Oracle – Digital IT News

Oracle and Digital Realty Collaboration Supports the Next Era of Workloads

Taylor Graham — Fri, 03 May 2024 19:05:58 +0000

Digital Realty announced a partnership with Oracle that is intended to accelerate the expansion and adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) within businesses. This strategic collaboration is geared towards creating hybrid integrated solutions to tackle Data Gravity challenges, expedite the time to market for enterprises to introduce next-generation AI services, and unlock business outcomes driven by data and AI.

As part of this collaboration, Oracle will deploy critical GPU-based infrastructure in a dedicated Digital Realty data center in Northern Virginia. This deployment, which leverages Digital Realty’s open, purpose-built global data center solution PlatformDIGITAL®, will cater to a wide range of enterprises and AI customers, helping them to address critical infrastructure challenges, including those experienced with NVIDIA and AMD deployments. By leveraging the expertise and resources of both Oracle and Digital Realty, customers with mixed requirements can benefit from a tailored and efficient solution that meets their specific needs for GPU-based infrastructure.

This announcement further strengthens Digital Realty’s existing partnership with Oracle, which currently encompasses multiple deployments across the globe, 11 Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) FastConnect points of presence, a global ServiceFabric presence, and a recent Oracle Solution Center deployment in one of Digital Realty’s Frankfurt data centers. In the fourth quarter of last year, Digital Realty successfully implemented an OCI Dedicated Region deployment for a major financial services customer, showcasing the potential of the collaboration between Oracle and Digital Realty in meeting enterprise customers’ hybrid cloud requirements.

Patrick Cyril, Global Vice President, Technical Sales & Customer Excellence – Revenue Operations, Oracle: “We’re excited to be working with Digital Realty to bring innovative solutions to the market that empower our enterprise customers workloads and their ecosystems to harness the boundless possibilities of AI. Together, we’re not just pioneering technology; we’re unlocking a future where every challenge is met with unparalleled innovation and every opportunity is maximized.”

Chris Sharp, Chief Technology Officer, Digital Realty: “We’re delighted to build upon our relationship with Oracle and enable the next generation of hybrid and private AI adoption among enterprises. Together, we’re bringing the extensive capabilities of the cloud to enterprises’ private data sets through secure interconnection, unlocking new data-driven business outcomes.”

This collaboration signifies a significant step forward in the advancement of AI technologies. By combining their expertise and resources, these industry leaders are poised to revolutionize the AI landscape and empower enterprises to unlock the full potential of their data. To learn more about the Oracle and Digital Realty partnership, visit the website here.

Oracle Climate Change Analytics Cloud Service Announced

Taylor Graham — Mon, 22 Apr 2024 17:00:48 +0000

Financial institutions face mounting regulatory demands to understand their environmental footprint and that of the companies they finance or invest in, termed financed emissions. To aid banks in assessing climate risk more effectively, Oracle has unveiled Oracle Climate Change Analytics Cloud Service. This innovative reporting and analytics platform, equipped with AI capabilities, aims to assist financial institutions in comprehending financed emissions, addressing statutory compliance, and mitigating risks associated with climate change.

“While banks work on climate-related financial risks that could affect them directly through their operations, they also need to be cognizant of their effect on climate indirectly through the businesses they finance. This dual responsibility requires the critical management of both risk and their own Net Zero commitments, which demands a significant effort from banks,” said Jason Wynne, global vice president for finance, risk, and compliance product development, Oracle Financial Services. “Oracle Climate Change Analytics Cloud Service enables financial institutions to calculate, and analyze the impact of their carbon emissions, as well as climate targets on current and planned investments to get a full picture of the bank’s resiliency and risk around climate change.”

According to a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration report, the global average atmospheric carbon dioxide in 2023 set a new record high at 419.3 parts per million. The Financial Stability Board (FSB) adds that “These risks are global in nature, and will have effects across all entities, sectors, and economies….the breadth of climate-related risks – including their possible simultaneous occurrence across multiple jurisdictions and sectors – also has implications for the resilience of the financial system.”

With climate-related risks on the rise, it’s imperative that banks can better understand and account for the impact of their holistic portfolio of assets from both a regulatory and business strategy perspective. With pre-built calculation models and dashboards, the service can help save banks time and effort, address global climate change reporting requirements, and incorporate climate risk into their future risk and investment decisions.

‘Climate Risk’ assessment made easier
Banks are challenged to comply with multiple frameworks across several jurisdictions, and collecting and storing the data necessary to meet these requirements can be daunting. This is especially true when dealing with large and complex global customers. With built-in AI and Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools Climate Change Analytics can scour the internet for publicly available information about climate change initiatives by companies that the bank has invested in, which can aid in their overall assessment of climate risk.

Also according to CDP, a leader in aggregating global climate disclosures on banks’ portfolios, portfolio emissions are over 700x larger than direct emissions – and the risks of inaction are huge. Financial institutions must urgently decarbonize their portfolios, by disclosing the impact of their financing activities, setting science-based targets, and aligning all financing activity with the Paris Agreement.

Oracle’s new cloud service enables financial institutions to calculate emissions across various asset classes and jurisdictions. This encompasses not only greenhouse gas emissions across an organization’s operations and value chain but also financed and facilitated emissions from its customers. This allows for the computation of a climate rating at a counterparty level across the bank’s customer portfolio and incorporates climate change risk into other risk-management functions, such as project planning and risk audits and analysis.

Key feature capabilities of Oracle’s Climate Change Analytics Cloud Service include:

Performing carbon accounting by calculating greenhouse gas emissions based on The GHG Protocol Corporate Accounting and Reporting Standard.
Calculating and disclosing emission numbers for financed, facilitated, and avoided emissions and emissions removal based on the Partnership for Carbon Accounting Financials guidelines.
Integrating climate risk into overall enterprise risk and investment decision-making with an in-house Climate Scorecard framework, probability of default (PD) and loss given default (LGD) models, and heatmaps.
Accessing more than 100 prebuilt, cross-jurisdictional climate change reporting disclosures, analytics, and visualizations to address requirements for standards boards and regulators.
Using advanced analysis to source, configure, store, and analyze customer climate change data with rich data models for analytics.
Helping to reduce IT investment with cloud-native technology that can meet the ever-changing climate change reporting requirements.

Learn more about Oracle Climate Change Analytics Cloud Service, visit the website here.

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AT&T Cloud Agreement New Five-Year Deal with Oracle

Taylor Graham — Sun, 14 Aug 2022 17:01:19 +0000

Oracle has renewed a strategic agreement with AT&T that will help give new capacity and capabilities for the company’s database and application workloads running in Oracle Cloud. The new five-year deal will build on AT&T’s use of Oracle Fusion Cloud Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Oracle Fusion Cloud Customer Experience (CX), Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, and other Oracle Cloud services, including:

Oracle Cloud ERP will enable AT&T to eliminate manual processes as part of the company’s ongoing financial and supply chain transformation.
Access to Oracle’s portfolio will expand the use of Oracle Cloud CX, which AT&T uses to engage customers with personalized content to help improve their overall experience.
OCI services will support AT&T’s IT modernization and data center consolidation.
AT&T will also certify Oracle’s next-generation cloud solutions and Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer X9M.

“AT&T’s cloud transition is a critical initiative for our business,” said Jon Summers, senior vice president, Information Technology, AT&T. “We’ve worked closely with Oracle on some of our toughest technology challenges over the years, and we’re excited to renew this collaboration for another five years.”

“AT&T is continually reinventing itself to better connect people and businesses, and we’re proud to extend our partnership to support that connectivity,” said Jonathan Tikochinsky, executive vice president, strategic clients group, Oracle. “By using Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Oracle Fusion Applications, AT&T is able to continue scaling globally and adapting to the evolving telecommunications market.”

For more information about Oracle, please visit us at oracle.com.

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SODA Tool Offered to SHI’s SAM and ITAM Customers

Taylor Graham — Mon, 28 Mar 2022 20:40:02 +0000

SHI International announced that Oracle has verified its new product, SHI Oracle Discovery Application (SODA). SHI International is one of North America’s largest IT solutions providers and member of Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN).

SODA provides an approved alternative to running Oracle’s license measurement tools and arms SHI customers with greater visibility into their Oracle deployments, such as where deployments are and how they are being used, so they can better understand licensing positioning, or respond to an audit. Engineered for speed and simplicity, SODA scans for details about the installed software and server environment and quickly and accurately provides data on product features, options, and management packs across any physical or virtual platform.

SHI will incorporate SODA as a feature of an Optimized License Position, Software Asset Management (SAM) Services, and Audit Management services within SHI’s IT Asset Management (ITAM) practice. SHI’s end-to-end ITAM and SAM services allow organizations to remain compliant, accurately budget true-up bills and audit fees, and optimize deployments to eliminate overspend.

“With this verification, SHI is positioned to help customers both use SODA and develop ongoing solutions based on the intelligence it provides,” said Neil Frodsham, Global Director of ITAM Services at SHI. “We want to ensure that our customers have deployed Oracle in a manner aligned to their contracts, and that they gain the business value they intended as Oracle’s solutions are typically business critical. This verification from Oracle confirms the unique value that both our ITAM practice and our technology offers, and better positions us to help organizations manage their Oracle contracts.”

The SHI team engineered SODA with speed and simplicity in mind to deliver information needed to manage database assets quickly with minimally invasive protocols and security levels. SODA produces a complete, Oracle-certified inventory of an enterprise’s database licensing obligations and reports how Oracle would determine the use. With continuous scanning, SODA maintains control over Oracle database licensing costs and includes the expert advice of SHI’s license consultants to ensure deployments are managed properly.

For more information, please visit www.shi.com.

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Exadata Cloud@Customer Enhanced by Extending Oracle Autonomous Database Features

Taylor Graham — Mon, 21 Mar 2022 21:41:50 +0000

Oracle announced availability of Multiple-VM Autonomous Database on Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer. Multiple-VM Autonomous Database enables organizations to create and run isolated, highly available Autonomous Database instances on Exadata Cloud@Customer systems that are also running non-autonomous Oracle Databases. This helps customers lower costs through better infrastructure utilization and makes it easier for customers to adopt Autonomous Database. Multiple-VM Autonomous Database is available at no charge via an over-the-air update for existing Exadata Cloud@Customer customers.

With Multiple-VM Autonomous Database on Exadata Cloud@Customer, organizations can set up isolated autonomous database environments for dev-test, staging, and production that implement different access rules, quotas, and availability policies to meet corporate governance requirements. Application developers have instant access to a self-service database application development platform that delivers mission-critical capabilities while supporting all modern data types, workloads, and development styles. In addition, Multiple-VM Autonomous Database helps improve developer productivity by creating a private database as-a-service environment with auto-tuning, auto-scaling, and auto-management capabilities that reduce the amount of time and effort required to deliver data-driven applications.

“We are focused on dramatically simplifying data management for all data-driven applications regardless of complexity, scale, criticality, or sensitivity,” said Juan Loaiza, executive vice president, Mission Critical Database Technologies, Oracle. “With Autonomous Database running on the same Exadata Cloud@Customer infrastructure as non-autonomous databases, customers can easily deploy new Autonomous Databases, and upgrade existing databases to Autonomous Database when they are ready.”

“Autonomous Database running on VMs in Exadata Cloud@Customer is a big win for developers,” said Holger Mueller, principal analyst and vice president, Constellation Research. “They can carve up VM clusters for self-service dev-test, staging, and production environments with appropriate SLAs, quotas, performance, and access characteristics. This capability combined with auto-provisioning, auto-tuning, and auto-patching as well as the converged support for all modern data types, workloads and development styles of the Autonomous Database frees developers to achieve higher velocity.”

“Autonomous Database on Exadata Cloud@Customer was already at least two generations ahead of the hybrid cloud offerings you could buy from the likes of AWS, Google and Azure,” said Ron Westfall, senior analyst and research director, Futurum. “Now, adding the ability to run thousands of Autonomous Databases in VMs across a single Exadata Cloud@Customer enables organizations to leverage fine-grained auto-scaling to only pay for CPU usage when it’s consumed—instead of paying for peak CPU usage all the time, like nearly every other hybrid cloud on the market. And considering that Snowflake doesn’t even have a hybrid cloud offering, they just fell even further behind.”

Leveraging Oracle Exadata infrastructure for performance, scalability, and availability, Multiple-VM Autonomous Database on Exadata Cloud@Customer makes it simpler to deploy cloud-native and mission-critical databases. Exadata Cloud@Customer has been successfully deployed by organizations worldwide, including Algar Telecom, Caja Los Andes, Deutsche Bank, Lalux, MacMaster University, Maxim’s, MoMRAH, n11.com, and Texas A&M University to achieve cloud benefits faster with lower complexity, risk, and expense.

Customers across the globe have access to Multiple-VM Autonomous Database on Exadata Cloud@Customer today via the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) console and APIs. It provides a consistent experience with that of the Oracle public cloud, but running on-premises in the customer’s data center to satisfy data residency and security requirements.

For more information about Oracle, please visit www.oracle.com.

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Oracle Announces Fusion Marketing, to Fully Automate Lead Generation and Qualification

Taylor Graham — Wed, 22 Sep 2021 01:29:49 +0000

To help marketers execute campaigns that generate highly qualified sales opportunities and accelerate deal cycles, Oracle announced Oracle Fusion Marketing. Part of Oracle Advertising and CX, Fusion Marketing enables marketers to easily create campaigns that span traditional marketing and advertising channels, and is the first marketing automation solution that is engineered to bypass the entire lead qualification and conversion process. Fusion Marketing uses artificial intelligence (AI) to automatically score leads at the account level, predict when consumers are ready to talk to a salesperson, and generate a qualified sales opportunity in any CRM system.

CRM has become the system that both sellers and marketers love to hate, due to disconnected workflows, too much manual administration, and siloed data often preventing sales and marketing teams from working with each other to engage customers and drive revenue. Because of this, the experience for most salespeople is that their CRM system doesn’t help them sell—and this disconnect between sales and marketing teams is a growing challenge as the B2B buying process becomes more complex. Customers and prospects are now interacting with organizations across an increasingly broad range of digital channels, buyer expectations are growing, and the need to access information at any time means much of the purchasing decision is now made before a salesperson is engaged.

“It is time for our industry to think differently about marketing and sales automation so that we can transform CRM into a system that actually works for both the marketer and the salesperson,” said Rob Tarkoff, executive vice president and general manager, Oracle Advertising and Customer Experience. “This is not about forecasts and rollups or a reporting tool to see how the sales force is performing, but instead about turning CRM into a system that helps sellers sell. A huge part of that change is bringing marketing and sales teams together and eliminating the low-value, time consuming tasks that distract from building customer relationships and closing deals. That’s why we have invested so much time engineering a system that will help marketers fully automate lead generation and qualification and get highly qualified leads to the sales team faster.”

Fusion Marketing simplifies and accelerates the creation and execution of marketing campaigns by automating the end-to-end process of lead generation and qualification. With Fusion Marketing, any marketer can easily build and run campaigns with consistent messages across advertising and email channels, all in a matter of minutes. This helps marketers improve the performance of campaigns by increasing the output of highly qualified sales opportunities.

Fusion Marketing guides the marketer through the entire campaign creation and execution process, including:

Building a Target Audience of Known Contacts: Marketers can select a product or service that is the focus of the campaign, and then select a list of known contacts from any CRM system.
Expanding Your Audience: From that audience, Fusion Marketing will automatically generate a highly targeted audience profile for use in online advertising to target people who are potentially relevant to your campaign—but unknown to your contact database.
Identifying the Best Customer References: Based on the focus of the campaign and specific industry of each customer, Fusion Marketing recommends the best reference stories to promote in the campaign.
Simplifying Campaign Configuration: Fusion Marketing provides a single user interface to assign all of the campaign assets required to run your campaign across email, website landing pages, and advertising channels. Previously, companies had to rely on multiple systems to do this.
Launching the Campaign: The marketer can easily set up advertising budget, start, and end dates and launch their campaign.
Monitoring Results: A prebuilt dashboard that provides marketers with real time visibility into campaign performance.

After campaigns have launched, Fusion Marketing automates the generation and qualification of leads:

Personalized Campaign Microsites: Emails and ads take people to an automatically generated “microsite” landing page for each campaign, which includes customer references personalized to match the industry and interest of the customer.
AI-powered Lead Qualification: Fusion Marketing monitors engagement across all campaign channels including emails, online ads, and microsite visits. Because interest at the company level is what matters, Fusion Marketing will qualify account level interest by aggregating engagement from people at the same company. This AI algorithm automatically generates qualified opportunities for salespeople when it detects sufficient engagement.
Deliver Qualified Opportunities to Any CRM System: When identified, qualified opportunities are delivered to any CRM system.

“Customer experience is so critical to customer acquisition and lifetime value that sellers can no longer afford to optimize customer touchpoints independently. The new challenge is to provide seamless continuity across the entire front office, which requires an infrastructure based on connected clouds,” said Gerry Murray, research director, IDC. “Fusion Marketing builds on Oracle’s engineering history and is a good fit for those looking for a suite of pre-integrated experience capabilities that sits on top of a complete cloud stack.”

“I see it every day: customers are looking for business solutions that drive true value and let human beings do what they do best,” said Samia Tarraf, North American Oracle Business Group Lead, Accenture. “With Fusion Marketing, Oracle has put their focus squarely on the customer, allowing marketers and sellers to quickly generate highly-qualified sales opportunities and close more deals. We have partnered with Oracle for over 30 years, bringing unparalleled innovation, industry and technology acumen to our joint clients, enabling them to sustain and grow in uncertain times. We continue the tradition and look forward to creating bold, unique market-leading opportunities across the enterprise.”

Part of Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications Suite, Oracle Advertising and CX connects data across advertising, marketing, sales, and service to make every customer interaction matter. Going beyond traditional CRM, Oracle Advertising and CX helps business leaders create, manage, serve, and nurture lasting customer relationships.

Fusion Marketing is available in limited release. For more information visit: https://www.oracle.com/cx/marketing/crm-fusion-marketing/

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Chainlink Announces Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP)

Leigh Porter — Thu, 05 Aug 2021 19:59:42 +0000

Chainlink introduced the Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP), a new global standard for decentralized inter-blockchain messaging, data, and token movements. CCIP will be available through Chainlink, the world’s most widely adopted decentralized oracle network. CCIP provides developers with an open source standard for easily building secure cross-chain applications that can interoperate across multiple blockchain networks through a single interface. Similar to TCP/IP’s standardization of communication across the early internet, CCIP is able to standardize the interoperability and token movements across hundreds of public and private blockchains.

Additionally, Chainlink announced a Programmable Token Bridge, a decentralized service that leverages CCIP and is a decentralized, compute-enabled token transfer service that enables developers to transfer tokens across blockchain networks in a highly secure way, as well as initiate programmable actions on the destination chain. CCIP will establish a universal connection between hundreds of blockchain networks both private and public, unlocking isolated smart contracts and empowering cross-chain applications across blockchain ecosystems.

“We’re excited to be creating a global standard for how blockchains transmit data, tokens, and commands between one another. The Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) unlocks the full potential of the blockchain industry, allowing the combination of previously disconnected smart contracts. The ability to build cross-chain applications is a large step forward in what smart contract developers can provide to their users,” said Sergey Nazarov, Co-Founder of Chainlink. “Before CCIP, each blockchain had its own ecosystem of isolated applications and services that have not been able to communicate with one another. With CCIP, smart contracts will be able to utilize services across multiple chains, send tokens and messages seamlessly with previously unavailable security guarantees, and easily connect smart contracts across multiple chains. Our goal with CCIP is to create a global open-source standard for how interblockchain messaging, token transfers, and advanced interoperation between blockchains will happen across our nearly 100 blockchain partners, which secure 90%+ of all value currently on a blockchain.”

The first committed user of CCIP will be Celsius, the industry-leading cryptocurrency yield-earning platform with nearly a million users and over $16 billion worth of total value locked. A pioneer in crypto earning and lending, Celsius will use CCIP to enable exciting new features that would both bring additional transparency and allow Celsius to better integrate into the DeFi world.

“We see the usage of CCIP through Chainlink services like messaging and programmable bridging as the perfect way to future-proof and scale Celsius for a more comprehensive multi chain DeFi integration.” said Celsius Co-founder Alex Mashinsky. “From our perspective, CCIP will allow our community to capture more value across multiple blockchains, while at the same time giving new and exciting DeFi protocols access to billions of dollars worth of liquidity. We’ve long relied on Chainlink Price Feeds for their unmatched security guarantees, and we look forward to becoming even more cross-chain enabled through CCIP.”

The introduction of the CCIP is designed to rapidly expand what developers can build by enabling the use of smart contracts from all over the blockchain industry. CCIP enables completely novel cross-chain applications that can utilize multiple smart contracts at the same time, as well as take advantage of the unique properties of specific chains or the assets on those chains. This opens up a whole new crop of cross-chain applications and protocols that can leverage the scalable computation of one blockchain, the liquidity of another, and the security of a third for governance, creating a single application that harnesses the expansive capabilities of a cross-chain meta-layer. The Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) represents a new global standard to power all blockchain interoperability, token transfer, and advanced cross-chain applications. Just like TCP/IP standardized communication across the early internet, CCIP provides a global open source standard for how all blockchains interoperate with one another, enabling a new world of cross-chain smart contracts.

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Oracle Helps Organizations Enhance the Employee Experience with Oracle Journeys

Taylor Graham — Tue, 13 Apr 2021 19:28:27 +0000

Oracle today announced a new platform to deliver a more intuitive, personalized, and streamlined employee experience within Oracle Fusion Cloud Human Capital Management (HCM). Oracle Journeys helps organizations create a one-stop shop for employees as they navigate all aspects of work and complete complex tasks. The new capabilities enable HR teams to create, tailor, and deliver step-by-step guidance to walk employees through events as diverse as onboarding, having a baby, returning to the workplace, launching a new product, or growing their career.

“With our homes doubling as offices over the past year, we’ve grown accustomed to the way technology improves our lives as consumers, and employees want that same experience at work,” said Chris Leone, senior vice president of development, Oracle Cloud HCM. “As offices reopen, it will be critical to provide consistent and positive experiences both in the office and for remote workers—but it doesn’t stop there. Organizations need to provide guidance throughout an employee’s entire career, from training to finding a mentor, returning to the workplace, and eventually traveling safely. Oracle Journeys will help HR teams provide value beyond traditional HR processes by tailoring unique experiences for their workforce.”

Oracle Journeys guides employees through tasks and key milestones while delivering quick access to resources they need across HR and the entire organization. It also makes it easy for employees to take action as they move through various events. The new features in Oracle Journeys help HR leaders by enabling them to move beyond standard HR workflows to create personalized, step-by-step guidance for any task—be it personal, professional, operational, or administrative. By providing easy access to AI-recommended processes tailored to individual needs, the solution helps employees save time and improve productivity. The latest innovations within Oracle Cloud HCM include:

Journeys LaunchPad: Delivers a single destination for employees to explore, launch, and share Journeys tailored to their needs. It can host any Journey applicable to an employee, assigned by their manager, or recommended by AI based on previous actions, events, or career progressions. For example, newly-promoted employees may see a New Manager Journey, those planning to return to the office may get prompted with a Return to Work Safely Journey, or those relocating to a new facility may receive a Relocation Journey and be guided through next steps—all directly within their LaunchPad. Employees can access and complete their Journeys on any device including desktop, mobile, chat applications, or Oracle Digital Assistant.
Journeys Creator: Allows HR teams and managers to create, modify, and assign Journeys across the enterprise. HR leaders can access a library of pre-built Journey templates, which can be tailored to the unique needs of the organization, workforce, and individual teams. This allows Journeys to be designed to meet specific company requirements, policies, and brand guidelines—all within minutes and without the need for IT or any coding. Organizations can also adapt them to include cross-enterprise tasks, and create Journeys like Manage My Expenses or Launch a New Product. Available templates include Onboarding, Return to the Workplace, Parental Leave, Relocation, Illness or Injury, and Return from Leave.
Journeys Booster: Helps integrate HR processes and other business functions such as finance, operations, and facilities management with third-party systems and external applications. This enables end-to-end process completion in a single experience, supported by the process automation capabilities of Oracle Process Cloud, with minimal coding needed. Journeys Booster automates requests and services across HR, IT, and other work systems and can also be expanded via HR Helpdesk when additional support is needed within workflows.

Supporting Quotes

“Employee experience is a critical, multi-disciplinary challenge and employee needs vary widely,” said Josh Bersin, global HR industry analyst. “Companies desperately need easy-to-use, highly customizable platforms to design, measure, and integrate employees’ digital lives. Offerings like Oracle Journeys are becoming the hottest part of the human capital systems market.”

“The employee experience is easy to take for granted, but it pays dividends when invested in properly. Companies that make deliberate efforts to make tasks quicker and easier with positive experiences for their workforce will reap the benefits of increased satisfaction, engagement, and productivity,” said R. “Ray” Wang, principal analyst, Constellation Research. “Customers seek the ability to manage their own journeys in their core HCM systems. This not only helps organizations better manage and grow their workforce during challenging times, but also enables HR to serve as an innovation center for the entire business.”

“The needs and expectations of employees have changed drastically. Now more than ever, our workforce needs personalized guidance, support, and motivation,” said Jacely Voon, chief people officer, People Culture & Corporate Social Responsibility, Fujifilm. “Oracle Cloud HCM provides a single HR platform that allows us to better manage our teams and keep up with their evolving expectations. No matter what further changes we see in the workforce, we will be ready to deliver a positive employee experience for our 14,000+ team members across the region.”

See here for more information about Oracle Journeys: http://www.oracle.com/human-capital-management/journeys

To learn more about Oracle Fusion Cloud HCM, please visit: https://www.oracle.com/human-capital-management

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Oracle Announces Java 16

Leigh Porter — Tue, 16 Mar 2021 19:18:43 +0000

Oracle announced the availability of Java 16 (Oracle JDK 16), including 17 new enhancements to the platform that will further improve developer productivity. The latest Java Development Kit (JDK) finalized Pattern Matching for instanceof (JEP 394) and Records (JEP 395), language enhancements that were first previewed in Java 14. Additionally, developers can use the new Packaging Tool (JEP 392) to ship self-contained Java applications, as well as explore three incubating features, the Vector API (JEP 338), the Foreign Linker API (JEP 389), and the Foreign-Memory Access API (JEP 389), and one preview feature, Sealed Classes (JEP 397).

Oracle delivers Java updates every six months to provide developers with a predictable release schedule. This offers a steady stream of innovations while also delivering continued performance, stability and security improvements, increasing Java’s pervasiveness across organizations and industries of all sizes.

“The power of the six-month release cadence was on full display with the latest release,” Georges Saab, vice president of development, Java Platform Group, Oracle. “Pattern Matching and Records were introduced a year ago as part of JDK 14 and have since gone through multiple rounds of community feedback based on real-world applications. This process has not only given Java developers the opportunity to experiment with these features before they were finalized, but also incorporated that critical feedback which has resulted in two rock-solid JEPs that truly meet the needs of the community.”

The Java 16 release is the result of industry-wide development involving open review, weekly builds and extensive collaboration between Oracle engineers and members of the worldwide Java developer community via the OpenJDK Community and the Java Community Process. The new features delivered in Java 16 are:

Language Enhancements First Introduced in JDK 14, Finalized in JDK 16

JEP 394: Pattern Matching for instanceof – Enhances the Java programming language with pattern matching for the instanceof operator.
JEP 395: Records – Enhances the Java programming language with records, which are classes that act as transparent carriers for immutable data. Records can be thought of as nominal tuples.

New Tool to Improve Developer Productivity

JEP 392: Packaging Tool – Provides the jpackage tool, for packaging self-contained Java applications.

Improved Memory Management to Improve Performance

JEP 387: Elastic Metaspace – Returns unused HotSpot class-metadata (i.e., metaspace) memory to the operating system more promptly, reduces metaspace footprint, and simplifies the metaspace code in order to reduce maintenance costs.
JEP 376: ZGC: Concurrent Thread-Stack Processing – Moves ZGC thread-stack processing from safepoints to a concurrent phase. This work eliminates the last significant bottleneck for allowing concurrent stack processing.

Improved Networking to Improve Developer Productivity and Flexibility

JEP 380: UNIX-Domain Socket Channels – Adds support for all of the features of UNIX-domain sockets that are common across the major UNIX platforms and Windows to the socket channel and server-socket channel APIs in the java.nio.channels package. UNIX-domain sockets are used for inter-process communication (IPC) on the same host. They are similar to TCP/IP sockets in most respects, except they are addressed by filesystem path names rather than Internet Protocol (IP) addresses and port numbers.

Addressing Future-incompatible Code

JEP 396: Strongly Encapsulate JDK Internals by Default – In JDK 9 we strongly encapsulated new internal API elements, thereby limiting access to them. As an aid to migration, however, JDK 9 deliberately chose not to strongly encapsulate at run time the content of packages that existed in JDK 8. JDK 16 tightens this constraint by encapsulating most internal elements of the JDK by default, except for critical internal APIs such as sun.misc.Unsafe. End users can still choose the relaxed strong encapsulation that has been the default since JDK 9. This will encourage developers to migrate from using internal elements to using standard APIs, so that both they and their users can upgrade without fuss to future Java releases.
JEP 390: Warnings for Value-Based Classes – Designates the primitive wrapper classes as value-based and deprecate their constructors for removal, prompting new deprecation warnings. Provides warnings about improper attempts to synchronize on instances of any value-based classes in the Java Platform.

Incubating and Preview Features

JEP 338: Vector API (Incubator) – Provides an initial iteration of an incubator module, jdk.incubator.vector, to express vector computations that reliably compile at runtime to optimal vector hardware instructions on supported CPU architectures.
JEP 389: Foreign Linker API (Incubator) – Introduces an API that offers statically-typed, pure-Java access to native code.
JEP 393: Foreign-Memory Access API (Third Incubator) – Introduces an API to allow Java programs to safely and efficiently access foreign memory outside of the Java heap.
JEP 397: Sealed Classes (Second Preview) – Enhances the Java programming language with sealed classes and interfaces. Sealed classes and interfaces restrict which other classes or interfaces may extend or implement them.

Improvements for OpenJDK Contributors

JEP 347: Enable C++14 Language Features (in the JDK source code) – Allows the use of C++14 language features in JDK C++ source code, and gives specific guidance about which of those features may be used in HotSpot code.
JEP 357: Migrate from Mercurial to Git – Migrates the OpenJDK Community’s source code repositories from Mercurial (hg) to Git.
JEP 369: Migrate to GitHub – Hosts the OpenJDK Community’s Git repositories on GitHub.

New Ports Provide Support for Java on More Platforms

JEP 386: Alpine Linux Port – Ports the JDK to Alpine Linux, and to other Linux distributions that use musl as their primary C library, on both the x64 and AArch64 architectures.
JEP 388: Windows/Aarch64 Port – Ports the JDK to Windows/AArch64.

Constantly Making Java Better
Java remains among the most successful development platforms ever, based on continuous innovation to address the evolving needs of modern application developers. To make the Oracle Java SE Subscription even more valuable to customers, Oracle added GraalVM Enterprise as an entitlement. GraalVM can help improve performance and reduce resource consumption by applications, especially in microservices and cloud-native architectures. Organizations that manage their Java estates by leveraging the Oracle Java SE subscription not only benefit from having the latest enhancements and direct access to Java experts at Oracle, but experience substantial savings over other approaches.

“Instead of getting interested every three or four years about what was new in Java, this cadence keeps me active as a passionate developer, teacher and trainer,” said José Paumard assistant professor, University Sorbonne Paris Nord and co-organizer, Paris Java User Group. “I have eagerly awaited using Records to improve the performance and readability of my data processing code, and after being able to use it as a preview feature, it is now going live with this latest release.”

Developers can learn more about Java 16 and get hands-on experience at Oracle Developer Live: Java Innovations on March 23, 25 and 30.

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Retailers Adapt to Massive Changes in Consumer Shopping with Oracle

Taylor Graham — Thu, 11 Feb 2021 15:25:37 +0000

The pandemic has changed the way people shop, making it critical for retailers to better understand demand and move merchandise accordingly. To meet these challenges, retailers across sectors are putting their trust in Oracle Retail Merchandising Cloud Service. Recent new customer wins and implementations include Gap, Inc, Giant Eagle, Mr Price, Poundland, and more.

“The new developments in the Oracle Retail Merchandising SaaS solution inspired us to reconsider the cloud for our transformational journey,” said Kim Sim, chief information officer, Mr Price Group. “Merchandising provides a sustainable, stable foundation for our high-volume processes. And in the future, the cloud provides us the flexibility to add additional modules as the business needs arise.”

Running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Oracle Merchandising Cloud Service provides retailers a unified foundation to manage and control critical merchandising activities, such as purchasing and distributing goods, fulfilling orders, and processing and closing out invoices to help ensure accurate financial data.

Oracle was also recently named a leader in the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Retail Merchandise Operations Management Solutions 2020-2021 Vendor Assessment¹. The report highlighted Oracle’s strength in supporting retail merchandising scale and complexity, as well as expansion of embedded artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning capabilities that are driving toward automated merchandising. Get an excerpt of the report here.

“Modern merchandise operations management solutions are purpose built for the analytical and experiential requirements of today and have the flexibility to expand on and enhance those capabilities in the future,” says Jon Duke, vice president of research for IDC Retail Insights. “And there is clear differentiation among vendors’ ability to meet the challenging demands of retailers.”

Recent grocery, fashion, hardline (offering a mix of non-fashion goods), and specialty retailers adopting Oracle Retail Merchandising Cloud Service include:

Gap, Inc., the global fashion retailer is now running on a single, high-performance instance of Oracle Retail Merchandising Cloud Service in North America for its GAP, Old Navy, Athleta, Banana Republic, Intermix, and Hill City brands.
Giant Eagle, the North American grocer selected Oracle Retail Merchandising Cloud Service, Oracle Retail Store Inventory Operations Cloud Services, and Oracle Retail Advanced Science Engine to help manage approximately 100,000 products across every store and optimize millions of customer transactions each week.
Mr Price Group, a leading omnichannel, fashion-value retailer in South Africa is implementing Oracle Retail Merchandising Cloud Service to support its transformation journey and growth.
Poundland, a leading value retailer in the United Kingdom is implementing Oracle Retail Merchandising Cloud Service to create a single, consolidated foundation to manage merchandise across its three brands: Pep&Co, Poundland, and Dealz.

“The past year has been one of the most challenging in retail history. Retailers had to throw out the playbook and adapt to everything from complete in-person shutdowns to unexpected surges in certain products,” said Lara Livgard, senior director merchandising, analytics, and enterprise, Oracle Retail. “Seeing our customers realize the benefits of our merchandising solutions faster than ever in this environment is validation of the innovations we are delivering in the cloud.”

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