardware, high degree of specialization, complementary with hardware and computer services, high level of maintenance and marketing costs. Competitor analysis is available to explore these areas and others in greater depth to help a software firm determine their future goals and strategies. Some techniques to conduct competitor analysis are:

Brand Strength analysis Market Share Analysis

Brand Strength Analysis Brand strength analysis describes efforts to determine the strength a brand has compared with its competitors. Software brand strength is hard to measure accurately. Techniques from competitor analysis can be used to compare companies over time. Company has to analyze how to determine the benefits of strong brand names in the software sector. Quantitative marketing research by sampling large customer bases using adaptive conjoint techniques and qualitative marketing research by focus groups and observing customers in stores are examples of techniques they recommend. Benefits to a company of good brand recognition include speeding up new product acceptance, enabling market share penetration by advertising, and resisting price erosion. During the decision process for software buying, usually 95% of customers buy a brand that they were previously aware of, 90% buy a brand that they considered beforehand, and 80% buy the specific brand they expected to. Branding power measurement is an important way that companies can keep track of their position in the software market.

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Market Share Analysis Market Share Analysis is an important part of market analysis and indicates how well a firm is doing in the marketplace compared to its competitors.

Objective & Scope of the Project

Primary Objectives of the Project To find out competitors of the given oracle products and Analysis of oracle as well as competitors products Secondary Objectives of the Project 1. Conducting a research on the existing product competition. 2. Suggesting scope of improvement for given oracle products.

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Scope of the Study The respondents for this study were the developers and users of oracle products from all over the world on internet.

Company ProfileOracle Corporation is a multinational computer technology corporation that specializes in developing and marketing enterprise software products particularly database management systems. It has enlarged its share of the software market through organic growth and through a number of high-profile acquisitions. By 2007 Oracle had the third-largest software revenue, after Microsoft and IBM. Name Type Industry Oracle Corporation Public (NASDAQ: ORCL) Computer Database Computer Software

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Computer Middleware Computer Hardware Founded Founder(s) California, USA (1977) Larry Ellison Bob Miner Ed Oates Headquarters Area served Key people 500 Oracle Parkway, Redwood Shores, California, United States Worldwide Larry Ellison (CEO) Jeffrey O. Henley (Chairman) Safra A. Catz (President) Charles Phillips (President) Oracle Database Oracle Fusion Middleware Oracle Applications Oracle Enterprise Manager Oracle Financials $26.82 billion (2010) www.oracle.com

Products

Revenue Website

Product ProfileOracle Software Products to be studied are: 1. Oracle Weblogic 2. Oracle Application Development Framework(ADF) 3. Oracle Webcenter 4. Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition(OBIEE)

These products are the part of Oracle Fusion Middleware (OFM, also known as Fusion Middleware).It consists of several software products from Oracle Corporation. OFM spans multiple services, including Java EE and developer tools, integration services, business intelligence, collaboration, and content management. Oracle Fusion Middleware provides software for the development, deployment, and management of service-oriented architecture (SOA). It includes what Oracle calls "hot-pluggable" architecture, designed to facilitate integration with existing applications and systems from other software vendors such as IBM, Microsoft, and SAP AG.

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Oracle Fusion Middleware components

Enterprise application server

Oracle Weblogic Server Oracle Application Server JRockit (a JVM) Tuxedo (software)

Integration- and process-management

BPEL Process Manager Business activity monitoring business rules Business Process Analysis Suite Business process management Oracle Data Integrator (ODI)

Enterprise connectivity (adapters)

Oracle Enterprise Messaging Service Oracle Enterprise Service Bus Oracle Application server B2B

Oracle Service Registry

Oracle Web Services Manager (OWSM), a security and monitoring product for web services

Application development tools

Oracle Application Development Framework JDeveloper Oracle SOA Suite TopLink, a Java object-relational mapping package Oracle Forms services Oracle Developer Suite11

Business intelligence

Oracle Business Intelligence 10g Oracle Business Activity Monitoring (Oracle BAM) Oracle Discoverer

Data hubs

Oracle BI Publisher Oracle Reports services

Systems management

Oracle Enterprise Manager Web services manager

User interaction

Oracle Beehive collaboration software Oracle Portal Oracle Webcenter Real-time collaboration Unified messaging Workspaces

Content management

Oracle Imaging and Process Management Web content management Records management Enterprise search Digital asset management Email archiving

Identity management

Enterprise Single sign-on Oracle Entitlements Server12

Oracle Identity Manager Oracle Access Manager Oracle Adaptive Access Manager Oracle Information Rights Management

Grid infrastructure

Services registry application-server security

1. Oracle WeblogicOracle WebLogic Server is a scalable, enterprise-ready Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE) application server. The WebLogic Server infrastructure supports the deployment of many types of distributed applications and is an ideal foundation for building applications based on Service Oriented Architectures (SOA). SOA is a design methodology aimed at maximizing the reuse of application services. The WebLogic Server complete implementation of The Sun Microsystems Java EE 5.0 specification provides a standard set of APIs for creating distributed Java applications that can access a wide variety of services, such as databases, messaging services, and connections to external enterprise systems. End-user clients access these applications using Web browser clients or Java clients. In addition to the Java EE implementation, WebLogic Server enables enterprises to deploy mission-critical applications in a robust, secure, highly available, and scalable environment. These features allow enterprises to configure clusters of WebLogic Server instances to distribute load, and provide extra capacity in case of hardware or other failures. New diagnostic tools allow system administrators to monitor and tune the performance of deployed applications and the WebLogic Server environment itself. You can also configure WebLogic Server to monitor and tune application throughput automatically without human intervention. Extensive security features protect access to services, keep enterprise data secure, and prevent malicious attacks.

Programming Models

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1. Web Applications provide the basic Java EE mechanism for deployment of dynamic Web pages based on the Java EE standards of Servlets and Java ServerPages (JSP). Web applications are also used to serve static Web content such as HTML pages and image files. 2. Web Services provide a shared set of functions that are available to other systems on a network and can be used as a component of distributed Web-based applications. 3. XML capabilities include data exchange, and a means to store content independent of its presentation, and more. 4. Java Messaging Service (JMS) enables applications to communicate with one another through the exchange of messages. A message is a request, report, and/or event that contains information needed to coordinate communication between different applications. 5. Java Database Connectivity (JDBC) provides pooled access to DBMS resources. 6. Resource Adapters provide connectivity to legacy and other external enterprise systems. 7. Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) provide Java objects to encapsulate data and business logic. 8. Remote Method Invocation (RMI) is the Java standard for distributed object computing, allowing applications to invoke methods on remote objects locally. 9. Security APIs allow you to integrate authentication and authorization into your Java EE applications. You can also use the Security Provider APIs to create your own custom security providers. 10. WebLogic Tuxedo Connectivity (WTC) provides interoperability between WebLogic Server applications and Tuxedo services. WTC allows WebLogic Server clients to invoke Tuxedo services and Tuxedo clients to invoke EJBs in response to a service request. 11. Overview of WebLogic Server Application Development describes developer tools and best practices for coding WebLogic Server applications.

WebLogic Server features and tools 1. WebLogic Server clusters provide scalability and reliability for your applications by distributing the work load among multiple instances of WebLogic Server. Incoming requests14

can be routed to a WebLogic Server instance in the cluster based on the volume of work being processed. In case of hardware or other failures, session state is available to other cluster nodes that can resume the work of the failed node. In addition, you can implement clusters so that services may be hosted on a single machine with options to migrate the service to another node in the event of failure. 2. Work Managers prioritize work based on rules you define and by monitoring actual run time performance statistics. This information is then used to optimize the performance of your application. Work Mangers may be applied globally to a WebLogic Server domain or to a specific application or component. 3. Overload protection gives WebLogic Server the ability to detect, avoid, and recover from overload conditions. 4. Network channels facilitate the effective use of network resources by segregating network traffic into channels based on the type of traffic. 5. WebLogic Server persistent store is a built-in, high-performance storage solution for WebLogic Server subsystems and services that require persistence. For example, it can store persistent JMS messages or temporarily store messages sent using the Store-and-Forward feature. The persistent store supports persistence to a file-based store or to a JDBC-enabled database. 6. Store-and-forward services enable WebLogic Server to deliver messages reliably between applications that are distributed across WebLogic Server instances. If the message destination is not available at the moment the messages are sent, either because of network problems or system failures, then the messages are saved on a local server instance, and are forwarded to the remote destination once it becomes available. 7. Enterprise-ready deployment tools facilitate deployment and migration of applications from the development phase to a production environment. 8. Production redeployment enables enterprises to deploy a new version of their application without interrupting work in progress on the older version.

Type of Oracle WebLogic Server Architecture

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1. Basic Recommended Architecture 2. Multi-Tier Recommended Architecture 3. Two-Tier Proxy Architecture 4. Multi-Tier Proxy Architecture

1) Basic Recommended Architecture (combined Tier Architecture) - All tier of Web Application (Web, Presentation, Object) are deployed on same WebLogic Server cluster.

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ii) Multi-Tier Recommended Architecture - Different tier of application (Web, Presentation, Object) are deployed to different cluster, One WebLogic cluster for Web, Presentation tier and another WebLogic cluster for Object Tier .

. iii) Two-Tier Proxy Architecture- Same as basic recommended architecture but Web Tier is hosted on existing Web Server (IIS, Apache, Netscape). Static HTML content is served via existing Web Server where as Presentation or Object Tier request are served from WebLogic Cluster.

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. iv) Multi-Tier Proxy Architecture- Same as Multi-Tier recommended Architecture but web tier is hosted on existing Web Server (IIS, Netscape, Apache) with WebLogic Proxy Plug-In on WebLogic Server

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2. Oracle Application Development Framework (ADF)Oracle Application Development Framework (Oracle ADF) is an innovative and mature Java EE development framework available from Oracle and unlike most other frameworks is directly supported and enabled by the award winning development environment, Oracle JDeveloper 11g.Oracle ADF simplifies Java EE development by minimizing the need to write code that implements the applications infrastructure allowing the users to focus on the features of the actual application. Oracle ADF provides these infrastructure implementations as part of the framework. To recognize a set of runtime services is not enough, Oracle ADF is also focused on the development experience to provide a visual and declarative approach to Java EE development through the Oracle JDeveloper 11g development tool. Creating the user experience is as simple as drag-and-dropping the desired data controls onto the page design and indicating what type of component should represent that data. Oracle ADF Architecture Oracle ADF is based on the Model-View-Controller (MVC) design pattern. An MVC application is separated into: 1. Model layer that handles interaction with data-sources and runs the business logic.17

2. View layer that handles the application user interface. 3. Controller that manages the application flow and acts as the interface between the Model and the View layers.

Separating applications into these three layers simplifies maintenance and reuse of components across applications. The independence of each layer from the others results in a loosely coupled, Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). Oracle ADF implements MVC and further separates the model layer from the business services to enable service-oriented development of applications. The Oracle ADF architecture is based on four layers: The Business Services layer - provides access to data from various sources and handles business logic. The Model layer - provides an abstraction layer on top of the Business Services layer, enabling the View and Controller layers to work with different implementations of Business Services in a consistent way. The Controller layer - provides a mechanism to control the flow of the Web application. The View layer - provides the user interface of the application. Oracle ADF Features 1. Page Flow 2.0 Oracle ADF extends the basic JSF controller to provide the ADF Controller. The ADF Controller solves some of the key problems inherent in Rich Enterprise Applications by18

providing: enhanced page and operations flow control, comprehensive state management, and reusability of flows as components in other flows and inside JSF pages and portals. 2. Drag and Drop Data Binding ADF provides a data-binding framework that simplifies the task of binding UI to business services down to simple drag and drop operations in the IDE. This makes the process of building the UI truly decoupled from the implementation of the business service layer, better positioning the application for implementation in a service-oriented architecture. 3. ADF Business Components ADF Business Components visually designed and customized to allow declarative access to relational databases. The business components can implement custom business functionality, declarative validation, security, and advanced object-relational integration ADF Business Components is just one of the possible business service implementations within the ADF meta-framework. 4. Multi-channel Clients The framework supports direct implementation of web-based interfaces, mobile delivery, and desktop applications, including integration with Microsoft ExcelIn many cases the components utilized to implement one delivery method can provide support for others with no changes needed. 5. Security ADF provides a robust permission based security implementation that integrates into an ADF based application in a declarative fashion. Security can be implemented at various layers within the application to achieve the desired level of security granularity. ADF Security is based on Oracle Platform Security Services (OPSS), the security foundation for Oracle Fusion Middleware and is fully integrated with enterprise identity & access management components. 6. Declarative Application Customization Any ADF application can be customized by layering on changes to an application without modifying the base source code. Customization can be done for each of the layers of the framework achieving a customized application fitting the needs of specific users.

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7. Productivity Oracle JDeveloper offers developer the capability to design an application utilizing visual editors and diagrams and then customize that design through integrated dialogs and property inspectors. JDeveloper also provides the ability for the developer to choose to directly manipulate source code at any time. This provides the option to switch between development styles at will to suit the type of application or preferences of the developer. JDeveloper provides a complete debugging solution that allows you to set breakpoints within the multiple languages and frameworks that are typically used within an application, 8. Components for Rich Enterprise Applications Oracle ADF includes a set of over a 150 standards-based Java Server Faces (JSF) components with built-in Ajax functionality. With these components, web deployed user interfaces can be developed with a level of functionality and interactivity previously reserved for thick-client applications. The components offer data interaction, data visualization, and encapsulated browser side operations in a set of easy to use components that makes rich client application development easier than ever.

3. Oracle Webcenter Oracle WebCenter is a product built on top of the JSF based Oracle Application Development Framework. It contains a set of components for building rich web applications, portals, and team collaboration/social sites. Oracle WebCenter is targeted at both the development community and business users, delivering a development environment that includes WebCenter Framework and WebCenter Services along with an out-of-the-box application for team collaboration and enterprise social networking. This is the strategic portal product, eventually replacing Oracle Portal as well as the portal products acquired from BEA. Oracle WebCenter Four Key Elements: 1. Oracle WebCenter Framework A modern portal framework to build and deliver any solution that might be considered a portal, composite app, social community, or web site. It includes core metadata management services in combination with a portlet runtime engine to change the way applications and portals are delivered and managed over their entire lifecycle.20

2. Oracle WebCenter Services: A prebuilt set of services that can be used to add social and personal productivity services to your application or portal. They include analytics and mash-up capabilities to quickly add new features into existing portal deployments.3. Oracle Business Dictionary and Oracle Composer:

A role-based view of all the enterprise resources that can be mashed up on a page including pre-built capabilities to add pages to any portal or application after it has been deployed.4. Oracle WebCenter Spaces:

A pre-built application leveraging the previous three areas to deliver dynamic online business communities and social sites for all teams and companies.

Oracle WebCenter Framework Features Oracle WebCenter Framework augments the Java Server Faces (JSF) environment by providing additional integration and run-time customization options. It integrates capabilities historically included in Oracle Application Server Portal (OracleAS Portal) products directly into the "fabric" of the JSF environment. This eliminates artificial barriers for the user and provides the foundation for developing the kinds of context-rich applications depicted. 1. Building and Consuming Portlets Portlets help you bring data from the Web, database, and so on, into your application. Using Oracle JDeveloper, you can create your own standards-based portlets to be consumed by any JSR 168 or WSRP-compatible portal. 2. Customizable Components

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WebCenter Framework provides new JSF components that enable developers to make any of their applications customizable. These new components act as containers into which developers can drop another Faces view component or a portlet. 3. Content Integration Using Oracle JDeveloper, you can then build JCR data controls to grab the content and drop it onto your page in a variety of display modes. 4. Securing Your Application With the Oracle ADF extensions provided in WebCenter Framework, you can define security for an entire application, a page within the application, or for individual actions provided by customizable components. 5. Managing Your Application throughout the Life Cycle WebCenter Framework reduces the time required to build, deploy, and migrate your applications through the use of several tools as follows:

Oracle WebCenter Services Features Oracle WebCenter Services offer a variety of content management, search, and communication services, including the following: 1. Oracle Content Database Oracle Content DB is a full-fledged content management system that enables users to manage content through the Web or from desktop applications. A rich library of ready-to-use Web services is provided to content-enable your enterprise in a service-oriented environment. 2. Oracle Secure Enterprise Search is a crawler-based service that can search a multitude of sources, structured and unstructured, in a variety of file formats, indexed or real-time. With Oracle Secure Enterprise Search, you can reduce the time spent finding relevant documents on your company's information repositories. 3. Communication Services, which help you better connect people and facilitate communication. These services include the following:

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Instant Messaging: Lets users freely exchange ideas through audio and video feeds, file exchange, and a range of other capabilities. Presence Server: Presence provides information about a person's availability to every person or application that subscribes to that person's status. Chats and other real-time services can be initiated from the associated user interface. Discussion forum: An interactive message board for sharing information, questions, and comments. 4. Wiki is server software that enables users to freely edit and create Web page content using a Web browser. This ease of interaction and operation makes Wiki an effective tool for collaborative communication. Oracle JDeveloper Features 1. Oracle JDeveloper is an integrated development environment (IDE) for building service oriented applications using the latest industry standards for Java, XML, Web services, and SQL. 2. Oracle JDeveloper supports the complete software development life cycle, with integrated features for modelling, coding, debugging, testing, profiling, tuning, and deploying applications. 3. Oracle JDeveloper's visual and declarative approach and Oracle ADF work together to simplify application development and to reduce mundane coding tasks.

4. Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition (OBIEE)Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition 11g (OBIEE) is a comprehensive business intelligence platform that delivers a full range of analytic and reporting capabilities. Designed for scalability, reliability, and performance, Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition 11g delivers contextual, relevant and actionable insight to everyone in an organization, resulting in improved decision-making, better-informed actions, and more efficient business processes. Oracle also provides the industrys only multi-sourced BI applications, as well as market-leading performance management applications that are powered by this BI platform. Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition Plus, also known as OBI EE Plus, is Oracle's set of business intelligence tools consisting of former Siebel business intelligence and Hyperion business intelligence offerings. The former Siebel products were initially23

marketed by the Oracle as Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition while the "Plus" was added along with Hyperion tools in 2007. Often OBIEE is used inter changeably with Oracle Business Intelligence Applications (OBIA) which is pre-built BI and DW solution using OBIEE.

Major Components 1. Oracle BI Server A highly scalable, highly efficient query and analysis server that integrates data via sophisticated query federation capabilities from multiple relational, unstructured, OLAP, and pre-packaged application sources, whether Oracle or non-Oracle. 2. Oracle BI Answers A powerful ad-hoc query and analysis tool that works against a logical view of information from multiple data sources in a pure Web environment. 3. Oracle BI Interactive Dashboard Rich, interactive pure Web dashboards that display personalized information to help guide users in effective decision making. 4. Oracle BI Publisher A highly scalable reporting engine capable of generating reports from multiple data sources in multiple formats via multiple delivery channels. 5. Oracle BI Briefing Books Reports that capture a series of snapshots of an Oracle BI Dashboard or report allowing the information to be viewed offline presentation style. 6. Oracle BI Disconnected Analytics A packaged solution to offer Answers and Dashboards to mobile professionals on computers disconnected from the network. 7. Oracle BI Office Plug-In

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Automatically synchronizes information from Answers to Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. 8. Oracle BI Delivers An alerting engine to capture and distribute notifications via multiple channels in response to predefined business events to speed decision making.

The specialty BI reporting components acquired from Hyperion include a widely deployed set of Business Intelligence tools which offer significant complementary functionality to OBIEE. These areas include strong integration with multidimensional data sources such as Essbase, a report centric approach to query and reporting, as well as robust native access to SAP data. These are referred as the Plus components:

1. Hyperion Financial Reporting a reporting solution for multidimensional data (OLAP) that generates highly formatted, GAAP compliant, book quality financial and management reports and supports the emerging XBRL standard.

2. Hyperion Web Analysis a context driven, thin client reporting and analysis tool that enables the graphical interaction, presentation and reporting of multi-dimensional (OLAP) data. 3. Hyperion Interactive Reporting a report centric query and reporting tool that transforms data from heterogeneous sources into meaningful queries, dashboards and reports via connection through the Oracle BI Server or direct connection to underlying databases as needed.

4. Hyperion SQR a high performance engine and development language for high volume, pixel perfect report creation, spanning multiple enterprise data sources including SAP R/3 and SAP Business Information Warehouse.

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Research MethodologyStatement of Purpose Competitor analysis is an elaborate process which requires research about finding the competitors of the given product after studying the product in detail. The research conducted for this project included Research to know the Competitors for given four Oracle Software products and their pros and cons with respect to their competitors. This was very important as this research for the company as it would enable the company in their strategic planning: To help management understand their competitive advantages/disadvantages relative to competitors. To generate understanding of competitors past, present (and most importantly) future strategies. To provide an informed basis to develop strategies to achieve competitive advantage in the future. To help forecast the returns that may be made from future investments (e.g. how will competitors respond to a new product or pricing strategy).

Type of Study The type of study or research conducted was mainly exploratory research. The main objective of the research was to get to know the competitors of given Oracle software products and their pros and cons with respect to them.

Data Collection For research to be completed data was collected from secondary sources only.The data which are not originally collected but rather obtained from published or unpublished sources are called secondary data. Secondary sources of data for the project were the information from

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various websites including oracles website, blogs of developers and users, discussion forums of developers, oracle white papers and social networking sites. Population Definition The focus is on all the developers and users of oracle software products worldwide.

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Data Analysis 1. Oracle WeblogicWebLogic Competitors Oracle Application Server by Oracle Corp Net Dynamics Application Server by Sun Sybase Enterprise Application Server by Sybase Web Sphere Application Server by IBM Netscape Application Server by Netscape I planet JBoss Apache Liferay Glassfish

Comparison of Oracle WebLogic Server with Apache Tomcat ServerAs the JVM progressed from version to version, there have been substantial improvements made that affect speed such as improved garbage collection. The choice of JVM implementation affects performance as well. If the JVM is the same, the performance differences from picking between Tomcat and WebLogic are minimal. Apache Tomcat Server: Pros 1. Tomcat's memory footprint is much smaller than Oracle WebLogic. On a server short on memory, Tomcat will perform better than WebLogic because it's smaller.

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2. Apache Tomcat support consists of having access to the source code and public message forums on the internet. If developers at a company are self sufficient and can leverage the source code and forums, the cost savings over a license from Oracle can be substantial.

Cons 1. Lower performance with respect to Weblogic. 2. It does not have a fancy graphical interface for configuring and customising, which can be very complicated.

Oracle Weblogic: Pros 1. Oracle Weblogic has technical support for an organization to satisfy risk management in the business. 2. Many organizations are forced to use WebLogic due to middleware application requirements requiring a commercial product such as WebLogic.

Cons 1. The cost of Oracle WebLogic is now over $25,000 per CPU. Many companies need technical support contracts to satisfy risk management.

Comparison of Oracle Weblogic Portal with IBM Websphere PortalIBM Websphere: Pros 1. Websphere portal integrates nicely with WSAD and everything can be done from within Eclipse. 2. Websphere can do lot of XML Integration easily.

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3. From a developer standpoint, you get WSAD (IBM WebSphere Studio IDE) and the portlet development toolkit so you can build portlets directly in the IDE using all the good things WSAD provides, if you have enough memory you can even install the WebSphere Portal Test Environment to run portlets directly into your IDE, so you can place breakpoints etc directly in your code/jsp and live test it. 4. Websphere is the support for the struts framework in portlets. 5. Many jobs available for Websphere as compared to Weblogic.

Cons 1. Websphere has a single configuration for all applications deploy on an application server. If you change one application and the configuration is changed for all applications on the server. 2. In Websphere, web interface is absolutely slow. 3. WebSphere takes up a lot of memory space as well and is slow. Same thing is with integration. WL workshop allows your application (whether portal or webservices) to be integrated with other components residing at one central point. 4. WebSphere takes atleast 5-10 hours to install. Unnecessary stuff is installed. There is no custom setup to disable some components. Atleast 2 GB ram is required for this portal test environment to install.

Oracle Weblogic: Pros 1. The Weblogic Workshop IDE makes developing portals and portlets very easy. You can preview any changes instantly .It is indeed very easy for you to download the BEA Platform and try it. 2. BEA documentation is excellent. You will be able to follow step-by-step instructions to create a Portal and some portlets - and the machine real requirements are not absurd (for a Portal). 3. WebLogic uses a separate domain for each deployed application. If you change configuration for one application, it doesn't affect all the others.30

4. Weblogic is a solid product that has the industry standard for a long time. 5. It is reliable, enterprise ready. 6. Weblogic is very simple to install and work, can be installed in 30 min to 1 hour.

Cons 1. Weblogic Portal needs a huge RAM. It is fairly slow when you edit JSPs. 2. You are tied to use the netui tags for everything. But the fact is that most of those tags do not support run time expressions. It may work simply superb for running a demo, but very hard for day-to-day coding. 3. There are couple of problems with drag & drop features on WebLogic map portlet. 4. WebLogic has a very heavy footprint which causes not as much performance than open source lightweight server like SpringSoruce DM, JBoss do.

Comparison of WebLogic with JBossJBoss: Pros 1. It is an open source which is an important consideration. 2. It has strong support for Hibernate. 3. It runs on any Java platform; is robust and can handle mission-critical applications. 4. JBoss start-up time is quite small (around 25 seconds) for a medium sized application. 5. The Eclipse plug-in for JBoss is quite good. 6. It permits run time debugging as well. 7. In JBoss, you need to set up some Env on your own, which is good in long run. It will kill your time in starting but you can get more and more adequate in future. 8. JBoss is a good app server if you are going to use the core features. 9. JBoss has all the advanced feature support for Clustering, Farming, Load balancing, WebServices, SOA Support etc. Its support services are offered on a

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professional basis, costs of which are competitive as compared to its big brand competitors. Cons 1. JBoss needs more knowledge about J2EE and have to manually create deployment packages. 2. It lacks some control and management features for PITH (Projects in the Huge); simple projects require only some programming knowledge. 3. JBoss is essentially free and customers download multiple copies across a wide area but then face the problem of keeping different versions of their software up-to-date and secure. 4. Although JBoss AS has several browser-based administration interfaces, including a JMX (Java Management Extensions) console, for the most part these interfaces provide information about the server and loaded applications and can't be used for all server configuration and management. 5. JBoss seems to lag behind WebLogic in its security offerings and its integration with external third party security managers. 6. There is a technical problem with JBoss that it uses multicast for replication in a cluster. This does not scale and just generates traffic in your network, not only impacting the application servers, but any other application that uses the network. 7. JBoss is suitable for applications which are of kind of small and medium size with less no of Users.

WebLogic: Pros 1. It has very strong support for high end architecture features such as clustering and scalability. 2. WebLogic has the best integration with other Oracle products such as Fusion Middleware, Oracle database and Oracle applications. 3. WebLogic is very rich in entity beans local implementation and the querying mechanism. 4. WebLogic has container rich features. 5. The WebLogic Server is the most reliable server and complex application server and offers the best support for the real-world applications. 6. Weblogic server is the best choice for a secure and fault-tolerant application.32

7. If concurrent hitting is very huge, one should prefer WebLogic. 8. WebLogic is better documented, and therefore an easier platform to learn on. Cons 1. Although it needs a higher level of understanding of the J2EE concepts. 2. It has a complex configuration and is very expensive.

Comparison of Oracle Products with SAP ProductsOracle: Pros 1. Oracle provides a broad enterprise application product portfolio gained from years of acquisitions of PeopleSoft, Siebel, BEA, Retek and many other companies. 2. It also has one of the leading databases and middleware product offerings. Siebel for CRM and eBusiness for Financials. 4. It is relatively less expensive than SAP. 5. Oracle Applications, with its flexibility and configurability, is a better choice. In fact, Oracle corporate culture, irrespective of what you may think or believe about its founder, appears to value adaptability to economic and market forces, which makes it a better long term business partner than SAP. 3. Oracle has the best-of-breed applications in many key areas PeopleSoft for HR,

Cons 1. SAP customers are often experiencing more complex implementations simply because they are doing more complex things than their Oracle Products. SAP: Pros

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1. SAP too has acquired companies through the years but more on the technology than application side. Thus the SAP product line is well integrated and very stable. 2. SAP has a very strong following in the manufacturing arena and strong functionality for support of manufacturing operations. 3. The SAP product is more monolithic than Oracle, but works very well and modules are well integrated.

Cons 1. SAP is generally implemented at bigger companies than Oracle. 2. SAP personnel costs are higher and consulting rates are higher than Oracle. 3. SAP is expensive to buy, customize and maintain. Not many companies can afford it. 4. SAP has had a history of poor implementations, and is therefore more problematic to implement than Oracle.

2. Oracle Application Development Framework (ADF)Oracle ADF Competitors JBoss Spring Framework TopLink Apex Rice KNS

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Comparison of Oracle ADF with JBOSS SeamBoth frameworks offer similar features in terms of bindings. JBOSS Seam: Pros 1. The key differentiator in Seam is the use of annotations. 2. Seam can work on Glassfish.

Oracle ADF Pros 1. The key differentiator in ADF is more declarative XML approach taken by ADF. 2. ADF is ahead of Seam's offerings, is in the area of customization and personalization as well as tooling.

Cons 1. ADF does not work on Glassfish.

Comparison of ADF Business Components with Spring frameworkSpring: Pros 1. Spring framework is free and free to deploy on any application server or web container. 2. It is a recognized product and is classed as the de facto standard for enterprise application development. 3. You can pay for additional support from Spring Source and training is provided by Spring Source as well as other training vendors.35

4. There are modules provided for security, integration, batch processing. 5. Spring also integrates very well with other frameworks/technologies such as Struts, Hibernate, Mule ESB and even TopLink. 6. A number of IDEs also recognise Spring (Eclipse, NetBeans, IntelliJ IDEA, etc.). Not to forget there is Spring.NET for .NET developers, and Spring Phython for Python developers.

Cons 1. Spring is bad at resolving ambiguities. Autowiring byType or byConstructor might result in ambiguity exception. 2. Avoid NameAware, BeanFactoryAware, and ApplicationContextAware interfaces. 3. It is recommended not to use a broader advice when your requirement could be fulfilled with a more narrow advice. MethodBeforeAdvice or ThrowsAdvice should be preferred over more generic MethodInterceptor if possible. 4. Instead of using broad method point cuts and filtering target methods in interceptor, use more sophisticated and elegant regular expression at the application context level.

Oracle ADF: Pros 1. Oracle ADF is free to deploy on any Oracle-based application server (i.e. WebLogic).and non-Oracle app servers (i.e. JBoss, IBM) or web container (i.e. Tomcat).

Cons 1. You have to pay for licenses. 2. A strong dependency on Weblogic server. 3. If you are a subscriber to the lightweight Spring, you may find ADF's prescribed architecture for business layer to be unwieldy. A number of traditional 'J2EE36

Patterns' have been applied, and the result is the expected extra layers of abstraction (rules on serialization for RMI, etc).

Comparison of ADF Business Components with TopLink

Both TopLink and ADF BC do the same thing - take care of persistence and eliminate a lot of SQL writing for CRUD operations when working with a database. TopLink: Pros 1. TopLink comes from developers who were thinking in object oriented style and wrote something to make interaction between objects and the database simple. 2. TopLink is the reference standard for JPA / EJB 3. 3. TopLink offering more isolation from the DB. 4. TopLink is much more oriented to pure OO developers where your application design is focused on UML class modelling. 5. TopLink went open source as EclipseLink - so you can get a version of it for free and you can also get a licensed version of it. 6. TopLink itself has tooling in JDeveloper and in a standalone mapper tool. 7. With TopLink, you can map ANY business domain model to ANY schema 8. TopLink focuses on providing productive, flexible, and high performance persistence architecture. 9. TopLink can be used in any type of architecture (2-tier, 3-tier with Servlets etc). 10. TopLink provides a Java-based query framework where developers do not need to know SQL to build complex queries. 11. TopLink provides a powerful, but simple to use, graphical workbench tool which enables developers to easily map Java classes to relational schema. 12. The workbench also supports generating Java classes from schema and can also generate schema from Java classes.

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Oracle ADF: Pros 1. ADF BC came from developers who were thinking in the way that most 4GL client/server tools were working which is how do once accesses these tables in the database and show them on my Form. 2. Oracle offers standards based and compatible code, best practices (design patterns already implemented for you), performance and tuning (for ADF BC4J) through ADF frameworks. 3. You can leave ADF whenever you want and return to boring 'manual' JSF plus hibernate architecture. 4. You have now great documentation and a personalised support through Metalink although it could be better. 5. ADF BC has a "Synchronize with DB" option that automatically picks up DB changes and applies them to your components. 6. ADF BC is much more oriented to people who are coming from a database background where they have SQL knowledge, and design their application based on their DB structure. 7. In ADF, GUI design, business and data model are generated automatically. 8. 9. It speeds development, reduces costs, mitigates risk, reduces testing. It allows developers to focus on building application logic.

10. It has tight integration with IDE (JDeveloper). 11. It contains full application development life cycle in a single environment.

Cons 1. ADF supports the other database too like mysql on the compromise of some functionality. But other part of the fusion application somewhere force developers to user oracle database. 2. A number of functionality is totally abstracted like the data controls where users have a very less grip to enhance or modify using the code. 3. As a developer sometime a feeling is not as a developer but a xml developer.

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4. Although in theory you can use any IDE, in practice you really will find it almost impossible to use the full ADF 'stack' (ADF BC + ADF Faces) without using JDeveloper to develop your application. 5. Refactoring can be messy. The idea is that the IDE is smart enough to refactor these objects and change all the relevant XML, but in many cases that's not possible (and manual refactoring is made more difficult by the declarative approach).

Comparison of ADF with ApexBoth Apex and ADF serve overlapping but slightly different purposes and the direction that an organization takes really depends on the amount of money it is willing to spend. Apex: 1. It runs PL/SQL makes it only that much easier to use. 2. Apex has all the power of the database and the web combined. What cannot be achieved within the db can usually be done with straight HTML, JavaScript or if nothing else, an external component any component (including flash, java or web services). 3. The belief that Apex applications published to the internet are not secure is also a pretty big misconception. It is just a matter of architecting the environment correctly.

3. Oracle WebcenterRival Products: IBM WebSphere Portal IBM Lotus Connections Telligent Enterprise Cisco WebEx Connect Novell GroupWise Jive SBS Microsoft Exchange/SharePoint Liferay Social Office/Portal Vignette Social Media Solution39

Every Oracle Fusions Applications user will be using Oracle WebCenter as their starting point. Pros 1. With the WebCenter Extension for JDeveloper, you can easily build portlets taking full advantage of the many sophisticated components in JSF Faces. 2. WebCenter comes with a high-end content management solution as well as a bundled Secure Enterprise Search license. 3. Release 11g will come with very useful pre-built application called WebCenter Spaces that allows you to set up a collaborative workspace. Cons 1. WebCenter is intended for enterprise level customers. You can license the core WebCenter functionality as WebCenter Services ($80,000 per CPU) or the WebCenter Suite (includes Web Content Management, Content DB, AquaLogic Interaction and WebLogic Portal) for $125,000 per CPU. 2. If you do not have this budget, you should look at Oracle Portal instead.

Comparison of Oracle Webcenter with Microsoft Sharepoint

Microsoft SharePoint:Pros 1. MOSS 2007 is experiencing significant adoption by smaller enterprises as well as some penetration in larger organizations for that use case, for content-centric partner extranets and customer-facing Web presences.40

2. It shows promise for departmental-level portal requirements. 3. Use of MOSS 2007 for team-based collaboration and document management is driving MOSS use for other initiatives, including portals. 4. Microsoft is successfully fostering initial MOSS 2007 deployments through Enterprise Licensing agreements. 5. SharePoint comes from the worlds largest software maker, Microsoft. 6. It comes in both 32 bit as well as 64 bit versions 7. SharePoint makes sense for customers with a heavy investment in Microsoft technology (Server, .Net Framework, SQL Server, and Office) 8. Sharepoint is very tightly coupled and integrated with Microsoft Office, Exchange, Biztalk Server. 9. SharePoint supports the WSRP 2.0 (Web Services for Remote Portlets). 10. Web interface is very user friendly. It has Ajax-based user interface (UI), along with a new rich text editor. 11. Documentation is good and easily accessible at your fingertips. 12. Sharepoint provides very robust support for both sequential as well as state workflows. 13. Sharepoint works on both Windows Server 2003 as well as 2008.

Cons 1. MOSS 2007 does not offer full support for enterprise mashups or social networking. 2. MOSS is not yet being widely deployed for high-volume, transactional portals. Although some organizations pursue custom WebPart creation for applications access, the relative lack of Business Data Catalogue use in B2E portals indicates MOSS isn't being used widely to access applications. 3. Widespread interest and adoption of MOSS means locating resources for new projects will be time-consuming and costly, and MOSS users indicate Microsoft, although actively working to address the issue doesn't have adequate support structures and skills in place for larger, more-complex MOSS deployments. 4. SharePoint Online is still inadequate for many horizontal-portal scenarios.41

5. SharePoint supports just one database and it is Microsoft SQL Server 6. SharePoint does not support hot deployment of JSR 168 compliant portlets 7. SharePoint is a .NET-based Portal Framework it does not support JSR-168.

Oracle WebcenterPros 1. Oracle plans to incorporate much of BEA's most-interesting technology into its strategic portal and user interaction platform offerings, including functionality found in the former BEA Ensemble, Pathways and Analytics offerings, as well as the .NET Accelerator. 2. By continuing to offer the WebLogic Portal products, Oracle gains a credible, proven offering for high-volume, large-scale, customer-facing portals. 3. Oracle can provide users with portal and enterprise content management (ECM) capabilities (Universal Content Management), although the integration available with Universal Content Management depends on which of Oracle's portal offerings is also leveraged. 4. Oracle is an aggressive adopter of portlet-related standards and is an early adopter of JSR 286 (Portlet 2.0) and WSRPv2. 5. WebCenter Interaction comes from the stable of Oracle. 6. It provides support for multiple database vendors and databases, namely Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle as well as IBM DB2. 7. It works well with both Java as well as .NET technologies 8. It also supports other app servers including IIS 9. Webcenter is coupled with Microsoft Office. 10. Webcenter interface development is very tightly coupled with Oracle JDeveloper which enables creation of compliant portlets easily. 11. WebDAV stands for Web Based Distributed Authoring & Versioning. It is a set of extensions to the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) that allows computer-users to edit and manage files collaboratively on remote World Wide Web servers. WCI supports WebDAV. 12. It has very good Ajax-based web user interface.

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13. Collaborative Document Management System is very good in WCI with Oracle pitching forward with its Oracle UCM (Universal Content Management) in the latest version of WCI.

Cons 1. WebCenter Framework, the basis for Oracle's two strategic portal and user interaction offerings (WebCenter Services and WebCenter Suite), lacks a significant track record for transactional portals or portals supporting large numbers of concurrent users accessing applications. 2. Oracle's plan to integrate large components of its four portal products including AquaLogic User Interaction (ALUI) with WebCenter Framework as the WebCenter Suite Offering is a significant technical challenge, and full integration may not occur within 12 to 18 months. WebCenter Spaces, which is part of the plan for the WebCenter 11g release, includes some of the functionality also delivered by ALUI. 3. Oracle faces a significant challenge to ensure that its prospective customers, its established portal users and its new Enterprise 2.0 sales force understand the use scenarios for the four portal and user interaction offerings on its active price list (WebCenter Services, WebCenter Suite, WebLogic Portal and Oracle Portal), as well as the relationships among the four offerings. 4. Oracle has committed to support products in its "Continue and Converge" classification, including Oracle Portal, ALUI and WebLogic Portal, for a minimum of nine years. However, there is a significant risk that existing customers, especially those on older versions of the BEA portal products, will migrate to a competitor's portal product rather than pursue WebCenter Framework as the technical foundation for their portal projects. 5. Documentation of WCI is a little hard to get since WCI has evolved as mentioned earlier from BEA ALUI and Plumtree. 6. WCI has support for only sequential Workflow. 7. It does not yet works with Windows Server 2008.

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4.Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition(OBIEE) OBIEE Competitors Microsoft BI IBM Cognos SAP Business Objects SAS

Comparison of OBIEE with Business Objects Pros 1. OBIEE provides Hierarchy Drilling. 2. Graphical Reporting (Charts, Pivots, Gauges, etc) 3. Scheduled Report Generation 4. Ad Hoc Analysis 5. Global support and development capability 6. Mass deployment via Intranet 7. It deploys on all platforms. 8. It reduces Skills required for report production. 9. It removes redundancy in Report production.

10. It removes time to produce reports, enabling more time to analyse the results. 11. OBIEE provides Actionable Insight i.e. it highlights where action is required. 12. It enables Single Version of the Truth Common data and reporting objects. 13. OBIEE can be used to develop full featured interactive dashboards, and reports. 14. It provides a scalable architecture that can plug into an existing BI deployment. 15. It can produce reports from several data sourcesflat files, relational and multidimensional cubes.16. OBIEE includes unique features not readily available in other BI platforms such 44

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Findings & Observations 1. Oracle WeblogicWith Apache Tomcat Server 1. As the JVM progressed from version to version, there have been substantial improvements made that affect speed such as improved garbage collection. The choice of JVM implementation affects performance as well. If the JVM is the same, the performance differences from picking between Tomcat and WebLogic are minimal. 2. Apache Tomcat support consists of having access to the source code and public message forums on the internet. If developers at a company are self sufficient, they prefer Apache tomcat server as they save cost for license. 3. If an organisation is more prone to risk then to satisfy risk management, an organisation prefer commercial product like Weblogic. 4. An organisation prefer Weblogic if they need a technical support from Oracle.

With JBoss 1. For better performance and for applications that are not extremely complex, JBoss is the optimal choice. It is also free but is needed more knowledge about J2EE and have to manually create deployment packages. Runs on any Java platform; is robust and can handle mission-critical applications. programming knowledge. 2. Since JBoss is open source, and is a very complete and well-build package, people tend to use JBoss more commonly and experienced less frustration with JBoss. With a45

Lacks some control and management

features for PITH (Projects in the Huge); simple projects require only some

basic open source framework to build on and make desired small changes to, people can get what they want in a hurry. 3. The WebLogic Server is the most reliable server and complex application server and offers the best support for the real-world applications.4. Although WebLogic server needs a higher level of understanding of the J2EE

concepts, has a complex configuration and is very expensive, this server is the best choice for a secure and fault-tolerant application. 5. WebLogic is the most reliable application server and is more suitable for complex, fault-tolerant applications.

With SAP 1. SAP is generally implemented at bigger companies than Oracle. SAP personnel costs are higher and consulting rates are higher than Oracle. 2. SAP is expensive to customize.SAP is like the Ferrari of the ERP world, loved by the very high end of the market but expensive to buy, customize and maintain. Not many companies can afford it. But if you need the sports car they are tough to beat. 3. Oracle on the other hand is like the Mercedes Benz of the ERP world, with its broad product line and strong underlying technology. Certainly not cheap to buy or maintain, but available to a larger audience and relatively less expensive than SAP.

With IBM WebSphere 1. Both the products have almost same features. 2. Websphere portal integrates nicely with WSAD and it can do lot of XML Integration easily. It has a support for the struts framework in portlets. 3. Websphere has a single configuration for all applications deploy on an application server. If you change one application and the configuration is changed for all applications on the server. Also web interface is absolutely slow. 4. WebSphere takes up a lot of memory space as well and is slow. WebSphere takes atleast 5-10 hours to install. Unnecessary stuff is installed. There is no custom setup to disable some components. Atleast 2 GB ram is required for this portal test environment to install. The Weblogic Workshop IDE makes developing portals and46

portlets very easy. You can preview any changes instantly .It is indeed very easy for you to download the BEA Platform and try it. 5. BEA documentation is excellent. You will be able to follow step-by-step instructions to create a Portal and some portlets - and the machine real requirements are not absurd (for a Portal). 6. WebLogic uses a separate domain for each deployed application. If you change configuration for one application, it doesn't affect all the others. 7. Weblogic is a solid product that has the industry standard for a long time. It is reliable, enterprise ready. Weblogic is very simple to install and work, can be installed in 30 min to 1 hour. 8. Weblogic Portal needs a huge RAM. 9. You are tied to use the netui tags for everything. But the fact is that most of those tags do not support run time expressions. It may work simply superb for running a demo, but very hard for day-to-day coding. 10. There are couple of problems with drag & drop features on WebLogic map portlet.

2. Oracle Application Development Framework(ADF)With JBoss Seam 1. Both frameworks offer similar features in terms of bindings. 2. The key differentiator is the use of annotations in Seam versus the more declarative XML approach taken by ADF. In terms of conversation, this is governed by the controller in ADF versus the model driven approach taken by Seam. ADF is ahead of JBoss's offerings, is in the area of customization and personalization as well as tooling.

2. Seam can work on Glassfish, but ADF is not!!!!

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The data that has been collected during the research has been analyzed in the previous chapter. The main findings of the study are given below:

Advantages of Using Oracle

Oracle takes a lead role because of some of the following reasons: Oracle is used for almost all large application and one of the main applications in which oracle takes its major presence is banking. In fact ten of the worlds top 10 banks run Oracle applications this is because oracle offers a powerful combination of technology and comprehensive, pre-integrated business applications, including key functionality built specifically for banks. Some similar databases like Sybase, SQL-Server one have facilities for using loops, conditions, arrays and so on in a program and also facilities like cursors and temp tables but all this would be used in a convoluted fashion which are very slow and resource consuming operations. The operations are not implemented as in Oracle which is efficient enough. Also with the features available in oracle with the earlier versions in market the oracle company keeps upgrading and releasing new products into market, new versions releases which serves better than the earlier versions and thus the performance is improved much in later versions and thereby retaining the market growth and thus proves greater satisfaction to the customers using this technology. Thus the advantage of a higher version is that one would have more features and better capabilities. For instance oracle 8i version has many new features which helped users namely like with oracle 8i one could run Java in the database, had features like new features on partitioning to48

support large database and so on. With the next version 9i oracle had these facilities maintained and had more new facilities added to it namely like new features added to help the DBA to handle change database configuration and so on. Oracle is a database that responds very well with excellent performance in demanding environments. Oracle is a major database which along with its added features passes the ACID test, which is important in insuring the integrity of data. This is very important because data is the heart of any system in organization. A reliable and adequate database system has the following properties:

Atomicity: That is Results of a transaction's execution are either all committed or all rolled back. Consistency: The database is transformed from one valid state to another valid state. Illegal transactions aren't allowed and, if an integrity constraint can't be satisfied then the transaction is rolled back. Isolation: The results of a transaction are invisible to other transactions until the transaction is complete thus increasing the security on data. Durability: Once committed (completed), the results of a transaction are permanent and survive future system and media failures and thus ensuring maintenance and protection of data. All the above are well maintained by Oracle database. The latest version oracle 10g has many features and one new feature is the introduction of recycle bin. This option when enabled could be used by users just like Windows recycle bin or Mac Trash. Dropped tables go "into" the recycle bin, and can be restored from the recycle bin. One of the main advantage of oracle over other databases is in its recent version oracle has the concept of Flashback technology. That is we all know that data is the heart of any application or organization and thus this requires careful maintenance. But sometimes application outage can occur and mostly DBA claim the reasons for this as hardware failure49

and apart from this the reason would be human errors like accidental deletion of valuable data, deleting the wrong data, or dropping the wrong table. So it is very essential to take care of such situation and this is done in oracle's latest technology called flash introduced in its latest version. By Flash technology it helps in recovery by working just on the changed data. Thus Flashback provides an Efficient recovery from human errors Faster database recovery Helps in simplifying the management and administration processes

and so on. Thus oracle has many advantages and features that give security, protection, maintenance, reliability and performance on operation of data and with this in addition its main popularity and stability is because it keeps on adding new features which makes it user friendly for users and popularly used database among organizations.

RecommendationsTune the OS

UNIX Tuning Parameters For better TCP (transmission control protocol) socket performance, set the tcp_time_wait_interval parameter. This parameter determines the time interval that a TCP socket is kept alive after issuing a close call. The default value of this parameter on Solaris is four minutes. When a large number of clients connect for a short amount of time, holding these socket resources can have a significant negative impact on performance. Setting this50

parameter to a value of 60000 (60 seconds) has shown a significant throughput enhancement when running benchmark JSP tests on Solaris. You might want to reduce this setting further if the server gets backed up with a queue of half-opened connections.# ndd -set /dev/tcp tcp_time_wait_interval 60000

Tunables AIX Tunables - Google "AIX Performance Management Guide"; Solaris Tunables - Google "Solaris 9 Tunables"; Linux Tuning Parameters - Google "Linux Tuning Parameters".Optimize Your Database

Having a good database design always helps, but that may not be possible at times of performance testing. But still, understand how a database server works and know the tools that can help you monitor the transactions will be a big plus. One key metric to monitor is disk I/O (usually that is the bottleneck for a database). Disk I/O optimization is related directly to throughput and scalability. Access to even the fastest disk is orders of magnitude slower than memory access. Whenever possible, optimize the number of disk accesses. In general, selecting a larger block/buffer size for I/O reduces the number of disk accesses and might substantially increase throughput in a heavily loaded production environment. Oracle determine number of processes (how many concurrent users on the database server?) SELECT name, value FROM v$parameter WHERE name = 'processes'; Share pool size: SELECT * FROM v$sgastat WHERE name = 'free memory' AND pool = 'shared pool'; Other areas include Max opened cursor, database block size, and sort area size. Microsoft SQL Server Store tempdb on a fast I/O device (SAN device) Increase the recovery internval if perfmon shows an increase in I/O. Use an I/O block size larger than 2KB. Identify the Best JVM SettingsTune your JVM's heap garbage collection and heap size parameters to get the best performance out of your JVM. The Sun HotSpot and WebLogic JRockit JVM parameters that most significantly affect performance are listed below. For more detailed information, consult your JVM vendor's tuning documentation, as well as the JVM-related reading material at Java Virtual Machine (JVM) Information.Sun JDK When using the HotSpot VM option (-server or -client), experiment with the following garbage collection parameters: * * * * -Xms and -Xmx (use equal settings at start up) -XX:NewSize and -XX:MaxNewSize -XX:SurvivorRatio -XX:+UseISM -XX:+AggressiveHeap

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For more information about tuning the HotSpot JVM, Google "JVM Heap Size and Garbage Collection". JRockit JDK When using JRockit's JVM, experiment with the following garbage collection parameters: * * * * -Xms and -Xmx (use equal settings at startup) -Xns -Xgc: parallel -XXenablefatspin

Monitor Disk and CPU Utilization

nmon is an excellent tool to report your system utilization including CPU and IO. See nmon page.After following the previous steps, run your application under a high load while monitoring the: * Application server (disk and CPU utilization) * Database server (disk and CPU utilization) To check your disk utilization on Solaris or Linux, use the iostat -D command, where the interval value determines how many seconds you want to elapse between monitoring cycles. To check your CPU utilization, simply leave off the -D flag (iostat ). For Windows, use the Performance Monitor tool (perfmon), to monitor both your disk and CPU utilization.

Top Tuning Recommendations for WebLogic ServerPerformance tuning WebLogic Server and your WebLogic Server application is a complex and iterative process. To get you started, we have created a short list of recommendations to help you optimize your applications performance. These tuning techniques are applicable to nearly all WebLogic applications. Tune Pool Sizes Use the Prepared Statement Cache Use Logging Last Resource Optimization Tune Connection Backlog Buffering Tune the Chunk Size Use Optimistic or Read-only Concurrency Use Local Interfaces Use eager-relationship-caching 52

Tune HTTP Sessions Tune Messaging Applications

Tune Pool SizesProvide pool sizes (such as pools for JDBC connections, Stateless Session EJBs, and MDBs) that maximize concurrency for the expected thread utilization. For WebLogic Server releases 9.0 and higherA server instance uses a self-tuned thread-pool. The best way to determine the appropriate pool size is to monitor the pool's current size, shrink counts, grow counts, and wait counts. See Thread Management. Tuning MDBs are a special case, please see Tuning Message-Driven Beans. For releases prior to WebLogic Server 9.0 In general, the number of connections should equal the number of threads that are expected to be required to process the requests handled by the pool. The most effective way to ensure the right pool size is to monitor it and make sure it does not shrink and grow. See Using the WebLogic 8.1 Thread Pool Model.

Use the Prepared Statement CacheThe prepared statement cache keeps compiled SQL statements in memory, thus avoiding a round-trip to the database when the same statement is used later. See Tuning JDBC Applications.

Use Logging Last Resource OptimizationWhen using transactional database applications, consider using the JDBC data source Logging Last Resource (LLR) transaction policy instead of XA. The LLR optimization can significantly improve transaction performance by safely eliminating some of the 2PC XA overhead for database processing, especially for two-phase commit database insert, update, and delete operations. For more information, see Tuning JDBC Applications.

Tune Connection Backlog BufferingYou can tune the number of connection requests that a WebLogic Server instance accepts before refusing additional requests. This tunable applies primarily for web applications. See Tuning Connection Backlog Buffering.

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Tune the Chunk SizeA chunk is a unit of memory that the WebLogic Server network layer, both on the client and server side, uses to read data from and write data to sockets. A server instance maintains a pool of these chunks. For applications that handle large amounts of data per request, increasing the value on both the client and server sides can boost performance. See Tune the Chunk Parameters.

Use Optimistic or Read-only ConcurrencyUse optimistic concurrency with cache-between-transactions or read-only concurrency with query-caching for CMP EJBs wherever possible. Both of these two options leverage the Entity Bean cache provided by the EJB container. Optimistic-concurrency with cache-between-transactions work best with read-mostly beans. Using verify-reads in combination with these provides high data consistency guarantees with the performance gain of caching. See Tuning WebLogic Server EJBs. Query-caching is a WebLogic Server 9.0 feature that allows the EJB container to cache results for arbitrary non-primary-key finders defined on read-only EJBs. All of these parameters can be set in the application/module deployment descriptors. See Concurrency Strategy.

Use Local InterfacesUse local-interfaces or use call-by-reference semantics to avoid the overhead of serialization when one EJB calls another or an EJB is called by a servlet/JSP in the same application. Note the following: In release prior to WebLogic Server 8.1, call-by-reference is turned on by default. For releases of WebLogic Server 8.1 and higher, call-by-reference is turned off by default. Older applications migrating to WebLogic Server 8.1 and higher that do not explicitly turn on call-by-reference may experience a drop in performance. This optimization does not apply to calls across different applications.

Use eager-relationship-cachingUse eager-relationship-caching wherever possible. This feature allows the EJB container to load related beans using a single SQL statement. It improves performance by reducing the number of database calls to load related beans in transactions when a bean and it's related beans are expected to be used in that transaction. See Tuning WebLogic Server EJBs.

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Tune HTTP SessionsOptimize your application so that it does as little work as possible when handling session persistence and sessions. You should also design a session management strategy that suits your environment and application. See Session Management.

Tune Messaging ApplicationsBEA provides messaging users a rich set of performance tunables. In general, you should always configure quotas and paging. See: Tuning the WebLogic Persistent Store Tuning WebLogic JMS Tuning WebLogic JMS Store-and-Forward Tuning WebLogic Message Bridge

Agile and self-service BI. Even though one can argue that CEIM, enabling BI reporting from Fusion apps out of the box, and new text to query capabilities are indeed the right steps on the road to Agile BI and equally important on the way to self-service BI many necessary components are still missing Anything (really anything) about BI SaaS Collaboration features (such as tight email integration, for example) beyond Oracle Web Center integration

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LimitationsThough the present study aims to achieve the above mentioned objective in full earnestness and accuracy; it is hampered due to certain limitation. Some of the limitation of the study is summarized as follows:

The project had a time constraint. Due to time limit it was very difficult to collect data. All the data collected was from secondary data. It was collected from websites, communities and blogs. So, it is difficult trust the source of data. The data given by some respondent might be biased. As research was conducted for a time interval of 2 months; any new updating in technical specifications or prices of the software product may not be reflected in the project.

Most of the data available for the competitors products are before the merging/taking over of the companies as Oracle has taken over most of the competitors products which indirectly reduce the threats for the company though they lack technically in their products.

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BibliographyBooks & Reference Materials: Marketing Management South Asian perspective Philip Kotler, Koshy,Jha 14th edition Marketing Research Third Edition G C Beri Marketing Research Third Edition Rajendra Nargundkar Oracle White Papers

Websites http://download.oracle.com http://blogs.oracle.com http://www.theserverside.com http://stackoverflow.com http://it.toolbox.com http://www.vibrantchannels.com http://en.wikipedia.org http://forums.oracle.com http://www.inside-oracle-apex.com http://.oracle.com

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