eDiscovery Roadshow

This week we completed our Australia-wide roadshow around eDiscovery focusing on the impact of the new Federal Court practice notes that are expected at any time. I had the pleasure of MC'ing the event and introducing our 3 guest speakers for the FREE breakfast technology briefings. First up was Dr Bradley Schatz from Vincents Chartered Accountants in Brisbane. Bradley is a world-renowned expert in computer forensics and one of 6 people to hold a doctorate in the subject. Bradley presented to the audience his views, in a very informative keynote, on eDiscovery, computer forensics and the new federal court practice notes that will impact almost every organisation in Australia.

Following this, I introduced two of Oracle's leading pre-sales architects - Peter Elford in Canberra, Brisbane and Perth, Tim Gregory in Melbourne and Sydney - to the audience. Oracle presented its Universal Online Archive (UOA) solution which forms the infrastructure repository against which any type of content can be stored, managed and protected for pro-active eDiscovery.

Tim and Peter also provided a demonstration of the image capture solution (ex-Captovation) that forms an integral part of the Oracle solution for eDiscovery. Dealing with extensive volumes of paperwork is something that organisations will have to contend with for a few more years yet. Oracle provides the ability to scan and acquire paper as digitised images and then ingest this information into the archive. This is the same type of solution as offered to ERP applications users for environments such as 'Accounts Payable' where invoice processing is required.

Finally, David Edson from Hyro presented his views on large-scale ECM system implementations. Hyro have worked with Oracle on a number of system implementations and have experience most of what can go wrong with an IT project. Hyro are offering a free half-day workshop to the event attendees to run through an organisations requirements and to advise on an appropriate strategy moving forward.

Congratulations to the winners of the Penfolds Grange handed out at the end of each event.

The 5 events were attended by almost 300 delegates representing around 200 different organisations. If we missed you at these events and you want to know more - please contact us directly. We are in the middle of processing the evaluation forms collected at the events and will be arranging follow-up sessions in the next few months.

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Paul


(l to r) Tim Gregory (Oracle), David Edson (Hyro), Dr. Bradley Schatz (Vincents) and Paul Ricketts (Oracle)

eDiscovery Customer and Partner Event

In August 2008, Oracle is hosting an eDiscovery event with two strategic partners across Australia. Presenting with Oracle will be Vincents and Hyro - two strategic partners working with us on this initiative.

You can register to attend by clicking here.

The event will be informative if you are interested in learning more about eDiscovery and want to see how solutions from Oracle can help you in the future.

This will be a multi-city event across Brisbane, Canberra, Melbourne, Sydney and Perth and will educate on the new practice notes that came into effect on the 1st July 2008. Oracle will be previewing its Universal Online Archive solution that provides a proactive repository within which an organisations information assets can be stored and managed effectively.

We look forward to welcoming you to these events and meeting you in person.

Paul

Do You Want to Streamline Your Applications?

Oracle has acquired a lot of technology recently - some of the biggest acquisitions have been within the Applications space. In addition to the Oracle eBusiness Suite, we own PeopleSoft, Siebel and JD Edwards and our acquisition of the Stellent technology in November 2006 puts us into a great position to underpin these applications with real-value content solutions.

Let's take a financials package for example, Oracle eBusiness Suite (EBS). Many organisations have successfully deployed this application to streamline their business processes but have neglected to solve an issue that causes headaches within the business teams. The handling of paper-based information within a financials process occurs on a daily basis and at certain periods (end of month, end of year predominately) the volume of paper being handled rises dramatically. Handling paper through a review and approvals process generates risk for an organisation. Believe it or not, the risk of spilling a cup of coffee on the paper is pretty high in most organisations as is simply mis-placing or losing the paper itself. Internal envelopes are notorious for getting lost for months-on-end - I've heard so many horror stories around this in my past. In addition to the risk of damaging or losing the paper, the process itself becomes long and cumbersome. Manual review and approval of paper - including the necessary cross-checks required can take anything from a week to a month to complete which in today's electronic age should be unacceptable to most organisations - particularly those that supply you with their goods!

There are solutions that help streamline the process through image-capture and electronic workflow processing. These solutions are easy to implement, highly-configurable as required and on the grand-scheme of things - relatively cheap to procure and own.

Now, of course, Oracle doesn't only look after it's own applications. SAP is out there being used by many organisations to run their businesses - we know a fair bit about this as most of the large deployments run Oracle's database at the back-end. SAP has a relatively good content management solution within its environment - but it is not considered by many to be enterprise-class as it doesn't really support the majority of ECM capabilities outside of its own ecosystem. Within SAP we provide an important and crucial solution that helps streamline the application itself ensuring ongoing performance without the need to consistently invest in new hardware. This solution is called SAP Archiving and is based upon the principal that only a relatively small percentage of data within SAP is actually being used. Once a financial transaction is complete, for example, the details (including any unstructured information) can be shipped out of the live environment into an archive - as long as it remains accessible if required. The Oracle Universal Online Archive solution fits this requirement nicely.

We are running a series of informative events in Sydney and Melbourne in the next few months to educate our customers and partners around these solutions. If you would like to be a part of these events, please let use know otherwise watch this space for registration details.

Paul

Unstructured Information Management a Problem? There is an Answer!

A recent Varonis Systems funded survey of 870 IT professionals found that only 23% believed unstructured data stored by their companies is properly secured and protected.

BELIEVE ME WHEN I SAY THAT THIS IS NOTHING NEW!

Unstructured information has ALWAYS been difficult to store and protect when so many organisations still rely on antiquated and outdated solutions that include simple file-system and PST environments. ECM solutions, and let's face the truth here, have existed for almost 20 years as mainstream-solutions to this very problem. Today's technologies allow for the automated categorisation and classification of unstructured information in an efficient and controlled manner and there is really no excuse for this result other that apathy and complacency in existence across these organisations.

Let's look at where unstructured information comes from...

1. Desktop document/presentation/spreadsheet tools and I'll use Microsoft Office as an example here. These solutions allow users to store their unstructured information, as a choice, on their local or network drives.
2. Email systems allowing users to create and store their unstructured information in, for example, a PST file on their local or network drives.
3. Workgroup tools, and I will include SharePoint in this, that allow users to store information more effectively that on their local or network drives - but still within a Silo.

Organisations are being taken down the path of ensuring that unstructured information is discoverable - this drive is coming predominately through legislative changes but also through knowledge management initiatives. To enable an organisation to respond to these drivers, an Enterprise-Class Content Management solution MUST be enabled that encompasses the management of office, email and 'siloed' information environments.

This is a blog that is contributed to by Oracle employees so it should come as no surprise to read that I will say, here and now, we have a solution to your unstructured information management problems - and we are far from being alone in the market. The issue, and this comes from 9 years of experience in this space, is that it is the business units that need to drive IT into providing a solution and not the other way around. Traditional solutions driven by IT address very specific requirements - I have lots of employees to manage therefore I need an HRMS, I have lots of customers to manage therefore I need a CRMS. The answer to the question of 'I have lots of documents to manage, how do I do so' is unfortunately answered on the whole with 'we already have a solution, it's called Windows Explorer and you can store your information on the network'.

The problem here is that once stored, either locally or 'on the network' - it is pretty difficult to provide access to anybody else - unless you've configured an enterprise indexing/search tool and this happens to be configured to look at all drives across the corporate systems. A centralised repository, that maybe deployed across multiple geographies and business units, really does help here. The Oracle solution for eDiscovery for example, is called Universal Online Archive and will eventually have the capability to store any corporate unstructured or semi-structured information.

The survey goes on to say, and I quote here, '61% of respondents say they cannot keep track of which users access specific unstructured data, and 91% say their organisations lack the ability to determine data ownership because of faulty governance policies and a lack of available storage tools that can remedy the problem'. Of course, the problem cannot be simply addressed through the implementation of technology. If it could, we would have every IT manager around the world knocking on our (collective) doors demanding that we sell them our latest and greatest solution right now as it represents the answer to all their prayers!

Organisations do have to develop maturity around unstructured information management if they are to succeed in solving their core issues that will eventuate into a successful ECM implementation. Policies and procedures is a good place to start for managing important corporate information. Educating their personnel is another place to go to - developing a message that storing emails in a PST file is a really bad this for the organisation as a whole and taking this out to every employee is another important message. Developing a taxonomy against which unstructured information is classified is equally as relevant for a large organisations.

The survey closes by stating the obvious - it is not a question of money, IT departments always have funding for projects that reduce costs and risks to the organisation - it is a question of the organisation simply not knowing where to start resolving the issue because of the complexities involved in managing unstructured information.

Here again, companies like Oracle have consultancy practices that really, truly and definitely CAN help!

Paul

Oracle Universal Online Archive Has Analysts Buzzing

Oracle Universal Online Archive (UOA) is getting positive notice in the email archiving space. According to Ovum Research: "This is another demonstration of the bringing to fruition the combined capabilities of both the Oracle and former Stellent teams, melding understanding of content types with that of high volume storage. Good move, very timely."



Oracle recently announced its latest offering to help organisations manage their information. This product, the Oracle Universal Online Archive, provides a secure repository accessible through an Open API including pre-defined web-services. The repository provides record retention and disposition management, auto-classification and information de-duplication for any type of corporate information including structured data from applications and semi-structured and unstructured data from desktop-systems, collaborative interfaces, scanned or faxed imaged, audio from telephony systems and video from closed-circuit security systems as examples.

By far, the leading source of information within an organisation is within the email system. The first release of the Universal Online Archive solution addresses this precise issue by supporting email management from Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Notes and a more generic SMTP interface. This integration allows for a filtered set of all inbound and outbound emails to be captured and stored within the repository. The repositories data de-duplication solution allows for single-point storage of these emails dramatically reducing the storage overhead for the archive in this environment.

An organisations' intellectual property is most often held within semi-structured and unstructured information formats including Microsoft Office formats, blogs, wiki’s and other solutions. The archive allows for this information to be ingested and managed securely within the repository alongside emails. The same set of retention and disposition policies can be applied to all formats of data held within the repository and information can be auto-classified in the same way also.

Data held in a financials solution can also be managed by the online archive repository as can data from HRMS, CRM and even an ERP solution and yes, we support SAP here as well!

Being based upon Oracle’s 11g platform, the archive provides you with unparalled scalability and all 11g database options are enabled including RAC. A wide-range of back-end storage platforms are natively supported including EMC, HDS, IBM and Pillar Datasystems Axiom product that offers equivalent storage and capacity at roughly a quarter of the price of its competition.

Oracle's research and development team has built a set of tools around the archive repository ensuring that data ingestion as well as data-analysis occurs with industry-leading performance and responsiveness.

Of course, the primary reason for implementing an archive is to support eDiscovery activities that could include legal-litigation against an organisation.

eDiscovery is a 7-step process for most organisations - reducing potentially millions of items of information down to the level of hundreds relevant to the activity. The Oracle Universal Online Archive is designed to provide an organisation with a secure, online repository of all corporate content. This ensures that in the event of an eDiscovery event taking place – there is no need, or at least a significantly reduced need, to load information from either paper of from disk-drives.

This means that organisation's can see significant reductions in costs associated with eDiscovery as well as reducing risk. New Australian legislation, currently in the court system, will enforce a requirement to adequately retain and dispose of corporate information in preparation for eDiscovery and in particular – litigation. Oracle’s Universal Online Archive solution is the only end-to-end platform that is capable of storing ANY corporate asset including documents, audio and video alongside structured data from your core-systems including CRM, HRMS and ERP.