Oracle Launches iPhone Applications

There's been a lot of talk about the highly-anticipated 3g iPhone release last week. I queued up and got my hands on a 16gb Black model Thursday night and am very happy with the device. A lot of organisations are preparing to release their applications for the iPhone, taking advantage of a. the wider release and availability and b. the significantly faster connectivity provided through 3g.

Dennis Howlett, a long-time critiquer of Oracle's products, spoke last week on his blog about the first of our iPhone applications - Business Indicators. He found it 'hard to fault the company for piggybacking on a platform that is getting plenty of attention. Even better that it is offered as a free download'. Thank you Dennis!

Oracle's new applications are focussed on the business intelligence world where key decision makers require up-to-date access to critical business information. Te new applications allow finger-tip access to key business metrics and analytical data - Oracle is clear in saying that the iPhone solution is NOT intended to replace a complete user dashboard experience. The application, known as Oracle Business Indicators, uses the service-orientated-architecture (SOA) capabilities of OBIEE and Oracle Business Intelligence web services to access reports and metric data from within the OBIEE catalogue. Access to custom reports from this environment are not yet available. Security and access controls are also managed by OBIEE - this is the same solution for more traditional desktop users.

Coming soon will be applications that manage the 'Approval' of information - suitable for purchasing, recruitment and expense reporting. Also, to follow will be applications that support CRM and ERP environments amongst others. One of Oracle's competitors released their version of the BI application for the Blackberry in 2007. One of the key differences is the platform of course, Blackberry's are generally provided by an organisation to an individual whilst the iPhone has been traditionally procured by individuals. In a world where form-factor is as important as functionality - user-experience with the large touchscreen with be preferred to the smaller displays offered by Blackberries. The development kit provided by Apple for the iPhone will also be a strong reason why we may see iPhones becoming common tools within the corporate world.

Paul

Enterprise Information Management

On the 3^rd March 2008, Oracle announced enhancements to the Enterprise Content Management platform at the AIIM conference and expo in Boston. Amongst the new feature and integration capability information was the announcement that the UCM platform integrates with the Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher. This is a core part of an organisations Enterprise Information Management (EIM) strategy and it is exciting that Oracle has brought together two acquired technologies with its own to provide this solution for our customers. This is highlighted in the following graphic:


Oracle's BI server provides the ability to abstract, model, cache, calculate, optimise, analyse and report upon data from a wide-variety of information sources – including relational databases and applications. The UCM platform provides four key capabilities to the enterprise include document and records management, collaboration, process management and web-content management – all falling under the ECM umbrella.

ThThis announcement brings these two technologies together by:

1. Providing the ability for information (e.g. reports) generated by the BI server to be stored and managed in Oracle’s UCM repository leveraging this environment’s version management and security features.
2. Providing the capability for the information to be published, under tight content management control, to an intranet or portal environment

Of course, the integration provides for more than a simple repository and publishing mechanism for our BI customers. The UCM platform is able to provide an unstructured repository that itself can be analysed and reported upon by the BI application which leads itself well into the world of eDiscovery. Supporting information can also be published by the UCM platform to support a report or a dashboard view of the enterprise, e.g. a set of scanned invoices can be made available to a report detailing accounts payable transactions from the ERP system.

Paul