Pool and adjust resources dynamically with application grid.
When companies determine their required resources for optimal performance, they usually consider first what they need. Some companies will find that they have the exact hardware and software configurations for their average processing needs but not their peaks. Thus, on occasion, when user demands on resources exceed capacity, performance times lag, and consistency and accessibility suffer.

But if an application is resourced to handle peak processing loads so that customers never experience slow performance, the result can be unused hardware and software capacity during off-peak periods.

The application grid approach to middleware infrastructure can help address these provisioning problems—either too little or too much computing power—by enabling a set of applications to share resources, adding more when needed and shifting them when demand spikes elsewhere. This infrastructure smooths out performance peaks and valleys and improves performance overall. The application grid allows adjustments to be made automatically and dynamically, which enables greater efficiency, speed, and scalability and a simplified IT environment.

Oracle Application Grid Infrastructure
Oracle application grid infrastructure consists of five technologies from the Oracle Fusion Middleware family of products—Oracle WebLogic Server 11g for Java Platform, Enterprise Edition; Oracle Tuxedo for C, C++, and COBOL; the Oracle Coherence in-memory data grid; the Oracle JRockit Java virtual machine (JVM); and Oracle Enterprise Manager. Together, these products form an application grid solution that helps many companies survive computing peaks and valleys and gives them a solid, dynamic computing infrastructure.

Juliana Button, director of product management for Oracle Fusion Middleware, says that an application grid enables organizations to support requirements for growth and scaling up or out very quickly while delivering high performance and seamless manageability. “The whole purpose of the application grid is to simplify and streamline the ability to provide a platform that can deliver extreme high availability, scalability, and performance while still making it manageable,” she says.

According to Maureen Fleming, program director for business process management at IDC, an independent industry analysis firm, many organizations are trying to improve the speed and timeliness of building and deploying applications while also lowering costs by moving to newer, abstracted middleware strategies.

“There’s a need for companies to get more efficiency from middleware,” Fleming says. “That’s why Oracle’s application grid is so interesting. For example, the Oracle JRockit Real Time JVM is optimized to make applications perform in a more deterministic way, so that application performance becomes very predictable. Once you know how your application performs, then you can manage the deployments more efficiently—typically with fewer instances of the application and fewer servers running the application, because it can be run at a higher level of utilization since the performance is known.”

Agile Payments
VocaLink is a London, England-based provider of transaction services to banks, their corporate customers, and government departments. VocaLink’s automated payment platform enables customers to process domestic and international transactions, and their ATM network connects more than 60,000 ATMs. The company leverages an application grid solution to gain efficiencies in a challenging market.

The payments processing market had been generally static for about 20 years, but rapid changes in recent years have shaken the industry. “We’ve gone from a very slow-moving industry to one that’s seeing a huge amount of change right now because of legislative initiatives both domestically in the U.K. and from Europe,” says Hussein Badakhchani, distinguished technologist at VocaLink.

One of the biggest changes is in the European Union, where the Single European Payments Area (SEPA) has removed the boundaries between markets to allow pan-European money transfers to occur. Consequently, VocaLink faces more competition from other countries and companies, increasing the pressure to reduce costs and improve profitability.
“We have to ensure that whatever IT system we implement is well aligned with business objectives and delivered at very good value,” Badakhchani says. “And we expect a high return on investment on anything that we purchase in terms of IT, services, hardware, and software.”

Oracle technology meets those expectations. “The Oracle application grid products deliver on that,” he says. “Oracle WebLogic Server is at the core of our middleware infrastructure. The application server is probably the best application server on the market in terms of Java and enterprise Java. It’s at the core of our IT infrastructure, and all of our payment services are deployed onto an Oracle WebLogic Server platform.”

In addition to Oracle WebLogic Server, VocaLink leverages the Oracle JRockit JVM for selected application services, Oracle Database, and Oracle Real Application Clusters. The company deploys its software on Sun servers. On a peak day, VocaLink’s service processes more than 90 million payment items, which translates into roughly 200 million JDBC local transactions.

“We selected Oracle WebLogic Server and other Oracle products because our application servers and databases need to be extremely resilient, highly performant, and able to handle a vast number of transactions,” says Badakhchani. “When we originally evaluated products, Oracle WebLogic Server was head and shoulders above the rest in terms of performance and still remains that way today. For us, getting the maximum value out of any infrastructure stack that we deploy is a real key concern. It’s critical to our business.”

VocaLink is also planning to expand the rollout of the Oracle JRockit JVM in conjunction with its existing Oracle WebLogic Server instances.

“For us, using Oracle JRockit with Oracle WebLogic Server was an absolute no-brainer,” says Badakhchani. “Simply dropping it in without actually making any configuration changes gives us a performance improvement and reduces resource consumption. Beyond that, Oracle JRockit has enhanced observability tools that give us the potential of reducing the amount of time that we spend troubleshooting. The effort of introducing it is very low, and the potential return on investment is high. That ratio makes it a really attractive option for us.”

Paying Off
For VocaLink, taking the time to rethink its application infrastructure has already paid off. And it’s a strategy that will continue to pay dividends in the future.

“In addition to Oracle JRockit and Oracle WebLogic Server, Oracle Enterprise Manager takes us to the next level in terms of allowing a transaction to be traced from the Java tier all the way into the database,” he says. “We’re achieving stunning transaction rates already. However, with the introduction of Oracle Coherence we expect to further increase our processing capacity without having to provision new hardware.”

Badakhchani says that Oracle Coherence offers VocaLink increased benefits.
“Introducing Oracle Coherence is a strategic option for moving toward a shared infrastructure,” he says. “The more processing we can shift from expensive database machines to lower-cost application servers, the more stable and cost effective our shared infrastructure will become. Ultimately Oracle Fusion Middleware and Oracle Database technologies assist us to pursue our mission to be a valued payments partner.”

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Enterprise architecture integrates services and delivers business success.
From automating manual processes to enabling new enterprise processes, technology has certainly changed business operations. However, there’s a new approach for managing technical resources that goes beyond changing individual operations and instead aligns all of IT more closely to business strategy. Enterprise architecture is a method and organizing principle that aligns functional business objectives and strategies with an IT strategy and execution plan.
“The overriding objective of enterprise architecture is to direct the evolution and transformation of enterprises with technology,” says Mark Salser, senior vice president of the Enterprise Solutions Group at Oracle. “This in turn makes IT a more strategic asset for successfully implementing a modern business strategy.”

Reviving Legacy Software Assets
Enterprise architecture is a professional discipline that starts with matching business requirements to an architectural vision (considering governance, current state of assets, road map, and business case). One aspect in harnessing the power of enterprise architecture is to maximize and fine-tune the benefits of a service-oriented architecture (SOA), which can lower costs by sharing services, create agility by orchestrating services, and improve interoperability between application silos.

“SOA is an empowering vehicle for legacy modernization projects,” says Lance Knowlton, vice president of platform migrations at Oracle. “By taking the most-costly legacy systems and modernizing them with SOA, you can provide a framework for moving other legacy services to a lower-cost platform.”

This architecture development process provides the structure for an enterprise architecture that can optimize the use of shared services in an organization. In reorganizing its legacy system, for example, Deutsche Leasing leveraged SOA principles to construct a completely new architecture with new workflows and business processes while retaining all of its old business-relevant knowledge.

Founded in 1962, Deutsche Leasing is the largest finance leasing company in Germany and one of the top five in Europe. The company offers a range of leasing services and insurance packages for both movable and nonmovable assets, such as information and communications technology assets, machinery and industrial equipment, medical technology, fleet management, and energy products.

Deutsche Leasing had to find a way to modernize more than 80 software applications developed over three decades and deployed primarily on IBM mainframe computers. The computer languages included COOL:Gen, Mantis, Cobol, Assembler, and Smalltalk—more than 8 million lines of source code in all. According to Peter Kox, head of Development International and Services at Deutsche Leasing, expanding this complex IT environment on the existing platforms was an expensive, dead-end prospect that extended the company’s reliance on obsolete technology and a dwindling base of legacy skills. “Our mainframe applications were facing the end of their useful life, so we decided to step into a modern Java EE [Java Platform, Enterprise Edition] architecture,” he says.

Kox, who served as program manager for the migration to the Java EE/Oracle platform, says the legacy applications were not well documented and not particularly scalable. Worse still, making changes was time consuming and risky to the business; taking down and revising a module often had unforeseen consequences. Deutsche Leasing wanted a new architecture that would duplicate the legacy functionality and add new capabilities as well.

“Most companies start the modernization journey focused on solving a specific tactical pain point,” says Barry Perkins, vice president of Oracle Modernization at Oracle. “Our goal is to solve the tactical issues while incorporating a strategic focus, providing tailored solutions that deliver maximum business value and benefit with a rapid ROI [return on investment] and a reduced TCO [total cost of ownership].”

Perkins says that Oracle’s modernization process begins with a business and technical discovery to document a company’s current business processes, IT environment, strategic future goals, and business requirements, followed by an assessment of its challenges and issues. With this information, the enterprise architecture team develops a modernization road map based on best practices that satisfies the customer’s modernization requirement.

Based on the outcome of Deutsche Leasing’s discovery process, Oracle modernization partner Hexaware recommended rearchitecting the company’s legacy systems. This involved recovering and reassembling business-relevant code from legacy applications while eliminating as much of the technology-specific code as possible. Deutsche Leasing began by inventorying all of the legacy software assets, creating a model of the 3,000-plus programs that made up the overall system. The goal of the rearchitecture was to leverage existing business processes, data models, and presentation logic as much as possible within a new Java EE architecture. Data from Btrieve, VSAM, DB2, and Microsoft Access databases was then cleansed and migrated into an Oracle Database; the new applications were deployed on Oracle WebLogic Server.

Deutsche Leasing used its SOA to enhance its contract termination module. The company created a unified partner management module for managing all partners and products, a management module for defining product offerings, and a Web-based system for lease- and hire-purchase products. It also centralized its security directory. “All the business services are implemented as discrete business functions that operate independently of the state of any other service defined within the system,” says Otto Schmitz, CIO at Deutsche Leasing.

Each service has a well-defined set of interfaces that exchange data with each other using Oracle Enterprise Service Bus. The business service layer also provides a mechanism to take enterprise-scale components, business-unit-specific components, and in some cases, project-specific components, and externalize a subset of their interfaces in the form of service descriptions. “The enterprise components provide service realization at runtime using the functionality provided by their interfaces,” Schmitz says.

This enterprise architecture provides the performance and flexibility Deutsche Leasing needs while opening access to a large pool of developers. “It’s much quicker to make changes, create innovative business services, and maintain the environment,” says Kox.

From the Vision to the Plan
A successful enterprise architecture is woven into the enterprise’s culture and evolves over time, maintaining flexibility for future change. But to get to an enterprise architecture, the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Indian Affairs had to start almost entirely from scratch, incorporating its constituencies’ demands as well as federal goals and mandates as guidelines for technical innovation.

“We had been off the intranet for six years as a result of a court order,” says Al Foster, acting CIO for Indian Affairs. “We didn’t have direct internet access. We didn’t have BlackBerrys for wireless access to e-mail. We had a very basic external Web site. We were not able to use many of the tools most corporations and government agencies had access to,” he says.

That didn’t stop Indian Affairs from planning for the future. “What we needed after the court order was lifted was an infrastructure that would allow us to join the rest of the Web-connected world,” he says.

The agency’s planning was guided by four primary issues. “We looked for an integrated product suite because we didn’t want to reinvent the wheel,” Foster says. “Next, we wanted something that would provide us with agility, because that’s a goal of the new [Obama] administration—to deliver capabilities quickly.”

Foster says the agency also wanted the new infrastructure to provide capabilities for communication and collaboration. This is extremely important given the agency’s diverse mission, which includes everything from education—Indian Affairs runs a federal education system for more than 40,000 students—and law enforcement to fiduciary responsibility for the trust assets of Native American tribes. Two million tribal members count on the Indian Affairs Web site for information.

Currently, 5,000 employees use the new intranet site, a number that will grow to about 10,000 within a year. “We needed an architecture that would allow all these parts of the organization to communicate effectively,” he says.
Finally, the new infrastructure had to sync up technically with the rest of the federal agencies.

In planning for all these constituencies and planning for the future, Foster and his team had to be sensitive to the need to empower information owners to manage their own content. “We initially wanted to do this to remove IT from the content management workflow, and this, in turn, has positioned us to respond to the new administration’s plans for open and transparent government,” Foster says.

Indian Affairs chose Oracle products because when the agency evaluated the market, Oracle offered the best combination of capabilities. “We were interested in speed, security, and simplicity to achieve our outcomes,” says Foster. “We wanted Enterprise 2.0 capabilities as part of an IT environment that could integrate with other federal agencies under the auspices of the U.S. Department of the Interior. We were interested in green computing, which our secretary and the new administration support. This is what Oracle delivered.”

Goals for communication and collaboration were enhanced by the Oracle WebCenter Suite Spaces feature, which has social computing services, certified Oracle application integrations, and Microsoft Office desktop integration to improve the usability and productivity of personal and group work environments. “Users can customize the site to determine what they see on their portal and how to arrange their personal workspaces,” Foster says. “This gives us the best of both worlds: a secure, centrally administered infrastructure that gives people individual control.”
The Oracle solution, while giving the agency the functionality it needs now, also gives Indian Affairs an opportunity to grow. “The core infrastructure is there to allow us to add other capabilities that are of interest to us, including, for example, Oracle Identity Management and Oracle Records Management,” Foster says. “Those two areas present significant challenges for many federal agencies.”

Indian Affairs weighed the cost of its enterprise architecture using Oracle against the long-term benefits. “This was an appreciable investment, but we calculated we would spend less money over the long term if we put the right foundation in place,” Foster says. “We have a well-defined vision for what we are trying to accomplish, and Oracle’s enterprise architecture enables us to think long term and to integrate new capabilities over time.”

A Framework for Integration
Developing an enterprise architecture presented unique challenges at the University of Wisconsin when its student financial aid office set out to create an online scholarship service to match qualified undergraduate students with available awards. The financial aid office worked with all of the university’s undergraduate schools and colleges as well as the Division of Information Technology, but the university’s decentralized environment meant that business objectives—much less an IT strategy—were not necessarily aligned.
“Each school and college is independent,” says Mary Hillstrom, assistant director in the Office of Student Financial Aid. “It’s been hard even to know how many scholarships we have on campus and, of those, what their total worth is. And that was part of the challenge of this project—making a decentralized campus work in a centralized way so that we could better serve students.”

The Office of Student Financial Aid decided to create a Scholarships@UW-Madison application, integrating it with the university’s surrounding services infrastructure. “We wanted to take advantage of Oracle’s direction,” says Karen Gunderson, technical manager for the project. “And we wanted a service-oriented-architecture approach.”
As an Oracle Fusion Middleware and Oracle WebLogic Suite customer, the university already had a license for Oracle Application Development Framework (Oracle ADF), a Java environment for building enterprise applications. Todd Hill, a lead developer on the project, decided to use this framework with Oracle JDeveloper as the application development environment.

Using Oracle ADF Faces Rich Client permitted the university to create a rich, interactive environment that displays lots of data relationships simultaneously. “Oracle ADF Faces Rich Client is very Ajax friendly,” says Hill.
The Scholarships@UW-Madison application gets student data from Oracle’s PeopleSoft Campus solutions; with its component interfaces, PeopleSoft Integration Broker made access to this data relatively easy. The university used Oracle ADF security to allow fine-grain control over pages and task flows, protecting sensitive student data.

According to Gunderson, the new application helps users identify and apply for scholarships while helping schools and colleges disperse available funds. For example, a donor might want to target a scholarship to a student with a 3.8 grade point average who went to a local high school. “With this system, we can help students know which scholarships they are eligible to apply for,” she says.

Hillstrom estimates that students will save time applying for financial aid, and financial aid officers will need less time to evaluate applications using the new process. In addition, Gunderson says, every department and college at the university will ultimately save time, money, and effort by not having to support its own financial grant systems.
The project was rolled out to continuing students in the College of Letters and Science in September 2009. Ultimately, the new application will be available to all undergraduate enrollment, about 25,000 students in all. Hillstrom, Gunderson, and Hill all believe that their experience will influence other projects at the university.

“I think [a system like this] gets traction at the business level first,” Hill says. “What hooks a lot of business users are the user interface features. Then we can speak to some of the advantages at the development level.”
“We are making it easier for the schools and colleges on campus to offer and award scholarships,” says Hillstrom. “The better we can automate this process, the better we can help students meet their academic goals.”
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Oracle Exadata and the Oracle Database Machine move information faster to make business better.
Faster access to data can certainly help answer questions from business users, but can it fundamentally change the way a business operates? Jonathan Levine thinks so.

Levine is chief operating officer of LinkShare, an online affiliate marketing network based in New York, New York. LinkShare brokers advertising space on internet publisher Websites on a cost-per-action basis, meaning that those publishers get paid when internet users go beyond simply clicking on an ad and actually take an action, such as making a purchase or signing up for a credit card. Publishers in the LinkShare network drive more than 1 million online marketing transactions each day, and its customers include a worldwide Who’s Who of Fortune 500 and other important retail and financial companies. This year, LinkShare migrated 13 years of historical data from a collection of existing systems into a Sun Oracle Database Machine with Oracle Exadata technology and is already benefiting from the results.

Core to LinkShare’s business model is helping its customers and partners design and execute effective online marketing strategies. One way it does this is by enabling them to query and analyze deep historical data on previous marketing campaigns—everything from the creative content to the Websites where the ads ran to the effectiveness of the offers and the products sold.

“The faster you can get data to people and the more freedom you give them in analyzing it, the more interesting the results will be,” says Levine. “Every time we’ve made it easier and faster for people inside or outside of the company to obtain data, they’ve done things that we haven’t expected. I can’t tell you exactly how that will play out once they can get information back 10 times faster, thanks to our deployment of Oracle Exadata, but I know that they’ll be able to make better decisions faster—and that will help them grow.”

Oracle Exadata provides a complete hardware and software solution for high-performance data warehousing, online transaction processing (OLTP), and mixed workloads. It includes a massively parallel architecture and uses a wide InfiniBand network to increase data bandwidth between the database server and storage to deliver extreme performance for all data management applications.

For LinkShare, Oracle Exadata’s extreme performance is paying off.
“With Oracle Exadata we’re finding that data loads much faster and our queries come back much faster than they do from the previous data warehouse,” says Levine. “Our customers will be able to do analytics more effectively because they can do them faster.”

In fact, industry analysts are seeing the same thing—that new technologies like Oracle Exadata can create fundamental changes in the ways that organizations analyze and react to data.

“With Oracle Exadata, organizations can really work with information to enable superior business decision-making by allowing analysts to consider more possibilities and do deeper analysis in the same—or even less—time,” says Merv Adrian, principal at consulting firm IT Market Strategy.

Software. Hardware. A Complete Database Machine.
The integration of software and hardware in Oracle Exadata delivers other key benefits.
“One of the more important value propositions of Oracle Exadata is that it’s preintegrated. The fact that Oracle owns the hardware and software gives the company the opportunity to deliver a much simpler value proposition,” says Adrian.
And according to Adrian, the software and hardware integration of Oracle Exadata also leads to significant savings in resource costs, since organizations can cut down on the number of expensive specialists needed to install and maintain an enterprise database machine.

“From my research, time to value is a big advantage,” says Adrian. “Organizations don’t want to send their personnel off for classes to learn new hardware or spend time installing and tuning all the different components.”
Adrian even sees new opportunities for solutions like Oracle Exadata. “I’m seeing something I call a transaction-processing data warehouse,” says Adrian. “It’s a hybrid combination where OLTP systems reference data warehouse information for assistance in creating customized responses for specific situations. For example, ‘what other products should we offer this customer?’ Or, ‘what type of special deal can we provide to this purchaser?’ These can be called ‘analytic transactions’; they depend on look-aside processing to complete a business process.”

In addition, Adrian describes Oracle Exadata as an extensible database platform. “It’s not a proprietary, closed environment,” he says. “It’s the world’s most widely distributed database, and people know how to build on top of it.”
Finding New Ways to Run a Business

LinkShare has been in business for almost 15 years and has a huge amount of historical data that it relies on to analyze and help customers define effective internet marketing campaigns. That includes information on the types of ads that have run in the past, the creative content of ads themselves, when they were run, what Websites they were placed on, and how consumers responded to them. Most of LinkShare’s advertisers want to be able to analyze three to five years of historical data to help them understand the effectiveness of different internet offers and the performance of particular ads on particular sites.

“We’re talking about huge volumes of historical information on what pieces of creative were put up on the network, what offers got made, which advertisers had relationships with what publishers, which of those things generated customer interest in the form of an impression or click, which of those clicks translated into a transaction, and how much did those transactions make?” says Levine. “Our advertisers and publishers want the ability to analyze this massive amount of data in real time. And for us, the amount of data and the number of people performing analysis will only continue to grow.”

As a result of that growth, LinkShare was continuously challenged to deliver 100 percent uptime as it grew its existing clustered database system. At the same time, the system also needed to accommodate increasing analytic and reporting demands from the business. LinkShare needed increased performance to meet its clients’ ever-increasing requirements for instant access to data and trends. Those factors led Levine and his team to switch to Oracle and to deploy their enterprise data warehouse with Oracle Exadata.

“One of the attributes of Oracle Exadata that was really important to us was the fact that it’s very fault tolerant,” says Levine. “It’s fault tolerant in the way that the system degrades, rather than shuts down, for most kinds of faults that we see in production. We saw very few other systems that were able to do that, especially taking into account price and how much space and power it took to keep the solutions running.”

Another business benefit of selecting Oracle Exadata for LinkShare is that it is based on Oracle Database software and Linux. “Managing Oracle Exadata is quite similar to any other Oracle databases, so I don’t have to have two database management teams and two systems management teams,” says Levine. “It’s very attractive from an operational perspective. We can better manage our operations teams’ workloads, so we can provide our customers better service without increasing our labor costs.”

Laying Down the Rails for a More Efficient and Responsive Business
It takes powerful engines and many miles of track to run a railroad, but doing it well also requires timely and accurate business information. And while Amtrak—America’s only high-speed and intercity passenger railroad—has plenty of rolling stock and track, its management needs more-complete and -timely information to make the train operations safer, greener, and more competitive, and the organization more responsive to customer needs.

Over the years, Amtrak had developed different data marts, but it never had a formal enterprise data warehouse. In 2009, Amtrak decided to build an enterprise data warehouse that would include data from finance, marketing, and operations, among other departments. An enterprise data warehouse would allow Amtrak management to be more proactive, especially in areas such as equipment failures and maintenance.
Specifically, the organization wanted a leading-edge platform that could deliver fast performance. As a result, it selected the Oracle Database Machine.

Amtrak recently rolled out its first Oracle Exadata-based solution, a dashboard for its board of directors that covers nine key performance indicators, including cost recovery ratio, ridership, on-time performance, and safety. It draws on five subject areas and seven large fact tables and provides a 40-second response time scanning 150 million rows of data using the Oracle Database Machine.
“It has very good performance, and we’re very pleased with it,” says Jennifer Kao, manager, enterprise data warehouse, at Amtrak.

In addition to the performance benefits associated with Oracle Exadata, the fact that Amtrak didn’t have to spend time or money integrating different components was very appealing.
“We really liked the idea of the database appliance and the integrated combination of hardware and software,” says Steve Trus, senior director of enterprise services at Amtrak. “That way, we don’t have to worry about upgrading it, or hardware and software mismatches. It’s much easier.”

Amtrak’s team was also attracted to the idea of being able to leverage the existing skill sets of its current DBAs and developers. In addition, Amtrak was already running several Oracle technology-based transactional systems, so its datacenter staff and processes were well suited to support the new Oracle Exadata technology.
With Oracle Exadata, the learning curve is reduced to a minimum. Because Amtrak has been using an Oracle solution, there have been almost no surprises and the deployment and development effort has been a lot smoother. And Oracle Exadata has significantly reduced the amount of DBA effort required in terms of performance tuning, since building lots of indexes and aggregate tables is unnecessary.

Amtrak already has another three subject areas, including ticket issuance, in the testing phase, with plans to add nine others to the Oracle Exadata-based enterprise data warehouse in the future. By the end of 2011, Kao expects that data warehouse will hold up to 3 terabytes of data and support more than 500 concurrent business intelligence users throughout Amtrak.

Scaling to Millions of Calculations
In addition to its data warehousing capabilities, Oracle Exadata’s extreme performance and scalability when handling OLTP workloads has had a big impact on one company for whom vacations are all business—big business. In fact, TUI Netherlands, a division of TUI Travel PLC, is the largest tour operator in the Netherlands, with more than 1 million customers. The company owns more than 200 travel agencies and even has its own airline, but one thing TUI didn’t have was the time to recalculate the prices of hundreds of thousands of vacation packages when the underlying components or source prices changed.

TUI’s travel agents, as well as direct internet customers, design and price holidays from a variety of package components, including air travel, hotel accommodations, and activities. Pricing, availability, dates, and times can change second by second, and overall pricing of all TUI’s “inventory” of packages and products can change hourly or daily depending on fuel prices and other variables. Compounding these challenges is the fact that TUI needs to deliver results night and day, seven days a week, so system performance and availability are critical.

“The speed of our systems is very crucial to our business because availability of individual package components changes so quickly,” says Eli Lysen, CIO, TUI Nederland NV. “If we have one component sell out, such as a flight seat, it can impact all the other components of the package as well as all the other packages. Calculations and availability are the most important things in the travel industry.”

As important as timely calculations are, at one point in 2009 TUI found itself several days behind on calculations it needed to complete.

“We ended up in a position where our systems couldn’t calculate the correct availability in time for our customers,” says Lysen. “That was a big reason for our purchase of Oracle Exadata. We needed much more power in our OLTP systems. Oracle Exadata has given us that power, and our calculations department is running many more calculations than it ever has in the past.”

Oracle Exadata has been very reliable for TUI. “With our old system we had to check it each hour to keep it running stable,” says Lysen. “Now, with Oracle Exadata, we have a stable system. We don’t have to check it all the time. It just works.”

Staying Competitive with the Right Information
Staying competitive these days requires a relevant strategy, great operations, and the right types of information to make the correct business decisions.

Oracle Exadata offers organizations a different way to make those decisions. It can handle the toughest data warehousing and OLTP requirements while simultaneously making it easier than ever before to truly understand and analyze the wide range of data that organizations are collecting. Whether it’s helping to generate internet marketing revenue, making the trains run on time, or ensuring that travelers get the best deal on their vacation package, Oracle Exadata gives organizations the power and flexibility to handle high-performance, high-visibility business challenges.
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My client based in South Dublin has a requirement for a Java Developer. This role will offer the opportunity to work in a dynamic environment on leading edge technology. You will work as an integral part of the product development team on all technical aspects of a key suite of applications.

The successful candidate will work as an integral part of the Java product development team on an industry leading product set. He/she will design and develop Java product modules from requirement specifications and will work with technologies including JSF, Hibernate, EJB, AJAX, Eclipse, JBOSS, SQL Server.

A minimum of 2 years Java development experience is required for this position.

Company: E-Frontiers
Location: Dublin South,
Job Type: Full Time Permanent
Years of Experience: 2+ years
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Job Reference Code: MGSW01_1283330740

For further information please contact Mary in e-Frontiers 01 4793219 and or email mary.ogara@e-frontiers.ie

Senior Java Developer required for city centre based company

5+ years Java Development experience is required for this role. Candidates must be proficient in the following technologies: J2EE, Spring, Hibernate, Struts, JBoss, Tomcat.

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Oracle PL/SQL Developer required for city centre based client

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Senior Java Developer required for city centre based company

5+ years Java Development experience is required for this role. Candidates must be proficient in the following technologies: J2EE, Spring, Hibernate, Struts, JBoss, Tomcat.

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A new Irish online ad network, Media Brokers, has been set up to sell “distressed inventory” to advertising clients. The company, which is headed up by Michelle O’Keeffe and which is backed by Dermot Hanrahan, chief executive of Electric Media, has already met with a good response from a number of ad agencies.

Media Brokers is essentially a “blind” or “value” network that represents a number of online publishers on whose behalf it sells distressed inventory, typically banner ads, to ad agencies. From an advertisers point of view blind networks offer cost efficiencies while providing broad reach, low cost and some degree of targeting, although not by site.

According to Michelle O’Keeffe, Media Brokers uniqueness stems from the fact that 64% of its network traffic is not available through any other value network and 90% of the traffic is from indigenous sites. “From our tests we are seeing higher click through rates from Irish sites, there are many explanations for this; ads placed within relevant content, brands are aligned with reputable indigenous sites, a sense of consumer trust on respected and well known publishers,” she says.

O’Keeffe set up the company earlier this year having spent over eleven years working in the digital marketing space. A former Entrepreneur of the Year in 2009, she was also the founder of the specialist affiliate company Travel Affiliate.
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Fashion lovers all over the country have an exciting new date for their diary as Ireland’s largest ever fashion event makes its debut in the vibrant surroundings of Dublin city centre. Hosted by Dublin City BID (Business Improvement District), The Dublin Festival of Fashion will take over the city’s leading shopping districts from Friday 1st to Saturday 3rd of October, running throughout the day and catering to absolutely everyone!
The highly anticipated three day event, which expects to attract well over 200,000 people to the capital, will kick off with extended late Friday night shopping. Start at St Stephen’s Green and shop your way down Grafton Street across to the retailers of O’Connell Street and then onto bustling Henry Street. Saturday and Sunday are definitely two fun-filled days not to be missed with a series of fashion and beauty master classes hosted by top industry professionals in leading salons, shopping centres, department stores and boutiques while you can also take advantage of a jam-packed schedule of quirky events and the best ever discounts and special promotions to be offered in the heart of Dublin.

If all this gets too much take a break and discuss your purchases in the pop-up Dublin Festival of Fashion HQ or one of the city’s two designated Fashion Cafes. A number of restaurants, cafes and bars around the city will also be offering shoppers special fashion themed menus to celebrate the event. The highlight of the weekend will centre on the first ever fashion catwalks coming to life in a spectacular way on Grafton Street and Henry Street. Three daily shows translating the season’s key trends will feature everything from high street to high end to retro vintage, all selected from the stylish retailers of Dublin city.
In addition to the unique schedule of daily fashion and beauty events, there will also be a number of art and cultural exhibitions, children’s craft events, Fashion Swap Shops and free design events such as crochet, knitting and jewellery making classes.
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Chemistry has won the creative account for BMW/Mini which was put out to pitch two months ago.
The agency, which is headed up by Ray Sheerin, saw off rival agencies Rotcho and, Boys and Girls. The incumbent agency is McConnells. The media account was not put out to pitch and all media is still being handled by Carat.

Like many other car manufacturers, sales of BMW and Mini were hit badly over the past three years. However there is clear evidence that both marques share of new car registrations is improving dramatically and BMW/Mini is keen to push this increase even further. Figures compiled by the Society of the Irish Motor Industry (SIMI) show that BMW only sold 52 new cars in 2008. This rose to 1,405 in 2009 and to 1,642 for the first six months of 2010. In whole 2009 Mini sold 263 units while for the first six months of this year the number was 256.
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