Single database as a single source of truth

Zatni Arbi, Columnist, San Diego, California
zatni@cbn.net.id

More and more organizations around us, including government agencies, banks, manufacturing companies, oil companies, mining companies, distributors, airlines and universities, have deployed complex and powerful applications that promise to reduce their costs, increase their productivity, give them more capabilities to boost their competitiveness, etc.

Meanwhile, IT consulting companies have acquired in-depth industry knowledge and an expanding repository of best practices for individual industry and business sectors. So, today, when applications are implemented, business processes will also be reengineered based on these best practices.

The great thing is that, thanks to the accumulated experience and skills, an implementation project that in the past would take many years can now be successfully completed in just a matter of months.

However, what will be the value of these highly promising applications and infrastructure, in which an organization has invested so heavily, if the data that they use does not represent the truth? What is the use of these applications if the quality of the data is questionable? What if the data is still fragmented and full of garbage? These were the questions that came up again and again during the Oracle AppsWorld event in San Diego late last month.

The theme that Oracle chose for the event was "Answers for Your Industry, Applications for Your Business". Not surprisingly, announcements were made for new products, services and a pricing structure to answer the challenges Oracle believes its customers are faced with.

As for me personally, I was doubly lucky to be invited to the event, because for many years I have always had a strong attachment to this city. San Diego was the place I stayed when I entered the U.S. for the first time in the summer of 1985, as my childhood dream became a reality. The conference brought me back here for a second time 18 years later.

The weather was pretty cold for a Jakarta guy who had forgotten to bring a lot of warm clothes, but fortunately the sun shone almost every day during my stay.

Single source of truth

Like many other major IT companies, Oracle has multiple business thrusts. First, of course, is its database, for which it is very well-known.

I am told that Oracle Database has not been successfully hacked for 15 years, and that today it has earned more certifications than its competitors. Remember the word "unbreakable" that the company used in its ad campaigns in 2002?

The second is its business applications, which are built on top of Oracle Database and Oracle Application Server. During the event, the atmosphere was upbeat. One of the reasons for this was that the company's chairman and CFO Jeff Henley announced in his keynote speech that revenue from applications saw an increase of 27 percent for the quarter ending last November.

This was no small feat, he said, given the fact that IT investments were still in a recovery stage all over the world. Jeff said that Oracle now has more than 100 different application modules specially tailored for many different industries.

Next is the outsourcing business. Oracle offers to maintain and operate its customers' database systems and applications, which can reside in the customers' facilities, in a partner's facilities or in the company's own facilities. During the event, the company announced a user-based pricing for its outsourcing services.

However, the main highlight of the event was the announcement of a new product called Customer Data Hub. This was Oracle's answer to the question of how one can achieve a single database that serves as a single source of truth.

In his very entertaining keynote speech, Larry Ellison, the newlywed Oracle CEO, used a database of credit cardholders as an example.

"No matter in which part of the world we do our shopping, and regardless of which bank has issued our credit card, we can always use it," he said.

Another amazing thing about the credit card is that the store where we are doing our shopping will be able to ascertain that we have sufficient balance on our credit card to pay for the merchandise that we are buying, he said.

"There can be hundreds of data fields in the credit card database -- our take-home pay, our mortgage, our savings, the check that we last wrote, whether the check bounced, whether our car payment was overdue, etc.," he said. "Yet, it usually takes the store only seconds to verify our credit cards."

Customer data hub

In the same way as the credit card database, a Customer Data Hub provides a single view of the truth. The database may be connected to hundreds of other databases, but every connection is in real time. The database may have copies in various places for backup purposes, but they always reflect exactly the same truth.

The Customer Data Hub, according to Ellison, is also Oracle's answer to the failure of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) in making it possible for businesses to have a complete view of their customers.

Typically, a business organization would like to know who their customers are, what they have purchased, what other products can be offered to them, etc. A Customer Data Hub "maximizes customer visibility".

Technically speaking, a Customer Data Hub consists of databases of customers, products, transactions, etc., a layer of Oracle's own e-Business Suite, and another layer that allows the hub to be integrated with applications from other vendors, including Siebel, Peoplesoft, Broadvision as well as legacy systems that have been specifically built to enable unique business processes.

There are other components and tools such as Oracle Application Server 10g, data quality services, Web services, data cleansing tools, data duplication identifying tools and data librarian functions and processes.

Alternative paths

Charles (Chuck) Phillips, Oracle's president and a rapidly rising star at the company, said in his speech that with the Customer Data Hub, businesses now have three alternative paths to get a single source of truth about their customers, which, in Oracle's parlance, is also called "a 360 degree view of the customers".

First, according to Phillips, businesses can acquire Oracle's e-Business Suite, which will give them everything from the database to the applications. "This will give a business the most bang for their money."

However, companies may already have hundreds of applications, including those developed by other companies, and converting all of them to Oracle's applications will take hundreds of years or forever.

For them, the right solution is to integrate their systems with the e-Business Suite, which, in its next version, will feature integration services and will therefore be "integration- ready".

The third choice is to have the Customer Data Hub, which contains the customer data models that can be accessed by other applications, including third-party and custom applications.

An organization can retain their existing applications and still benefit from a single source of truth provided by the Hub. "Whichever path is taken," Phillips said, "the objective is the same: to get high quality information on customers."