Profit Magazine August 2016

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INTEGRATION
Bringing it all together pg. 06 Can we master complexity? pg. 12

Integrating in real time pg. 16 Your cloud wherever you want it
pg. 19 Making the cloud connection pg. 54
TECHNOLOGY POWERED. BUSINESS DRIVEN.
VIEW
FROM
THE TOP
Avaya sees the big
picture: Integrated
systems are the key to
customer satisfaction
Our goal was to put the

customer irst and ill
all of our integrated
processes around what
they want, so that their
experience is seamless.
FARI EBRAHIMI, SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT

AND CIO, AVAYA
oracle.com/profit
SUCCESSES FROM
AROUND THE WORLD
6 CLOUD
Volume 21 , Number 3 , August 2016
E DITORIAL
Editor in Chief
Managing Editor
Deputy Editor
AARON LAZENBY
[email protected]
JAN ROGERS
BLAIR CAMPBELL
Contributors
DAVID BAUM, BOBBIE HARTMAN, ALAN JOCH, MONICA MEHTA,

CHRIS MURPHY, KATE PAVAO, ROB PRESTON, TARA SWORDS,
ALISON WEISS, MINDA ZETLIN
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Vice President, Brand Creative
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Designer
Production Designer
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VOLUME 21 > NUMBER 3
CONTENTS 03
August 2016
UPFRONT
04
19
23
POOLING RESOURCES
Destination: San Francisco, Soak

and Suds, Sharing Economy
Comes Home, Viva Virtual Vegas
12
OPPORTUNITY COST
As technology and markets

accelerate, how do we balance
risk and reward?
INSIDE ORACLE
15
BEAM ME UP, PEPPER?
Oracle President of Product

Development Thomas Kurian
makes a unique appearance.
BIG IDEAS
50
54
59
A VIEW FROM
THE TOP
Avaya executives see
deep connections
between systems
integration and
customer satisfaction.
CLOUD CHALLENGE
Five projects show the many use

cases of cloud platforms.
CLOUD-CONFIDENT
Top Oracle partners are building

successful ERP cloud businesses.
COVER STORY
38
HUNTING FOR GROWTH
Dow Chemical uses technology

and a human touchto connect
with customers around the globe.
CLOUD SPECIAL SECTION
Proit examines how companies

around the world are putting
cloud to work.
A HEALTHIER
INFRASTRUCTURE
Pharmavite rebuilds its IT systems

from the ground up.
FEATURES
FYI
07
44
BEST OF BOTH WORLDS
Oracle Cloud at Customer offers

enterprises cloud agility while
minimizing risk.
BRINGING IT ALL TOGETHER
IT staff and business users can

create an integration strategy for
the cloud era.
NEW CONNECTIONS
The cloud simpliies system

integration for business users.
PART OF THE SOLUTION
I use Oracle Cloud every day.

Knowing how it works can help
me make it better.
06
16
64
THE ENFORCERS
Recent research shows C-suites

inluence on security policy.
BOB ADLER/GETTY IMAGES
COVER: BOB ADLER/GETTY IMAGES
PROFIT AUGUST 2016
04 EDITORS NOTE
Part of the Solution
Aaron Lazenby
Editor in Chief, Proit
[email protected]
Integration
technologies are
increasingly
making users a
part of the solution.
From what Ive
seen, well all
beneit as a result.
I work with an experienced group of journalists,

copywriters, editors, and content strategistsand
we produce a lot of content about enterprise computing. Keeping track of it all is a huge chore. (Who
is the assigned writer? Who is the editor? Whats
the current status of the work? Where will it be
published?) But the cloud is making this easier.
Every day, I use Oracle Marketing Cloud for
content worklow management. Consistent with the
marketing copy written about cloud applications, we
have beneited from a fast and easy rollout and have
seen quick results. Weve adapted our worklow to
match the best practices established by the system,
and shifting away from old, ineicient email- and
spreadsheet-based processes has been fairly painless.
Despite the fact that I use this cloud-based system
on a regular basis, I dont know much about how it
works on the back end. But I am very intimate with
the processes the system supports. And the more I
use the system, the more ideas I have about how it
could possibly connect to other business processes.
Working on this issue of Proit, I learned about
two technologies within Oracle Integration Cloud
Service that really give users an opportunity to inluence how cloud systems work together.
One is the visual designer within Oracle
Integration Cloud Service. It gives users an easy way
to drag and drop connections between software-asa-service (SaaS) applications. So if I want to promote
this column via Twitter, I could (without the help of
the IT team) ire up an integration to send the title
and link to an instance of Oracle Social Cloud.
The other thing I learned about is the recommendation feature of Oracle Integration Cloud Service.
This allows users to publish and share the integrations theyve made between SaaS applications in
their environment. So if youre looking for the best
way to automate a new business process or share data
between lines of business, this feature allows you to
crowd-source a solution between your peers.
In the pages of Proit, we often discuss how to
make a closer connection between business users
and the systems they need to get their jobs done.
Now, integration technologies are increasingly
making users a part of the solution. From what Ive
seen, well all beneit as a result.
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But Project Partners can help you get there fast.
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Visit www.ProjectP.com to move forward.
All trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
www.ProjectP.com 1.650.712.6200
06 LUMINARIES
By Vikas Anand
Bringing It All Together
It is essential that the

IT staff be able to
respond to the needs of
the business, helping
to build the computing
architecture required
to increase the
agility of the lines of
business and keeping
them responsive to
developments in
the market.
Today, inside of enterprises large and

small, line-of-business managers are buying
best-of-breed software-as-a-service (SaaS)
applications on their own to quickly get the
tools they need to keep pace with the market. HR managers acquire Oracle Human
Capital Management Cloud for onboarding
employees. Chief marketing oicers are
signing up for Oracle Marketing Cloud to
connect with their customers and prospects.
These cloud deployments are saving signiicant time and money, compared to their
on-premises counterparts.
Getting a quick beneit from an enterprise application is a huge development
its one of the reasons cloud-based
applications are becoming the standard
for business systems. But what if two cloud
systems need to share data? What if a
business process lows from one cloud into
an on-premises system?
Just as before the cloud revolution, systems need to be integrated. But if the chief
marketing oicer gives the IT department
a call and asks for help connecting his new
system to the on-premises system of record,
theres a good chance that hes not going
to like the answer. If the IT staf was not
involved at the time of the purchase, it will
not have the insight required to it the new
SaaS application into an already complex
systems environment. In fact, it might take
more time to complete this integration
than it took to roll out the cloud solution
in the irst place thereby reducing the
time to beneit.
But it is unacceptable to leave all of
these systems operating in isolation from
each other, undermining the beneits of
SaaS by illing the enterprise with silos
as a service. It is essential that the IT
staf be able to respond to the needs of the
business, helping to build the computing
architecture required to increase the agility
of the lines of business and keeping them
responsive to developments in the market.
In my mind, there are two ways to
accomplish this.
First, enterprise IT staf members must
establish a high standard for integration
functionality. That means they must

do their homework and learn about the
integration capabilities ofered by various enterprise integration cloud vendors.
They should have answers to questions
such as: How do I manage APIs that share
data with external sources? What kind
of out-of-the-box integration services are
available? Can a cloud solution connect to
solutions from other vendors? Will a solution be able to interact with an in-house
legacy system?
By interrogating potential vendors and
learning about their integration footprint,
the IT staf can create a list of approved
enterprise cloud vendors that have the
technology to prevent the organization
from unwittingly descending into the silo
as a service quagmire.
Second, some basic integration work
needs to be shared with the lines of
business. This means two things: the IT
department needs integration technology built with the end user in mind, and
the users need the skills and knowledge
necessary to do this work themselves.
Fortunately, I believe both of these points
can be addressed through technology. By
championing an integration platform that
is designed with business users in mind,
the IT staf can remove the technical
barriers preventing users from entering
the integration game. That means business users dont need to study integration
technologies such as REST, Python, or
BPEL they just need to be able to use
the kinds of interfaces that are common
on the modern internet.
If you want to realize the beneits of the
cloud era, you have to be able to modernize your IT infrastructure to scale to a
more dynamic environment. I believe that
means taking a new approach to integration. Bringing it all together is a big deal
but fortunately, with a little planning, it is
an efort that both the IT staf and business users can work on in harmony.
is senior director for Oracle
SOA Suite and Oracle Integration Cloud Service.
VIKAS ANAND
Working in harmony, IT staff and business users create an integration strategy for the cloud era.
FYI 07
THE RUNDOWN Destination: San Francisco TRAVEL Soak and Suds

NETWORK Sharing Economy Comes Home GADGET Viva Virtual Vegas
GREEN
POOLING RESOURCES
into an active and economical generator of clean
energy, with the added beneit of keeping land free
for other operations or activities, says Nick Boyle,
CEO at Lightsource Renewable Energy, which
built and operates the unique solar project. Close
proximity to water also helps to keep the panels and
wiring cool, which in turn boosts their eiciency,
he adds.
Could backyard pools be next? In theory, theres
no reason why it couldnt be installed on a pond, lake,
or even swimming pool to cater to the consumer market, says Boyle. Learn more at lightsource-re.co.uk.
BOBBIE HARTMAN
LIGHTSOURCE RENEWABLE ENERGY
Solar for the house, solar for the business solar

on the open water? London, England, now hosts
the worlds largest loating solar power farm on the
Queen Elizabeth II Reservoir, about eight miles from
Heathrow Airport.
Capable of generating enough electricity to power
1,800 homes, Thames Waters loating power station
includes 23,046 solar photovoltaic (PV) panels buoyed
by 61,000 loats and 177 anchorsbut takes up only
10 percent of the reservoir (about eight Wembley
Stadium football pitches).
Installing a solar PV array over a body of water
turns what can often otherwise be a redundant space
PROFIT AUGUST 2016
08 FYI
THE RUNDOWN
DESTINATION:
SAN FRANCISCO
Yerba Buena Gardens
BEST OASIS
For a hyperlocal
getaway, Profit
Editor in Chief
Aaron Lazenby
recommends
nearby Museum
of the African
Diaspora (685
Mission Street) for
thought-provoking
exhibitions.
Oracles Chief
Communication
Officer Bob Evans
suggests the
San Francisco
Museum of
Modern Art
(SFMOMA)
coffee bar (151
Third Street) for
a cup of freshbrewed Sightglass
coffee. Patricia
Dues, president
of the Oracle
Applications User
Group (OAUG),
suggests Yerba
Buena Gardens
(750 Howard
Street), where you
can nd a quiet
spot to relax.
Stinson Beach
The Ice Cream Bar
BEST
PICK-ME-UP
BEST
TOURIST SPOT
BEST
INSIDER TIP
BEST
EXCURSION
If you have a need

for a sweet treat,
Evans suggests
you pop into
Beard Papas
(99 Yerba Buena
Lane) for a cream
puff (US$2.90US$3.40), while
Colleen Cassity,
senior director
of corporate
citizenship at
Oracle, says you
will melt for an ice
cream sandwich
(US$4.25) from
The Grove (690
Mission Street).
Need to soothe
your soul? Try
the ochazuke
(Japanese tea
soup, US$13) at
Samovar Tea
Lounge (730
Howard Street),
which Lazenby
says is pure
perfection.
To see iconic San

Francisco, Dues
says you cant
miss Fishermans
Wharf, where you
can nd everything
from clam
chowder served
in a sourdough
bowl to Ghirardelli
Chocolate
souvenirs to bring
home, while Evans
recommends you
check out the
panoramic view
from atop Coit
Tower (1 Telegraph
Hill Boulevard).
Jeremy Ashley,
vice president
of the Oracle
Applications user
experience team,
suggests you shop
at Union Square
(333 Post Street)
including
a stop at the
always-inspiring
Apple Store (300
Post Street).
To add some
depth to your
city explorations,
Cassity suggests
downloading
Detour San
Francisco
(US$24.99,
iPhone), a
location-aware
audio tour app
that offers local
secrets and stories
as you wander
San Franciscos
most iconic
neighborhoods.
And because it
has to be 5 oclock
somewhere,
Lazenby says you
need to hustle
over to The Ice
Cream Bar (815
Cole Street),
because of two
words: alcoholic
milkshakes. Try the
Royal Reda mix
of beer, sherry,
and cherry ice
cream (US$13).
Youre welcome.
If you have extra

time to take a
day or overnight
trip after the
show, Cassity
recommends
unwinding at
Indian Springs
(1712 Lincoln
Avenue, Calistoga),
a Spanish-style
spa that dates
from 1862 and is
just a 90-minute
drive from San
Francisco. Evans
loves strolling
around Stinson
Beach, a beautiful,
white-sand beach
town less than one
hour north, while
Dues likes
to road-trip to
Napas famous
wine country for
a tour at one of
the areas many
working vineyards.
What better way
to say cheers to a
great show?
TRAVEL
SOAK AND
SUDS
Heres a new way
to relax with a beer:
visit Hop in the Spa in
Sisters, Oregon, to tap
into a unique pampering
experience. Patrons can
start with a pint of beer
from Deschutes Brewery,
a local microbrewery,
and then soak in a cedar
tub full of brewed hops,
barley, and minerals
and inish with a massage
enriched by hand-crafted
hop oil.
Hops help moisturize and exfoliate the
skin, and also help with
insomnia as they calm
the nervous system,
says spa cofounder Mike
Boyle. They also make
the skin and muscles soft
and supple, which is a
great way to prepare for
a massage.
Hop in the Spa
opened in February 2016,
and Boyle is currently
developing packages that
will feature spa services,
tours to local breweries,
and educational seminars. Patrons can also
enjoy a beer and a pretzel
on the sun deck, which
Boyle calls Central
Oregons irst authentic
beer garden. Soaks start
at US$75 and massages
start at US$65. Find out
more at hopinthespa.com.
MONICA MEHTA
ELIJAH MERCHN, MARK DOLINER/FLICKR; HOP IN THE SPA
Planning to come to San Francisco, California, for Oracle OpenWorld? Oracles lagship
event, taking place this year from September 1822, is always full of exciting executive
keynotes, thousands of hands-on labs and demos, and plenty of networking opportunities.
But what do you do when you have a little downtime between sessions or need a quick energy
boost to keep you going into the afternoon? We asked some Oracle insiders to clue us in on
their favorite Bay Area secrets. TARA SWORDS
When you do
just one thing,
you get very, very, very, very
good at it.
Cloud-based Project Management software solutionsthats all we do.

If all you want is access to the Cloud, call our generalist competitors. But if you want the leading specialist in Cloud-based Project
Management solutions, call us. This is our only business, founded on our very, very, very deep knowledge of your complex
applications, integrations and infrastructure.
The other guys just dont have our Project Management software expertise, dedicated technologies or uniied global support. Sure,
anyone can brag about providing infrastructure in minutes, but can they custom-build Your Perfect Cloud for instant productivity
and ROI? Thought not.
Were also the only one with SpringBoardour mind-blowing Cloud portal. It not only connects you to 200+ Project Management
software titles, training and administration tools, but to real-time support, real humans and real answers. So choose the best. And
dont ever, ever, ever settle for less.
Technology and Expertise by
Americas Top 20
Engineering, Design & Construction irms all use LOADSPRING*
*Source: 2015 ENRs Top 100 Professional Services Firms and Top 500 Design Firms + LOADSPRING data.
Copyright 2016. LoadSpring is a trademark of LoadSpring Solutions, Inc. All Right Reserved. loadspring.com Follow us on Facebook.
10 FYI
NETWORK
SHARING ECONOMY COMES HOME

sionate professionals such as mechanical
engineer Jeremy Swerdlow often live for
years in a sprawling home where they host
tech talks and Sunday night dinners and
collaborate on projects. Of course, they
all have chores. For example, Swerdlow is
in charge of the garage, which is really a
permanent maker lab complete with a laser
cutter, a 3-D printer, electronic fabrication equipment, and more. In this way,
Rainbow Mansion is like a normal house
in the area. In Silicon Valley, garages
are for projects, not for cars, he jokes.
More information is at podshare.co and
rainbowmansion.com. KATE PAVAO
GADGET
VIVA VIRTUAL VEGAS
Travelers who are heading to Las Vegas, Nevada, for

a conference or a little R&Rcan now plan their trip
without having to gamble on experiences that might not
be worth the expense. The new Vegas VR app for mobile
devices ofers 12 experiences allowing virtual tourists to
ly in a helicopter over the famous Strip, loat in a gondola through the Grand Canal Shoppes, zoom down the
SlotZilla urban zip line, and more.
Virtual reality is another way to inspire people to
travel by allowing them to feel what its like to be in an
experience before booking their trip, says Caroline
Coyle, vice president of brand strategy for the Las Vegas
Convention and Visitors Authority, who sees unlimited
potential for the Vegas VR app to bring the city to life
and to entice visitors. She says tourists should expect more
experiences to be added to the app, with the potential
addition of 4-D and augmented reality in the near future.
Learn more at itb.vrtv.vegas. ALISON WEISS
RAINBOW MANSION; WES ROWELL
With long work hours and increasing

time spent interfacing with devices instead
of people, its easy for professionals to feel
isolated. Coliving ofers an alternative: these
communities ofer like-minded people a way
to come together to share space, eat meals,
and build networks.
The models vary: Los Angeles,
Californiabased PodShare provides bunks,
bikes, and coworking tables at locations
throughout the city, catering to shorter stays
for travelers, temp workers such as production assistantsand new arrivals.
Meanwhile at the Cupertino, California,
Rainbow Mansion, a small group of pas-
12 FYI
NUMBER OF LINES OF CODE that could be deployed in
100 MILLION THE
a modern luxury car
(Source: Washington Post, May 2016)
ON TOPIC
OPPORTUNITY COST
As technology and markets accelerate, how do we balance risk and reward?
We are dependent on toolsfrom cars to healthcare screenings to global shipping networksthat
are built on increasingly interconnected and interoperational systems. Many people dont realize
that a lot of these systems are too complex to fully
understand, says Samuel Arbesman, author of
Overcomplicated and a scientist in residence at venture
capital irm Lux Capital. Its a trend Arbesman sees
only accelerating and while these systems provide
us with great beneits, there can be dire consequences, including deaths, when they fail. How do
we ind balance?
On complexity: Complication is
when you have a whole bunch
of stuf, but complexity is when
all those things are interacting
in a way that makes it diicult
to predict the resulting outputs.
Within a complex system, there
is feedback, emergent behavior,
and sometimes incentives on
the conditions. Think of an
animal: When its alive, theres
a huge amount going on inside
it. When its dead, its still enormously intricate, but theres no
dynamics and therefore theres
no potential for complexity.
On unintended consequences:
In 1982, the Vancouver Stock
Exchange unveiled its own
kind of stock index, and it
started at around 1,000 points.
Then it went down, down,
down, which was curious
because it was a bull market.
It turned out that deep within
the system, instead of rounding
numbers to the nearest second
decimal point, the system just
truncated the number. Over

the course of two years, the
index lost half its value.
More recently, think about
machine-learning systems.
These are enormously powerful, complex systems. The
problem is that oftentimes
these systems dont provide
the outputs we desire, and we
have very little insight into
how the results are achieved.
On glitches: Oftentimes to
really understand how a
system works you need to try
to actively cause it to fail.
Biologists do this by creating
mutations, either by knocking
out a gene and seeing what
happens, or by irradiating
bacteria and seeing what
results. Netlix does something similar with Chaos
Monkey, a tool that randomly
takes down certain computers
in its system to see how well
the entire system adapts.
On the cloud: Everything in
OFTENTIMES
TO REALLY
UNDERSTAND
HOW A SYSTEM
WORKS YOU
NEED TO TRY TO
ACTIVELY CAUSE
IT TO FAIL.
technology is moving toward

increasing complexity, and
thats not a bad thing. Cloud
solutions allow us to focus on
what we want, instead of what
we dont want. Startups no
longer need to spend a huge
amount of time building a
server room. But we should be
aware of potential limitations
and where these things might
break down.
On perspective: We tend
toward two extremes with
technology: either extreme
veneration or extreme fear.
Both approaches can cut
of our questioning and our
attempts to understand complex systems. Biological thinking and an iterative tinkering
approach threads the needle
between two extremes
especially when we are humble, trying to understand these
systems as much as we can but
accepting when we dont.
KATE PAVAO
The Future of Supply Chain in the Cloud

Its really not a question of if your business will move to the
Cloud, but rather when. Companies need to know where they
stand against their competition.
81%
Respondents who hope to

use Cloud-based Supply
Chain applications
to improve internal
operations to reduce
costs and inefficiencies
Top 3 Applications
Companies are Moving to Cloud
Respondents who
expected increase
in Public Cloud
adoption for
Large businesses
over next 3 years
46%
Lack of System Integration seen as

an Obstacle to Supply Chain Goals
Responses by Segment
Job Function
#1
Human Capital Management
#2
Global Trade Management
#3
Transportation
44%
Business
40%
IT
Company Size
37%
Midsize
46%
Large
Industry
44%
High Tech
46%
Manufacturing
30%
CPG
Job Level
39%
C-Suite
43%
Non C-Suite
Visit our booth in Moscone West at Oracle OpenWorld to receive

a copy of our study or download at inspirage.com/cloud
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SPONSORED CONTENT
JD EDWARDS SPECIAL ISSUE
[PARTNER Q&A
Connecting Cloud to Business Value

Hitachi Consulting helps IT leaders create cloud strategies
to enable innovation.
mplementing a cloud-centered
IT portfolio can help enterprise leaders quickly harness
technology to achieve operational efciencies and innovative
outcomes in todays fast-paced
business arena. But adopting cloud
technology involves more than
just selecting the right hardware
Phil Regnault, Hitachi Consulting
and software. Here, Phil Regnault,

senior vice president at Hitachi
Consulting, a Premier Partner in
the Oracle PartnerNetwork Cloud
Program, discusses the issues to
carefully consider and why its important to craft a strategy to realize
the full business potential of cloud.
What are some of the challenges

of moving to the cloud?
For many chief information ofcers,
its realizing that cloud is already
happening across their enterprise. Recently, Hitachi Consulting
looked across our own company
and we found a high number of
cloud applications being used
throughout. IT leaders need to
develop an overall cloud strategy
to ensure that cloud applications
function with an appropriate level
of security and that their value is
maximized by integrating applications in a programmatic fashion.
Why is integration such
a critical issue?
Enterprises function best when
data ows from one application
to another to create seamless
experiences for customers, suppliers, and employees. But, there is
a proliferation of cloud solutions
available today that are being deployed that are not preintegrated,
leading to isolated application
siloes. Working with a partner like
Hitachi Consulting can provide the
strategy and support to ensure
that cloud applications are managed as a portfolio and determine
which applications should be integrated together. We bring a high
level of expertise because weve
been exposed to thousands of cli-
For more information on how executive leaders can maximize their

journey to cloud, visit oracle.com/goto/cloud-for-c-suite
ents who are facing these integration challenges right now. We also
have developed integrated cloud
solutions that have embedded
best practices and solve the most
common and critical business
issues. Oracle plays a big role
because its Oracle Cloud technology is often at the core of these
Hitachi Consulting solutions.
Are there other cloud trends
driving business value?
Today, IT is inltrating the physical realm by way of the Internet of
Things (IoT). Hitachi Consulting is
part of Hitachi Ltd., which makes
many of the IoT data collecting
assets that bridge the virtual and
physical IT worlds. The cloud is
the best means to collect, process, analyze, and contextualize
the data collected from assets.
IT leaders are just beginning to
think about how IoT can impact
and create value for their enterprises. Hitachi Consulting is one
of the only companies in the world
that has information technology,
operational technology, and technology services all under one roof.
Together with our partnership with
Oracle and Oracle Cloud, we can
offer the unique insights to help
our clients determine how cloud
and IoT together can conspire to
generate business value. n
INSIDE ORACLE
Q&A How the cloud simplies system integration for business users BREAKTHROUGH Your cloud,
where you want it HEADLINES Oracle buys Opower
KEVIN TWOMEY; JAMES MCENTEE/GETTY IMAGES
15
Oracle President of
Product Development
Thomas Kurian in the
Oracle studio (left), and
his holographic presence
in Miami, Florida (right)
BEAM ME UP, PEPPER? Redwood Shores, California

At the Accenture Oracle Leadership Council in Miami,
Florida, in April, participants were surprised by a unique appearance from Oracle President of Product Development Thomas
Kurian. Kurian, who couldnt be in Miami for the event, still
managed to deliver his keynote address in person. The backstage magic happened via a live studio feed from the Oracle cam-
pus in Redwood Shores, California, where Kurians holographic

keynote was captured and transported to the Miami conference.
This old school illusion technique called Peppers Ghost
dates back to the 1600s, but was popularized in 1862 by scientist John Henry Pepper. Today live streaming video enables
Pepper to travel the world. BY JAN ROGERS
PROFIT AUGUST 2016
16 INSIDE ORACLE
Q&A
NEW CONNECTIONS
The cloud simplies system integration for business users.
Darko Vukovic, a manager in the Oracle
Integrated Cloud Product Management
Group, believes that scale and experience
matter when it comes to building integration
technologies for the cloud era. He believes that
when it comes to connecting modern systems,
Oracle has a big advantage.
Our customers are often very large and
sophisticated enterprises that adopt hundreds
of diferent systems, both on premises and in
the cloud, says Vukovic, describing the current state of enterprise IT. We are in there,
working with systems that are cloud-based, on
premises, and even from third parties. Because
we have insight and understanding about how
these systems operate together, we can provide
better types of connectivity between them.
PROFIT: How do Oracle products address these
shifts?
VUKOVIC: All Oracle Cloud services come with
APIs out of the box, which means that you have

the ability to actually interact with the services,
not just through their user interface but also
through the APIs they expose. And those APIs
are built with the intention of people building
integrations, as well as derivative applications on
top of them.
By the end of the year, Oracles newest product
in the API management space is coming out,
Oracle API Manager Cloud Service. This new
product is more cohesive in terms of functionality.
It integrates fully with partners such as Apiary
and with other Oracle products such as Oracle
Integration Cloud Service. It is a more compel-
Here, Vukovic talks to

Proit about how Oracle
builds its cloud solutions to
integrate easily, which puts
more power into users hands.
PROFIT: How has the cloud
changed the way integration works?
VUKOVIC: With the cloud, there are two fundamental shifts. One is that not only do you no longer
possess an application on premises, but its actually being hosted and operated by someone else,
so that integration needs to go over the public
internet. This presents all kinds of challenges,
such as how do you make that connection secure?
The second big change is that integration is no
longer an afterthought. Today, when you design
a new system, whether its in the cloud or on
premises, you have to think about people wanting
to use it alongside a bunch of other systems. What
we are seeing more commonly now is integration driven by APIs, which reduces the need for
complicated adapters and protocols and very
application-speciic stuf.
17
HEADLINES
JUNE
A selection of Oracle announcements

from the past quarter
21
Oracles New Database

Appliances Deliver the Power
of Engineered Systems to
Organizations of All Sizes
20 New Cloud Platform Lets

Independent Software
Vendors Publish Oracle
CloudCompatible Apps on
the Oracle Cloud Marketplace
16
Oracle Partners with

Snapchat to Measure
Impact of Digital Advertising
on Store Purchases
14
Oracle Utilities Analytics

Cloud Service Helps
Utilities Make Better
Business Decisions
MAY
Darko Vukovic,
Manager, Oracle
Integrated Cloud
Product Management
Group
ORACLE
02 Oracle Buys Opower
APRIL
BY GIVING TOOLS TO
LINE-OF-BUSINESS
ADMINISTRATORS
TO BUILD
INTEGRATIONS,
YOU ALLOW THEM
TO AUTOMATE
PARTS OF THEIR
JOB THAT WERE
TIME-CONSUMING
OR WASTEFUL.
ling solution than what a customer can get today,

whether from Oracle or from other vendors in
the space.
PROFIT: IT departments have historically been in
charge of creating seamless integration for users.
Is this still the case?
VUKOVIC: Its very typical for a company now to
have more than a hundred software-as-a-service
[SaaS] systems and dozens of on-premises systems, which means the number of possible permutations is just massive. Company leaders realize
that they need more than their IT department to
help out with integration.
With a product such as Oracle Integration
Cloud Service, line-of-business administrators
the people who actually operate those systems
can build out some simple integrations, for
example, uploading a ile into their customer
relationship management [CRM] system or connecting the CRM system to their service system.
They can use a UI to model the problem and
solve it, rather than needing to be able to code
and conigure.
If they understand the high-level picture, and
they understand things such as headers, ields,
and URLs, they could actually go ahead and use
our products to solve their problem without needing to pull in a more seasoned developer.
PROFIT: Are there other advantages, besides just
saving IT resources?
VUKOVIC: More and more of us use computers to
amplify our productivity. The people who use the
machines end up knowing how best to use them
and how to get the most optimal output from them.
By giving tools to line-of-business administrators to build integrations, you allow them to automate parts of their job that were time-consuming
or wasteful, and they can take that extra energy
and focus it on work that adds value.
PROFIT: Are Oracle Cloud customers able to share
integration best practices?
VUKOVIC: Yes. Lets say someone wants to integrate
Oracle CRM Cloud solutions and Oracle Human
Capital Management Cloud systems to provision
peoples accounts in the CRM system. It turns
out a lot of people have that same use case. After
one person integrates these systems with Oracle
Integration Cloud Service, Oracle can extract
certain metadata such as ield names, which
dont come with any privacy concernsto see
how users map elements to each other.
Oracle can share this information with its new
customers. It might not be exactly what they want
to do, but it gives them a good starting point thats
going to save 80 to 90 percent of their time.
28 Oracle Buys Textura

27 Oracle Marketing Cloud
Helps Marketers Reduce
Sales Cycles and Improve
Conversion Rates
15
Oracle Buys Crosswise
06 Oracle Announces New

Oracle HCM Cloud Solutions
to Help Further Drive HR
Transformation
Aaron Lazenby is editor in chief of Proit.

PROFIT AUGUST 2016
A Refreshing Change
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INSIDE ORACLE 19
OF ORGANIZATIONS SURVEYED that are in the process of creating
61 aPERCENTAGE
cloud services strategy
(Source: Cloud Security Alliance, cloudsecurityalliance.org)
BEST OF BOTH
WORLDS
Oracle Cloud at Customer offers enterprises cloud
agility while minimizing risk. BY ALISON WEISS
CUSTOMERS ARE
NOW GETTING
THE PRICING,
FLEXIBILITY, AND
SCALABILITY
OF THE PUBLIC
CLOUD, BUT
THEY HAVE
THE ABILITY
TO MEET ALL
THEIR PRIVACY,
SECURITY, AND
REGULATORY
REQUIREMENTS.
The promise of public cloud technology is that

it enables enterprises to improve productivity and
innovate faster. But irms in many industries such
as healthcare, public sector, and inancial services
have had serious reservations about migrating to
the public cloud because of potential security risks
and regulatory barriers. Now companies no longer have to choose between embracing agility and
managing these risks with Oracles new Oracle
Cloud at Customer service.
According to Amit Zavery, senior vice president of Oracle Cloud Platform, Oracle Cloud
at Customer gives enterprises the ability to run
Oracle Cloud, Oracles public cloud platform, on
their own premises by placing an Oracle cloud
server within the data center of their choice. As
a result, companies gain all the beneits of cloud
while still maintaining full control over their information and complying with all data privacy and
data residency requirements.
Weve made Oracle Cloud at Customer to
be exactly the same pricing model as what we
do in our public cloud, he says. Customers are
now getting the pricing, lexibility, and scalability of the public cloud, but they have the ability
to meet all their privacy, security, and regulatory requirements.
The timing for Oracle Cloud at Customer
couldnt be better. A 2015 report from the Cloud
Security Alliance reveals that banks, insurance
companies, and government organizations are
becoming more open to adopting cloud. Indeed,
while only 32 percent of organizations surveyed
have a cloud services strategy in place, 61 percent
are in the process of creating such a strategy.
The Oracle Cloud at Customer service
takes advantage of the same software used in
Oracle Cloud and is complemented by a common set of APIs and tools. Further, Oracle is
responsible for the maintenance and manage-
Amit Zavery, Senior Vice President, Oracle Cloud Platform
ment of the environment.

For customers looking to migrate from Oracle
solutions on premises to innovative software-asa-service-based applications, Oracle Cloud at
Customer easily facilitates connectivity between
legacy applications and next-generation applications running in the cloud via Oracle Integration
Cloud Service. It also utilizes a hybrid cloud structure that enables enterprises to run any workload on
premises or in Oracle Cloud, and the workloads are
completely portable between the two environments.
If a company is running an application on
premises and needs excess capacity during the
holiday season, since a workload can be moved
transparently with Oracle Cloud at Customer, it
is simple to get excess capacity from the public
cloud for a few hours to accommodate that burst
in demand, Zavery observes.
Oracle is already seeing high demand for the
solution, which currently provides a variety of
services including enterprise integration, application development, and data management.
Ultimately, plans call for every service Oracle
ofers in the public cloud to be available in
Oracle Cloud at Customer.
Alison Weiss is a frequent contributor to Proit.
PROFIT AUGUST 2016
SPONSORED CONTENT
C L O U D PA R T N E R R E P O R T : E X E C U T I V E Q & A
Accelerating the Growth of Cloud Business

The Oracle PartnerNetwork Cloud Program helps partners move their
customers to modern business models.
he Oracle PartnerNetwork
(OPN) Cloud Program
was launched in February
2016 to help partners accelerate the growth of their Oracle Cloud business. Shawn
Price, senior vice president,
ties to grow their Oracle Cloud

business and differentiate their
company and their solutions
in the market. Partners meet
critical performance metrics
to attain a Cloud designation that showcases their
The OPN Cloud Program

puts our cloud strategy
into action with our
partners. We want to
provide customers with
both exceptional tools and
services for moving their
cloud business forward,
and offer outstanding
incentives to partners who
are promoting our cloud
solutions.
Shawn Price, Oracle
Oracle Cloud, discusses the

programs details and how
it brings value to Oracles
partners and customers.
What is the Oracle PartnerNetwork Cloud Program?
The OPN Cloud Program
provides partners opportuni-
level of skill and expertise

in delivering Oracle Cloud
solutions. This new program
and its progressive Cloud
tiers complement the OPN
program membership levels.
It pivots relationships with our
partners to focus on cloud
business and help custom-
ers transform and accelerate

their business to the cloud.
How is this program important to customers?
Customers are looking for the
right partner to deliver solutions to help streamline and
grow their business. Oracles
new program maps to the
model in which our partners
engage and the maturity of
their Cloud business to help
customers identify those partners who have differentiated
expertise, skills, and proven
investment in Oracle Cloud.
What should a customer look
for when selecting a partner
to deliver a cloud solution?
OPN members can showcase
their investment in Oracle
Cloud by achieving one of four
Cloud designationsCloud
Standard, Cloud Select,
Cloud Premier, or Cloud Elite.
Each progressive tier includes
key cloud-specic performance metrics, allowing
customers to select partners
based on their specic prole
and to identify partners who
exemplify excellence in delivering Oracle Cloud solutions.
Cloud Standard partners
have transacted Oracle Cloud
business, become specialized in an Oracle Cloud solu-
Top-Tier OPN
Cloud Partners
OPN Global Cloud Elite Partners
Deloitte
Accenture
tion, or developed an application integrated with or that runs
on Oracle Cloud Services. Cloud
Select partners have a proven
track record in driving business
with at least a few successful
Oracle Cloud implementations
in their portfolio. These partners
may be in the specic niche
youre in, or they might have
expertise in a product set that
youre considering to run your
business. Look at their proles
and at their specializations to
learn more about their unique
focus.
Cloud Premier partners have
proven success with Oracle
Cloud and have transformed
their business to focus specically on driving Oracle Cloud
solutions with successful and
repeatable use cases. These
partners are highly invested
in Oracle Cloud solutions, and
have a number of Cloud specializations or applications integrated with or built on Oracle
Cloud Services. They also have
Certied Oracle Cloud Implementation Specialists, multiple
customer references, and dedicated Oracle Cloud teams.
Additionally, we feature our
top Cloud partners in the Cloud
Elite tiers. These designations
are earned by highly skilled
and committed partners with
a depth and breadth of Oracle
Cloud expertise to provide comprehensive Oracle Cloud solutions. At the time of this printing,
two partners have achieved this
prestigious statusDeloitte
and Accenture at Global Cloud
Elite. We expect this number to

grow as our partner ecosystem
evolves and fully embraces the
cloud.
Why did Oracle launch this
program within Oracle
PartnerNetwork?
The cloud is changing everything.
It is changing the way we work,
the way businesses are run, and
the way we communicate. Our
OPN ecosystem needs to evolve
with the market. The OPN Cloud
Program puts our cloud strategy
into action with our partners.
We want to provide customers with exceptional tools and
services for moving their cloud
business forward, and offer outstanding incentives to partners
who are promoting our cloud
solutions.
With the OPN Cloud Program,
we have a comprehensive portfolio of cloud offerings to enable
our partners to fully realize the
competitive advantages offered
through Oracle Cloud. We can
equip our partners with the
tools they need to successfully
move our mutual customers to
modern business models. Our
rapid growth and extensive software-as-a-service, platform-asa-service, and infrastructure-asa-service cloud portfolio present
an unparalleled opportunity for
partners and customers alike.
How is the program being
accepted in the market?
Oracle partners are excited
about the program, and customers are embracing it. We
OPN Cloud Elite Partner

PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC)
OPN Cloud Premier Partners
Al Moammar Information
Systems
AST Corporation
Capgemini
Cognizant
Hitachi
IBM
Infosys
KPMG
NTT Data
Sopra Steria Group
TCS (Tata Consultancy Services)
Visit the OPN Solutions
Catalog to learn more
about these partners at
solutions.oracle.com.
*Partner list valid as of June 1, 2016
are starting to see OPN Cloud

designations in requests for proposals. Because this program
directly supports Oracles strategic direction and the market
demand for cloud solutions, we
are investing to ensure it will
continue to evolve to meet our
partners and our customers
needs. Our partners have played
a huge part in Oracles transformation to the cloud. We encourage customers to engage with
partners who are participating in
the OPN Cloud Program. n
For more information, visit www.oracle.com/partners/goto/cloudpartner
[PARTNER Q&A
SPONSORED CONTENT
A Better Finance Function

PwC has a unique value proposition for Oracle customers looking to
move their finance operations to the cloud.
or customers seeking to modernize their nance operations,

PwC offers deep expertise
in Oracle nancial solutions, a
business-led technology approach,
a focus on measurable results,
and a broad scope of services
and experience. Larry Abramson,
a principal at PwC specializing
in Oracle Cloud applications and
engineered systems, discusses
PwCs unique
value proposition for Oracle
customers looking to move their
nance function
to the cloud.
and technology skills help

enhance the core transaction
processing and reporting competencies of our clients nance function, while strengthening its ability
to support management decisionmaking and corporate strategy. We
assist the nance integration team
by providing Oracle and nance
business process professionals to
help them lead the nance work
stream of the larger integration
effort, provide the extra support
needed to utilize new functionality
in nance upgrades, or help with
nance transformation initiatives
that require a blend of both Oracle
and nance consulting support.
What are the

chief reasons
customers are
moving their
finance function
to the cloud?
Companies
are
Larry Abramson, PwC
now using cloudbased nancial solutions to create
remarkable business opportunities across the enterprise. Theyre
enhancing their corporate agility,
increasing collaboration and innovation, and running their businesses with dramatically less investment. In fact, many companies are
reducing total cost of ownership
by up to 60 percent over a 10-year
period.
How do you start such a project?

We usually start a project by exploring what the client is hoping to accomplish by moving to the cloud. For
instance, PwC helped a global digital
industrial company provide professional services in connection with
the implementation of Oracle Cloud,
reducing risk and lowering cost over
an on-premises upgrade. Our clients
have improved business processes,
gained operational efciency, and
enhanced employee engagement
with Oracles cloud technologies.
What is PwCs strategy on

helping customers with the
finance function?
Our accounting, organizational,
What does PwC do to help

customers move their financials to
the cloud?
PwCs Rapid Fit to Cloud (RF2C) is a
proprietary framework that enables
us to deliver Oracle Cloud Financials
in an extremely short time frame.
RF2C is built on PwC experience in
Oracle implementations leveraging
For more information, visit www.pwc.com/oracle
our dedicated Cloud Center of Excellence. It features accelerators and

a prebuilt prototype, and is implemented with an agile, iterative methodology. This framework makes
moving to the cloud both fast and
painlessand then helps businesses efciently handle the speedy new
cadence of cloud updates. Its not
uncommon for our clients to deploy
a core Oracle nancial solution in
the cloud in as little as 18 weeks.
Why do customers choose
PwC for their finance-in-thecloud projects?
PwC is a global company with
delivery capabilities of more than
3,500 Oracle professionals in 110
countries, and 2,000-plus Oracle
engagements. We are an Oracle
Diamond Partner and an Oracle
Cloud Elite Partner. We deliver resultsa large manufacturing client
increased its top line margin growth
by enabling deal margins analysis
for sales leaders, and was able to
decrease time spent on revenue
recognition monthly postings by 70
percent. For companies that need
to invest in innovation to fuel their
future success, PwCs Oracle Practice delivers cloud-fueled inspiration
and experience. We leverage Oracle
Enterprise Resource Planning Cloud
nancials to help clients manage
costs, boost operational efciencies,
and accelerate decision-making
with real-time information. n
CLOUD SPECIAL SECTION 23
CLOUD WORLDWIDE
In this special section, Profit examines how companies
around the world are putting cloud to work.
IN THIS SECTION
Capital Investment (p. 24) First-Class Flight (p. 26) Trading Light (p. 28)
A Taste for Cloud (p. 30) Social Suds (p. 32) Cloud on the Curriculum (p. 34)
PROFIT AUGUST 2016
24 ORACLE CLOUD CUSTOMER

Abu Dhabi,
United Arab Emirates
ORACLE ERP CLOUD
CAPITAL INVESTMENT
Going all in on Oracle Enterprise Resource Planning Cloud boosts business
and IT process effectiveness at KBBO Group.
BY JOHN SOAT
Khaleefa Butti Bin Omair

(KBBO) Group, established
in 2004, is a leading investment irm based in Abu
Dhabi in the United Arab
Emirates (UAE). It has a
diverse portfolio of properties operating across the
globe, with investments in
key sectors including healthcare, currency exchange,
equity brokerage, education,
prepaid electronic distribution, real estate development,
oil and gas, information
technology, and facilities
management.
control and governance over its investments. We

came to the conclusion that we need to bring all
the companies were involved with operationally
onto a common technology platform, he says.
As for what technology to standardize on,
having been in IT for more than a decade,
Mayani was well acquainted with how quickly
the enterprise environment can change. We
wanted to invest in technology that was futuristic, he says. Already high on his priority list was
cloud computing.
A BIGGER DECISION
The i rst technology initiative KBBO Group

tackled was an organizationwide email system.
The company chose Microsofts cloud ofering,
Oice 365, which provided additional beneits
in terms of online document management and
WES ROWELL
In 2013, KBBO Groups

various companies were using
a diverse collection of accounting systems including Intuit
QuickBooks, Microsoft Great
Plains, and Sage and operating
according to a variety of diferent business processes. To help streamline and
unify systems and processes, KBBO Group drew
up a well-dei ned technology roadmap for the
next several years. With an emphasis on process
eiciency and employee productivity, the technology plan was intended to help the company
be more agile and more responsive to growth
opportunities, says Samir Mayani, director of IT
at KBBO Group.
One imperative was technology standardization. KBBO Group needed a single enterprise
resource planning (ERP) platform to bring
together its many companies based in the UAE
and the UK, including One Financial Markets,
One Prepay, Bin Butti Real Estate, Brokerage
House Securities, and others. Technology and
process standardization would give KBBO Group
more transparency and help it maintain process
25
IF IT HAS
TO SPEND
70 PERCENT
OF THE TIME
MANAGING
THIS NONVALUE-ADDED
TASK [OF
MAINTAINING
AGING
SYSTEMS],
THEN WHERE IS
IT SUPPORTING
THE BUSINESS?
Samir Mayani, Director of
Information Technology,
KBBO Group
collaboration features, Mayani says.

Next up was a much bigger decisiona
complete ERP system. KBBO Group short-listed
three vendors: Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP.
Bolstered by the irms success with its cloudbased email system, and having a fair understanding of the signiicant advantages such a cloud
deployment would ofer, Mayani was conident in
an organizationwide cloud ERP implementation.
At the time, though, not many large companies
were using cloud computing on the scale envisioned by KBBO Group. Cloud ERP providers, including Oracle, had only a few reference
accounts using their entire suites of cloud ERP
modules. We were one of the irst customers in
the Middle East looking to implement a complete
cloud ERP suite across multiple companies and
various countries, Mayani says.
KBBO Group evaluated both on-premises and
cloud ERP oferingsas well as hybrid options. It
found the advantages of a cloud-only environment
signiicant and insistent. For instance, theres
the savings on manpower and infrastructure,
including space and rent in an expensive area of
the world. Also, theres the ability to hand over
responsibility for security and disaster recovery to
the cloud services provider. The most important
consideration was the security and conidentiality
of the data, Mayani says, which is why security
experience and expertise in a cloud provider was
a top priority for KBBO Group.
Finally, not having to spend the majority of his
IT resources on the maintenance of aging systems
was very attractive. Because, if IT has to spend
70 percent of the time managing this non-valueadded task, then where is IT supporting the business? Mayani says. And given the requirements
of the companies KBBO Group owns, the cloud
will make it easiest to support the business as we
grow, he says.
USER FRIENDLIER
KBBO Group chose Oracle Enterprise Resource

Planning Cloud (Oracle ERP Cloud) for several
reasons. Oracles cloud-based ERP services were
less complex and easier to work with than those
of its competitors; in particular, the user interface was simpler and friendlier. That was one
of the critical requirements, Mayani says. Also,
Oracles inancial system better addressed local
requirements, thanks in large part to Oracles
20-year history in the region. And Oracle was
very lexible in terms of cost, he adds.
Oracle recommended a service provider to
help with the implementation, which involved
multiple business organizations in multiple
geographies. KBBO Group had the cloud ERP

modulesincluding inancials, payroll, and
procurementup and running across 12 legal
entities in about ive months, going live in January
2015, Mayani says.
The company has beneited from the new
system organizationwide by standardizing HR
and inancial processes. The system has helped
reduce the IT stafs workload by 40 percent
thanks to user friendly business intelligence
tools and real-time management reporting
capabilities, and it has enabled business users to
input, manipulate, and report on a wide variety
of information sources.
KBBO Group has integrated the cloud ERP
services with Oice 365, using document management capabilities to attach Microsoft Word or
Excel iles to transactions in the ERP system.
KBBO Group also has successfully implemented two updates to Oracle ERP Cloud in the
past year and earlier this year was preparing for
the latest update, Release 11. Regular technology updates are another advantage of the cloud
system, even though theyre something of a forced
march. You have to work within the time frame
provided, Mayani says. Cloud updates are
relatively fast compared to on-premises software
upgrades, which can be arduous, three-to-fourmonth projects. Not only that, if the on-premises
upgrade is too diicult, you might not do it for
many yearsand that means you dont pass on
the beneits to the business, Mayani says. The
cloud update regimen helps keep us always in
tune with the new functionality, he says.
KBBO Groups technology roadmap continues
to serve its companies well, and the investment
irm makes the cloud ERP services available
to subsidiaries as theyre added. However, the
services arent forced on subsidiaries if their business requirements dont it with the standard ERP
platform and instead call for industry-speciic
solutions. Rather, Mayani says, KBBO Group is
helping its investment companies in making the
right decision and using the right solution.
John Soat is senior writer in Oracles Content Central
organization. Previously, he was a freelance writer and

multimedia producer specializing in the intersection of
business and technolog y.
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Nairobi,
Kenya
ORACLE CX CLOUD
FIRST-CLASS FLIGHT
Kenya Airways reads digital body language to personalize
customer outreach and service.
BY ROB PRESTON
Kenya Airways knew that if it were

ever to achieve its goal of becoming not
only Africas leading airline but also a
shining example of progress on the continent, it had to gain a more-complete,
individualized understanding of its customers. We didnt know who our guests
are, recalls Chief Marketing Oicer
Chris Diaz, who also serves on the board
of Brand Africa, an intergenerational
movement to create a positive image of
Africa and drive its competitiveness.
ness of those campaigns. And because it had no

single repository for customer data, it didnt know
the preferences, special needs, or other personal
characteristics of its aforementioned guests,
who range from commercial traders, business
executives, and government oicials to students,
missionaries, and medical tourists.
All of the airlines customer data, much of
it duplicated, was sitting in spreadsheets and
databases in various company and partner
travel-agent oices, so there was no coordinated
way to analyze and report it. One example of the
dysfunction: each May the airline would blast a
Mothers Day greeting to almost every customer
in its scattered databases, to which many of the
nonmothers inevitably responded, Was this
email really meant for me?
MARKETING FACELIFT
Kenya Airways turned to Oracle for help. It

irst engaged with consultants in the Oracle
Marketing Cloud Success Program to rationalize
WES ROWELL
Kenya Airways, the countrys lagship carrier

since 1977, ranks fourth among Africas airlines
in terms of seat capacity, with a leet of 45 aircraft
covering 62 destinations. Its market opportunity
is huge: Africas current population of about 1
billion is on pace to reach 1.5 billion within a
decade, with a rapidly expanding middle class in
many countries. But so are its challenges. Much
of that population growth will be in Sub-Saharan
Africa, one of the worlds least-developed regions.
In addition, internet and mobile communications
penetration is inconsistent across the continent,
limiting the airlines technology reach.
Nevertheless, as the only African airline
in the SkyTeam alliance whose 20 members
include Aeromexico, Air France, Alitalia, China
Airlines, Delta Air Lines, and Korean Air
Kenya Airways knew it had to up its technology
game because it had a very high global standard to live up to, Diaz says. Before embarking
on a multiyear program to automate as well as
integrate the data collected fromits marketing,
sales, and customer service activities, it had been
operating in the dark.
The airline didnt know who clicked its batchand-blast Microsoft Outlook email campaigns. It
had no clear view into what its sales representatives in diferent oices were doing. It was advertising mostly on billboards, in newspapers, and
on lyers, with no way to measure the efective-
27
THE ROI IS
DYNAMIC.
IT ISNT
JUST ABOUT
MONEY. IT IS
ALSO ABOUT
THE LEVEL
OF UNDERSTANDING
YOU HAVE OF
A CAMPAIGNS
REACH, AND
THIS IS THE
FIRST THING
ORACLE
MARKETING
CLOUD
ALLOWED US
TO DO.
Harriet Luyai, Marketing
Automation Lead, Kenya Airways
its marketing organization and deine modern

skills, roles, and business requirementsall while
cutting costs and learning how to go to market
faster, Diaz says.
That consultation laid the groundwork for the
irst technology phase of Kenya Airways automation journey: deployment of Oracle Marketing
Cloud in late 2014. The airline ran its irst
automated marketing campaign a few weeks later,
aiming emails, SMS texts, and social media posts
at Kenyan emigrants in Dubai, ofering them special holiday season fares to Kenya on the airlines
new Boeing 787 Dreamliner.
In subsequent months, as it created campaigns to promote new and expanded routesto
Hanoi, Vietnam, and Zanzibar in East Africa,
for example the Kenya Airways marketing
team got more adept at tracking revenue lows
generated by those campaigns and identifying
new sources of data to target the campaigns more
efectively. The ROI is dynamic, says Harriet
Luyai, marketing automation lead at Kenya
Airways. It isnt just about money. It is also about
the level of understanding you have of a campaigns reach, and this is the irst thing Oracle
Marketing Cloud allowed us to do.
During a presentation at an Oracle conference
in London, England, in February, Luyai delved
into some early success metrics. Reachable
contacts have more than doubled, to 89 percent from 40 percent. Open rates on marketing
emails are up to 65 percent from 40 percent. The
airlines acquisition ratethe percentage of
respondents who opt in to its campaignsis up
to 20 percent. Its email unsubscribe rate is at an
all-time low of 0.11 percent.
BREAKING DOWN SILOS
Shortly after rolling out Oracle Marketing Cloud,

Kenya Airways moved to automate its sales activities (using Oracle Sales Cloud) and its customer
service activities (using Oracle RightNow Cloud
Service) as welland, perhaps most important,
tie together the three clouds under one central
data repository, breaking down the silos between
those departments and cleaning up the data. One
result: the airlines marketing and sales teams
worked together to set up a new conversion matrix
to qualify leads, enhancing the proile it for
targeted customers.
The beneits of this newfound alignment
abound in so many ways that we both wonder how we could bear behaving in silos for so
long, Luyai says. Clearly, gaining full control
over data is the best thing that can happen to a
marketer in this day and age. It is the only way
to bring in personalization at the early stages of

travel inspiration, search, and shopping inluence
to accelerate purchasing decisions.
Kenya Airways started pulling together information to deine guest personas (age, household
income, role, education level, and other details),
as well as parallel segmentation information ( job
function, job level, revenue generated for the
airline, geography, status, income level, preferences, interest areas, service calls, email activity,
form submissions, and purchase history), as the
airline tried to read its customers digital body
language to personalize oferings, Luyai says.
Now the airline is preparing to enter a fourth
technology phase in its digital transformation:
the rollout of Oracle Social Cloud. The goal is to
help the Kenya Airways marketing team drive
additional revenue by converting leads to ticket
sales, increasing website traic, and increasing
social followers.
Additionally, Kenya Airways customer
service team plans to follow social media posts
and discussions about the airlines services and
respond to questions and problems within 30
minutes. Oracle Social Cloud will help agents
prioritize their follow-up posts and manage
worklows for the appropriate approvals and
for troubleshooting.
Kenya Airways now knows a lot more about
its guests based on data from multiple marketing, sales, and customer service channels, from
booking to arrival: what brand of beer they like
to drink, what their favorite meal is, and what
time of day they like to ly, as well as their wedding anniversary date and birthday. Not only do
personalized ofers engender repeat business, but
they also elicit more feedback on service levels,
Diaz says.
More than anything else, guests remember
how you made them feel, he emphasizes, reiterating the company mission of turning moments
into memories.
Rob Preston is editorial director in Oracles Content
Central organization, where he provides insights and
analysis on a range of issues important to CIOs and other
business technolog y executives. He was previously editor
in chief of InformationWeek. You can follow him at
@robpreston.
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PROFIT AUGUST 2016

Milpitas,
California
ORACLE SCM CLOUD
TRADING LIGHT
How a spin-off spun up laser-fast
BY MARGARET HARRIST
That was the case when optical communications technology

company JDSU decided to split
itself in two. One of the newly
formed companies, Lumentum,
consolidated the former JDSU
high-speed optical communications products for telecom, data,
and laser solutions for materials
processing into a new standalone
business. Lumentums product
exports are highly regulated by the
United States and other countries
around the world because of their
potential military uses. Rather
than use JDSUs old trade management software to manage the
compliance aspects of the business,
executives decided to try something new.
In fact, Lumentum rebuilt its
entire IT department in 2015
in preparation for becoming a
fully independent company on
August 5, 2015. It needed the
global trade management function to be operational on that date so that it could
continue exporting products. But with a much
smaller IT team, Lumentum also didnt have the
resources to implement a customized application.
We knew we wanted to be cloud-based
because that has the advantages of no up-front
investment and rapid deployment. And we also
wanted to take a fresh look at our business processes, says Sree Vaidyanathan, vice president
of IT at Lumentum. With so much going on at
once, we needed a global trade management solution with minimal risk that could integrate out of
the box with Oracle E-Business Suite.

JDSU has been largely an Oracle shop, and
Lumentum was implementing a number of
Oracle applications (including Oracle Human
Capital Management Cloud and Oracle Product
Information Management). Choosing Oracle
Global Trade Management Cloud Service
seemed like a natural extension of eforts already
under way.
But if the soon-to-be-launched company chose
Oracles cloud solution for global trade management, it would be the i rst company in the world
WES ROWELL
Every corporate spin-of

is complex in its own right,
but when inancial high-wire
acts meet national security,
that complexity ratchets
up to ten.
29
to go live with it. And the solution would need to

operate lawlessly on day one.
No pressure.
COUNTDOWN BEGINS
WE KNEW WE
WANTED TO BE
CLOUD-BASED
BECAUSE
IT HAS THE
ADVANTAGES OF
NO UP-FRONT
INVESTMENT
AND RAPID
DEPLOYMENT.
AND WE ALSO
WANTED TO
TAKE A FRESH
LOOK AT OUR
BUSINESS
PROCESSES.
Sree Vaidyanathan,
Vice President of Information
Technology, Lumentum
With a compressed time schedule and no option

for missing the launch date, Lumentum brought
in Oracle partner Accelalpha to support the
implementation. The project kicked of in midJanuary with Accelalphas standardized methodology for global trade management projects
which provides a framework for implementation
of both on-premises and cloud technologies.
But because of the compliance issues involved
with exporting laser technology, Lumentum had
speciic requirements.
The system needed to prevent orders from
going to a customer who had not yet provided the
required documentation, explains Nat Ganesh,
a partner in consulting services at Accelalpha.
Although this was a unique requirement and
outside of our usual approach, we were able to use
standard functionality in Oracle Global Trade
Management Cloud Service to meet Lumentums
needsand to screen parties to ensure that their
documentation hadnt expired.
Once the Oracle Global Trade Management
Cloud Service instance was made available for
testing in February 2015, Accelalpha quickly got
data lowing to it from Oracle E-Business Suite,
so the Lumentum global trade management team
could understand how the new system looked
and worked.
The Lumentum team actually drove the test
cycles. They were the ones with their hands on the
keyboard from the very irst cycle, Ganesh says.
With such a short implementation time frame,
there wasnt the luxury of a long runway and, as
with all projects, buy-in from end users was critical.
And because it was a cloud implementation,
Accelalpha didnt have to spend a lot of time
provisioning the environment or training the IT
department on how to conigure the system.
In fact, Ganesh says, Once we left, we
found that the cloud platform made it a moresupportable solution from Lumentums perspective. We didnt have to spend as much time going
into details about customization. We trained
Lumentums global trade management team, and
they were capable of supporting the solution with
only occasional help from IT.
And that was one of the critical goals for
Lumentum. We needed to ensure that the
trade management team could manage compliance data efectively without involvement from
IT, Vaidyanathan says. That teams eiciency
improved overall and the order fulillment time

was reduced because of the automation.
Not only was the team trained and prepared
by Lumentums irst day; the application itself
was ready to go live more than a month earlier
than anticipated.
TACTICAL PROGRESS
One of the critical concerns for Lumentumand

a key consideration for any company implementing a cloud solutionwas the timing of patches
for this business-critical application.
Our shipments pick up at the end of the
quarter, and we had to be sure that patches didnt
hit at that time, says Lumentums Vaidyanathan.
This is the kind of tactical issue that is critical if
you dont line things up properly. It can end up
interrupting your services.
Accelalphas Ganesh also points to the importance of working with a partner or consultant
that has a solid record of cloud implementations
and is experienced in global trade management.
This is a complex compliance area where there is
minimal room for error. Making mistakes can be
very expensive, he says.
In the case of Lumentum, solid planning and
Accelalphas expertise and established methodology made for a smooth launch in a complex situation where multiple integrated systems were being
implemented simultaneously.
The company completed its irst full quarter as
an independent company at the end of 2015, and
Vaidyanathan says it went well for Lumentum
overall and for the IT and global trade management departments speciically, despite the many
demands of spinning of a company.
There were some challenges around reporting, but nothing we couldnt handle with the
new system, Vaidyanathan says. Weve had
no unplanned downtime, and we were processing orders from the irst hour. We wanted to be
sure our irst product was processed and shipped
before we celebrated. And we did!
Margaret Harrist is director of content strateg y and
implementation at Oracle, where she focuses on digital

disruption, enterprise resource planning, big data, supply
chain, Internet of Things, and software as a service.
Follow her at @mharrist.
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PROFIT AUGUST 2016

Lule,
Sweden
ORACLE HOSPITALITY CLOUD SERVICES
A TASTE FOR CLOUD

How Max Hamburgerrestauranger is becoming Swedens latest breakout star
BY ROB PRESTON
When you think of Sweden, which

images come to mind? An iconic
i lm director? A hugely successful pop
music group? Inexpensive, assembleyourself furniture?
sory i rm Management Events. But were actually ahead of them today in terms of technology.
CLOUD VISION
All of Max sales channels are built on top of

Oracle Hospitality RES 3700, an on-premises,
point-of-sale restaurant enterprise solution that
lets users schedule staing, manage inventory, and
report and analyze key data. Max connects the
Oracle Hospitality RES 3700 systems to its mobile,
web, and kiosk channels using Oracle Hospitality
eCommerce Integration Cloud Service.
Now, as the company looks to expand into
other countries via both wholly owned restaurants and franchise partners Max is migrating that core technology platform to the cloud,
speciically to Oracle Hospitality Simphony
Cloud Service.
Its actually a two-step migration. Brms and
his team are i rst testing an on-premises version
of the Oracle Hospitality Simphony platform,
due to roll out in the fall, so that we can see
that all of the integrations are working exactly as
WES ROWELL
How about hamburgers to die for?

Unknown to most people who live outside of
Scandinavia is a fast-food restaurant chain with
120 locations that boasts some of the best burgers
(and, increasingly, healthier fare) in the world.
Max Hamburgerrestauranger AB, founded
in northern Sweden in 1968, is now looking to
expand beyond Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and
the United Arab Emirates i rst to Poland and
potentially to other countries in Europe. The
company, a pioneer in environmental sustainability, is serving up not only high-quality, freshly
cooked food but also a digital customer experience that few, if any, of its much larger international rivals can match.
Kiosks strategically placed at every Max
restaurant let customers select food (including a
variety of special sauces) and drink items from
an easy-to-navigate, custom-built interface;
place and pay for their order; and then retrieve
it at the counter within minutes. The companys
mobile app, available for iOS and Android
devices, gives customers the option of ordering
and paying for their meals in advance, so meals
are ready for pickup at a designated time and
restaurant location.
Orders placed on those digital channels now
account for half of the family-owned companys
approximate 270 million in annual salesabout
70 percent of the sales at some restaurants, says
CIO Johnny Brms. Whats more, the average
order value per kiosk transaction is higher than
at the conventional in-restaurant point-of-sale
tills, and orders from the mobile app are still
higher, he says.
When you look at the competition we have
todaythe McDonalds restaurants of the
worldits huge, notes Brms, who was recently
named 2016 Executive of the Year by tech advi-
31
WHEN YOU
LOOK AT THE
COMPETITION
WE HAVE
TODAYTHE
MCDONALDS
RESTAURANTS
OF THE
WORLD
ITS HUGE.
BUT WERE
ACTUALLY
AHEAD OF
THEM TODAY
IN TERMS OF
TECHNOLOGY.
Johnny Brms, CIO,
Max Hamburgerrestauranger AB
we want, before moving to the cloud version in

18 to 24 months, he says. Parallel to that work,
Max is moving its kiosk functionality to Oracle
Hospitality Simphony Cloud Service to give
small franchisees access to that functionality from
the get-go, under what Brms calls a loosely
coupled solution.
Why move a fully functioning restaurant
management system to the cloud? He cites
several reasons:
One global, centrally administered platform
will make the companys expansion into other
countries a lot faster and easier. Even technically unsophisticated franchisees can get
onboard quickly.
Centralized administration also delivers a
consistent guest and brand experience across
locations; simpliied data reporting; eicient
application updates; and control of menus,
pricing, and promotions.
An Oracle team regularly updates the
systemwhich supports multiple languages
and currencies, as well as ever-changing tax
codes and other iscal requirements in each
country so that Max doesnt have to.
Oracle Hospitality Simphony Cloud Service
supports an array of operations features. Its
also highly extensible Max can expand and
add brand-diferentiating capabilities.
A cloud solution is more cost-efective and
secure than multiple on-premises solutions.
Max, with only a small IT team, will not have
to invest in servers, storage, irewalls, and
related technical support for each restaurant,
letting Brms and his team focus their budget
on more-strategic initiatives.
Last but not least, Oracle Hospitality
Simphony Cloud Service is a reliable, alwayson solution. If a restaurants internet connection goes down, in-store operations continue
uninterrupted and the accumulated sales data
posts to the cloud automatically when the
connection is restored. That supports the
business much better because theres less risk
that you lose all of your ways of operating the
restaurant, Brms says.
DATA, DATA EVERYWHERE
Max philosophy on data is a simple one: As a

cost-conscious, quality-obsessed, customer-focused
company, we measure everything, Brms says.
Its always about inding better ways to
satisfy the customer, he says. Thats the biggest challenge: to understand the customer. We
always have to be listening to them to make sure
we deliver the products they want in a way that
they want to interact with us.

Using the data reporting and analytics capabilities of the Oracle Hospitality RES software,
combined with a third-party application, Max
and its restaurant operators can now assess
real-time data in a range of areas sales, labor,
inventory, discounts, tenders, guest countsfrom
any location. (Oracle Hospitality Simphony Cloud
Service promises to make that reporting and
analysis even easier.)
That data helps the company and its operators
igure out where to open restaurants and how to
lay out each one; create detailed staing plans
for each location; make better-informed restocking decisions; compare inancial results among
locations and against budget or history to see if
business adjustments need to be made; negotiate
better deals with suppliers; track promotional
campaigns against sales; and identify which kiosks
at a location are producing the most sales for a
given product.
For example, when Max launches a campaign for a new product, such as a healthy veggie
sandwich, it can view hour-by-hour, day-by-day
how well that product is selling on a restaurant,
geographical, and enterprise level. It then can
assess whether to add that product to its standard menus, perhaps only in certain countries or
regions. Max restaurant operators also do A/B
testing on kiosks within their locations, using
diferent navigation and menu variations to see
which ones perform best.
Nick Low, a senior solution manager in the
Oracle Hospitality food and beverage unit,
compares all of that collected data to sawdust in a
lumber mill. What do you do with all of this data
left over? he asks. Youre repurposing it to make
sure that youre servicing your guests correctly. It
used to be mostly about cost eicienciesare my
costs in line? Now its more about improving the
customer experience.
Rob Preston is editorial director in Oracles Content
Central organization, where he provides insights and
analysis on a range of issues important to CIOs and other
business technolog y executives. He was previously editor
in chief of InformationWeek. You can follow him at
@robpreston.
ACTION ITEM
PROFIT AUGUST 2016

Tokyo,
Japan
ORACLE CX CLOUD
SOCIAL SUDS
Sapporo brews new beersand new customerswith social and marketing cloud ingredients.
BY AARON LAZENBY
Toward the close of the 1800snot long after

the end of many centuries of isolationJapan fell
in love with beer. In 1876, demand for this novel
beverage led to the creation of Japans brewing industry and the opening of the countrys
i rst industrial brewery in the northern capital
of Sapporo. The Hokkaido Kaitakushi Beer
Brewery established the oldest beer brand in the
island nation, today named after the city where it
was founded and known for its gold-star label.
But Sapporo Breweries i rsts didnt stop with
the suds themselves. In May 2011, Sapporo was
the i rst Japanese beer brand to establish a presence on Facebook. This foray into social media
marked a transformation of marketing strategy at
the company, changing the organization and refocusing tactics around direct, personal interaction
with customers. Today, social and content marketing eforts are delivering results: driving new
revenue for the company, giving product development new insights into the market, and building
relationships with beer fans in a whole new way.
BUILT FOR DIGITAL
While Sapporo Breweries was smart for being

the i rst Japanese company in its sector to move
to Facebook, the organizationat that point
was not designed for this new era of marketing.
According to Mitsutaka Kudo, general manager
of the companys digital marketing section,
Sapporo Breweries corporate culture encourages
innovation. So several divisions of the company
started experimenting with Facebook. These
uncoordinated eforts revealed the eicacy of
social tactics, but also introduced ineiciency and
duplication of efort as multiple social marketing
initiatives appeared across the organization.
We didnt have standard rules regarding social
media, says Kudo. So we gathered all the staf
working on social media eforts and transformed
them into our new digital media department.
The digital media department, which Kudo
now leads, was built by bringing together all of
the staf who started social media eforts in their

previous departmentsadvertising, sales support,
ecommerce, and othersand building a social
center of excellence within the company. This
meant standardizing processes, establishing best
practices, and assembling an IT platform that
would help the new team get the job done.
Initially, we didnt have any tools for social
marketing, says Kudo. If we wanted to post
on Facebook, we would have to log in and post
directly. But that kind of manual execution cant
scale for the enterprise. Now, we use Oracle
Social Cloud and have allocated budget to
social marketing eforts. This investment relects
changes in the perception of social marketing
among our management.
With the team and strategy in place, the digital media department could begin work on the
social properties they now controlled. The initial
focus was on three Facebook pages that accounted
for more than a half a million total followers: the
main Sapporo Breweries brand page; a lifestyle
channel called Hokkaido Likers that promotes
WES ROWELL
In Japan, the word Sapporo is synonymous with beer history.
33
THE POWER
OF SOCIAL
MARKETING
IS NOW
UNDERSTOOD
INSIDE OF
SAPPORO
BREWERIES.
MANAGEMENT
REALIZES
THAT WE CAN
USE THESE
CHANNELS
AND TOOLS TO
EXPAND THE
BUSINESS.
Yuichi Mori, Assistant General
Manager, Digital Marketing,
Sapporo Breweries
events and attractions in the companys home

state; and Hyakunin Beer Lab, a community of
beer connoisseurs who share ideas about beer and
comment on new beers that come to market.
The team had a speciic goal for the Facebook
pagesto move marketing eforts to properties
their customers are already using. Historically,
Sapporo Breweries interaction with end customers was focused on registered users at
sapporobeer.jp (a large majority of the companys
sales is via distributor channels). Because these
registered users are highly motivated to buy and
are 88 percent more likely to take action than
nonregistered users, this segment is quite valuable.
And becoming a registered user means that the
customer data is captured by Sapporo Breweries
marketing automation system, which is built on
Oracle Marketing Cloud.
But site visits and registrations were on the
decline, so Kudos team decided to shift their eforts
toward the external properties where customers
(and potential customers) were congregating.
Historically, we deployed member registration campaigns giving gifts to entice people
to sign up, says Yuichi Mori, assistant general
manager, digital marketing section at Sapporo
Breweries. But just this year, we started taking a
content marketing approach. We are creating and
uploading much more interesting and amusing
content to our social properties, via Oracle Social
Cloud, so potential customers will follow our content to registration pages on our oicial site.
CONTENT NURTURE
This content took diferent forms, depending on

the channel. For Hyakunin Beer Lab, for example, the content was focused on soliciting feedback
from the Facebook community about Sapporo
Breweries products. That meant setting up a
weekly live virtual meeting where educated beer
drinkers could ofer their thoughts on new brews.
The company even organized oline meetups for
the most active members of the online community, collecting input on the development of new
beers. In fact, in 2014 the company launched a
new beer named Hyakunin no Kiseki Shifuku
no Buraun Eeru (Hundred Miracle Bliss Brown
Ale) that was designed by lab participants.
For Sapporo Breweries corporate Facebook
page, adapting to the demands of that community
meant developing a clever video campaign at a
pace unprecedented for the organization.
We wanted to show all the major Sapporo
Breweries brands, but we had to do it in a way
that works for social media, says Mori. So we
created a story about a workplace where each of
our brands represented a diferent worker with

a diferent personalitywith our main brand as
the CEO, of course. The campaign moved from
concept to market in an astounding 27 hours. And
the efort paid of: 33 percent of consumers who
saw the campaign took some kind of action
either sharing the video, visiting the companys
website, or buying beer via ecommerce.
On Twitter, Kudos team was interested in
responding to criticism of the companys products
but was not sure if that kind of intervention
would be appreciated. We found the opposite to
be true, says Kudo. We used active support to
respond, and our followers liked that interaction.
This presents an opportunity to inluence the
views of customers who are critical of our products and change the nature of the relationship.
This initiative is paying of; using analytics available in Oracle Marketing Cloud, Kudos team
discovered that the companys Twitter followers
are signiicantly more likely than their counterparts on Facebook to make a Sapporo Breweries
beer purchase via ecommerce.
While these top of the funnel tactics are
relatively new for the company, the goal remains
the same increase customer loyalty and drive
new revenue. And because the front end of the
processmanaged using Oracle Social Cloud
is connected to the back-end outbound marketing and segmentation eforts connected to Oracle
Marketing Cloud, the digital marketing team
increasingly delivers the right message designed
to motivate the right action. Social and content
marketing eforts give us new insight into what our
customers want, says Kudo. And once we understand what a user is looking for, we deliver that
message and invite them to become a customer.
The companys digital marketing team hopes
to use these content and social marketing eforts
to continue to make history in Japan creating
innovative, customer-facing campaigns and opening up new markets for new products, such as
wine, which is seeing signiicant growth in Japan.
The power of social marketing is now understood inside of Sapporo Breweries, says Mori.
Management realizes that we can use these
channels and tools to expand the business.
ACTION ITEM

PROFIT AUGUST 2016

Tubaro,
Brazil
ORACLE CLOUD PLATFORM
CLOUD ON THE
CURRICULUM
Brazilian university Unisul retools for innovation.
Innovation is deep in the institutional

DNA of Universidade do Sul de Santa
Catarina (Unisul). Since its founding in
1964, the private, not-for-proit university
has had a very public mission: Harness
innovation both to better the lives of
its students and to advance the regions
social and economic development, says
Unisul Provost Sebastio Salsio Herdt.
Over the last ive decades, the university has
served more than 150,000 students, many of
whom have gone on to contribute signiicantly to
the growth and development of Santa Catarina,

a state in southern Brazil. Thanks in part to
Unisuls eforts, the states economy is considered
the most entrepreneurial in the country, with
one business for every 40 inhabitants. The states
economy has grown 340 percent over the last
three decades, signiicantly outperforming the
overall Brazilian economy.
The university serves 20,000 traditional students and has opened nearly 100 smaller facilities
to support long-distance learning across Brazil,
from the Uruguayan border to the northern
Amazon region. Its virtual university enrolls an
WES ROWELL
BY ROBERT LANDON
35
additional 10,000 students. Unisul plans to grow

its enrollment by as much as 60 percentfrom
30,000 to 50,000 studentsin the coming years.
FROM UPGRADE TO DEEP RETHINK
CURRENTLY
WE CAN
SERVE 2,000
STUDENTS,
BUT BY
LEVERAGING
THE CLOUD,
THAT NUMBER
CAN GROW TO
MORE THAN
12,000.
Tatiane Leal, CIO, Unisul
To enable that kind of growth, Unisul knew it had

to upgrade its PeopleSoft Campus Solutions, an
Oracle platform for everything from enrollment
and degree planning to learning management,
that it irst deployed in 2005. But given the universitys deep commitment to innovation, administrators quickly saw the upgrade as the catalyst
for a much larger organizational transformation.
After evaluating eight campus software suites,
Unisul decided to stay with PeopleSoft Campus
Solutions. However, that selection process underscored the fact that its hardware was sorely in need
of updating. The performance of Unisuls IBM
mainframe, adopted a few years before, was no
longer acceptableand wouldnt allow the university to consolidate all of its applications, including
those from third parties, on a single system.
During the proof-of-concept phase, Unisul
saw the excellent results we could expect running
our applications on Oracle Exadata and Oracle
Exalogic 17 times faster than x64 and 4 times
faster than the IBM mainframe, says Tatiane
Leal, CIO at Unisul. The deep integration of the
applications was just as compelling, Leal says.
And once Unisul decided to run Oracle
applications and engineered systems, it made
sense to extend Oracle products to all three
layers of our architecture, including middleware
as well as applications and hardware, explains
Salsio Herdt.
In the end, Unisul decided to deploy Oracle
Exadata and Oracle Exalogic to run its production systems, Oracle Business Process
Management Suite and Oracle Portal (which
powers its student, employee, partner, and public
websites) at the middleware level, and the latest
versions of PeopleSoft Campus Solutions and
Oracle Customer Experience applications.
However, the university was determined to
take one more bold step: It adopted Oracle Cloud
Platform to use Oracle Java Cloud Service and
Oracle Database Cloud Service. According to
Leal, theyre cost-efective and easy to deploy and
manage. But for Salsio Herdt, the cloud services
are having an even more profound impact, powering what he calls innovation centers.
Wherever they may be in Brazil, talented
students can access and work with these state-ofthe-art technologies as part of the curriculum,
he says. Because the services are in the cloud,
the university can dramatically expand access to
online students across Brazilall they need is a

decent internet connection.
Currently we can serve 2,000 students, but
by leveraging the cloud, that number can grow to
more than 12,000, Leal says.
For Salsio Herdt, that expansion is not just a
matter of growing his institution. It is also a social
good. Now, talented students who once had no
chance to access this kind of technology can do so
from home, at work, or wherever they have access
to the internet, he says.
THE POWER OF A UNIFIED PLATFORM
Both Salsio Herdt and Leal say that a uniied

platform is helping them perform their jobs much
more efectively. Now we have a platform to
drive innovation and move the university forward
into the future, says Salsio Herdt. We always
refer to Oracle as our partner, not our supplier.
And by adopting a single set of deeply integrated technologies, the IT department has all
the scalability and reliability they need, even with
a limited IT team. This means they can support
Unisuls growth even as we reduce costs and optimize current resources, says Leal.
The Oracle Database Cloud Service and
Oracle Java Cloud Service oferings are a key part
of the equation. Currently, they are limited to
educational functions. But Leal has plans to leverage them for internal development and testing, so
that on an ongoing basis her team can innovate
both more quickly and at signiicantly lower cost.
Whats most important to Salsio Herdt is the
ability to inspire students as they move forward
with their professional endeavors. And ultimately
it is about unleashing the kind of creative and
entrepreneurial energies that spur social and
economic development in Santa Catarina and
throughout Brazil.
Robert Landon is a freelance writer for Oracles
Content Central organization. His writing has also
appeared in Dwell, Metropolis, Cond Nast
Traveller UK, Arrive, Bloomberg.com, CNET
.com, Denver Post, Departures Magazine,
Houston Chronicle, Los Angeles Times, Miami
Herald, National Geographic Traveler, Readers
Digest, and many other consumer publications.
ACTION ITEM
PROFIT AUGUST 2016
SPONSORED CONTENT
SPONSORED CONTENT
IoT, Big Data, and Business Insights

Fujitsu and Oracle make IoT and ERP work together to provide
business leaders instant feedback and data to make better decisions.
ncorporating the Internet of
Things (IoT), along with the massive quantities of data it produces, into your business requires
a carefully considered strategy.
Gregory Belt, senior director, Fujitsu
America Business and Application
incorporate IoT data into your ERP

system, when you do the math on
the amount of data, youll see the
potential to swamp the system.
With billions of additional records
that it has never had to deal with
before, your ERP system can get
efciently. A good solution doesnt

require users to log on to the ERP
system for one query and log on
to an IoT system for another query.
Our rst order of business is to look
at all the business processes and
gure out what the ERP system
needs to know from the IoT system,
and vice versa. We build use cases
by talking to users. Then, we gure
out where the IoT data needs to
go in the ERP system. For most
use cases, complete replication
of all data between IoT and ERP is
not needed. Instead, techniques
such as a punch out from the
ERP system to the IoT system for
specic queries can provide users
very effective ways of getting all the
information they need from a single
system. As needed, we recommend
and implement changes to the ERP
and IoT systems and infrastructure
to ensure that data analysis and
processing is done in real time, now
and as the customers business
grows.
Services (BAS), discusses how

Fujitsu is helping companies integrate IoT, big data, and enterprise
resource planning (ERP) on Fujitsu
M10 SPARC servers to add signicant business value without creating
complexity.
choked if you dont have an intelligent integration strategy.
What value does Fujitsu bring specifically to manufacturing companies that want IoT systems?
From warehouses that automatically sense inventory depletions to
products that provide maintenance
alerts, manufacturers are nding
a variety of valuable uses for IoT.
They are building things, and those
things move in real time. They want
to always know where their things
are nowout on the manufacturing
oor, in their warehouse, or in their
distribution network. The sensors in
the IoT system are producing massive amounts of data on products
What is the challenge in getting

IoT and ERP systems to work
together?
IoT solutions connect a huge
universe of sensors attached to
products, components, labels,
equipment, and things to create
big data systems. If youre trying to
What is the Fujitsu strategy for IoT

and ERP integrations?
Fujitsu can provide everything from
expert advice to turnkey solutions,
but our focus is rst on listening to
the customers pain points, understanding the existing infrastructure,
and then efciently reaching the
customers business value goals.
We need to help customers not just
implement a new IoT infrastructure,
but develop an approach that builds
on their existing infrastructure
JD EDWARDS SPECIAL ISSUE
[PARTNER Q&A
and things. Meanwhile, the ERP

system is the single source of
truth that helps manage important functions such as product
planning, inventory, shipping, and
payment. We help companies
integrate these two sources of
truth so that they complement
each other.
Can you provide an example of
how you worked with a manufacturing customer on IoT?
We recently worked with one that
had very real business process
challenges around their warehousing and inventory operations.
These problems could be solved
quite cost effectively with an IoT
solution that tracked all inventory
movements in real time. Since an
Oracle ERP solution was already
their single source of truth for
inventory, their initial requirement
was for an integration of all IoT
inventory transactions into their
existing ERP system. To meet that
requirement, we calculated that
more than one billion additional
transactions per year would need
to be processed by the ERP
systema load that their current
hardware infrastructure could
not handle. A Fujitsu business
process consultant examined the
customers needs and found that
all business requirements could
be fully met by only running about
10 percent of the IoT transactions through the ERP system.
The remaining 90 percent of IoT
transactions provided value, but
value that was best utilized with
real-time IoT dashboards and metrics on the manufacturing floor
and not consuming resources on
the ERP system. Each customer
scenario is different, and by working with Fujitsu each customer

can achieve the best balance of
infrastructure for their specific
requirements.
Why are the Fujitsu M10 SPARC
servers a great platform to help
companies handle the massive amounts of data that IoT
produces?
Capacity and growth planning.
Fujitsu M10 servers are great ERP
platforms, and they really fit as
big data solutions as well. Fujitsu
M10 servers unique features
and characteristics make them
well suited for an integrated ERP
and IoT platform for all sizes of
customer workload. Core-based
Capacity on Demand, flexible
memory configurations, and
immense I/O scalability available across the entire Fujitsu
M10 model line mean that these
SPARC servers provide Payas-You-Grow scalability, high
performance, and mission-critical
reliability for enterprise-class
workloads. Customers often
wont, cant, or shouldnt start
an IoT implementation from
scratch. Fujitsu M10 servers have
the flexibility, performance, and
virtualization features to implement IoT plus ERP in phases
and at the customers pace of
business growth. These are excellent machines for consolidating
not only ERP and IoT. Scalability
up to 64 sockets, support for
Oracle Solaris 10 and 11, and a
100 percent binary compatibility
guarantee make Fujitsu M10 a
great platform for new and legacy
SPARC/Oracle Solaris applications. You really can put your
For more information, visit www.fujitsu.com/sparc
We figure out the right home for every

piece of data and the right technology
from all the competing solutions out
there, and we provide the cost-effective,
right solution for each customer rather
than a one-size-fits-all.
Gregory Belt, Fujitsu America, Inc.
whole data center on a Fujitsu
M10 server and manage the various workloads on premises or as
part of a hybrid solution.
In general, what unique values
does Fujitsu bring to your customers?
Until recently, companies in
search of IoT solutions to augment their ERP would likely need
to go to several different service
providers to build an end-to-end
solution. With the acquisition of
GlobeRanger and the integration
of its IoT solutions into our portfolio, Fujitsu meets the ERP, IoT,
and big data needs of our customers, with all solutions engineered
to run on the Oracle stack. As an
Oracle PartnerNetwork Diamond
partner, Fujitsu has 13 Advanced
Specializations and more than 50
Oracle Specializations that cover
the entire Oracle stack.
Fujitsu has a very wide base of
expertise across the IT landscape,
and we focus on a hybrid IT approach. We figure out the right
home for every piece of data and
the right technology from all the
competing solutions out there,
and we provide the cost-effective,
right solution for each customer
rather than a one-size-fits-all. n
A VIEW FROM
THE TOP
Avaya executives see deep connections between integration and customer satisfaction.
BY MONICA MEHTA
PHOTOGRAPHY BY BOB ADLER/GETTY IMAGES
39
SNAPSHOT
AVAYA
avaya.com
Headquarters: Santa Clara, California
Industry: Communications
Employees: 11,200
Revenue: US$4.1 billion
Oracle products: Oracle Integration Cloud Service,
Oracle Sales Cloud, Oracle Marketing Cloud, Oracle

Social, Oracle Java Cloud Service
FARI EBRAHIMI
Senior Vice President and CIO
Length of tenure: Four years
Education: Undergraduate and graduate degrees
in electrical and computer engineering, University

of Maryland
Personal quote/mantra: Never stop learning, and
keep innovating.
Being the easiest

company to do
business with was a
central goal of Avayas
digital transformation,
says Fari Ebrahimi,
senior vice president
and CIO at Avaya.
he modern customer expects a seamless experience from businesses: no

lag time, no gaps in the exchange of information, no mistakes about
account details or purchasing history. 81 percent of prospective buyers
are frustrated by companies that dont make it easy to do business with them,
according to a 2015 Accenture report on customer experience. The good news
is that there are a lot of opportunities for improvement.
PROFIT AUGUST 2016
40
WE HAVE TO MAINTAIN SOME LEGACY PLATFORMS

AND EXTRACT INFORMATION FROM THEM INTO CLOUD
APPLICATIONS. THE ORACLE INTEGRATION TOOL IS HELPING US
SHIELD THE BUSINESS FROM THAT COMPLEXITY.
Avaya used Oracle

technology to develop a
much-needed Partner
Portal, explains Hazem
Morsy, vice president of
global IT at Avaya.
PAUL S. HOWELL
Hazem Morsy, Vice President of Global IT, Avaya
41
When customers call a sales representative, or when a sales
representative wants to negotiate or manage a deal with a customer, they want all customer information available and up to
date, and they want quick and easy responses to their requests
as time is of the essence when it comes to striking the next deal
or ensuring fast customer service. In order to deliver that high
level of service, the diferent parts of the business that handle all
that data need to talk to one another. From an IT standpoint,
this means having integrated systems that can easily swap data.
Systems integrationthe process of connecting computing systems and applications so they function as a coordinated
whole is the IT backbone of great customer experience.
Traditionally, IT has had to write custom code to enable
systems and applications to communicate. In todays fast-paced
business world, organizations no longer have the time or money
to do that. They must enable their users to get the information
needed across business departments instantly and efortlessly.
Avaya is a leading communications company providing
solutions that aid in the engagement of customers, vendors, and
internal/external teams across multiple channels and devices.
Its most popular platform integrates and delivers voice, video,
data, and web communications applications and services
that customer service team members anywhere can access.
95 percent of Fortune 500 companies are running Avaya solutions, which makes uptime and ease of use paramount. For a
company that helps other companies deliver an exceptional
customer experience, customers are priority #1. But in early
2013, Avaya found that its Net Promoter Score (NPS)a loyalty
measure of a companys customer relationshipswas only in
the low 20s.
To improve customer satisfaction, leaders at Avaya
embarked on a three-year customer-centric digital transformation that involved changing from a hardware-based model to
a cloud services model. One of the most important elements
of the transformation was giving its employees and partners a
360-degree view of customers, and that involved integrating
on-premises legacy systems, new Oracle cloud applications,
and third-party and partner systems with the help of Oracle
Integration Cloud Service and Oracle Java Cloud Service.
Now, employees and partners can pull information on
everything from sales leads to customer service tickets without
lots of complicated, costly coding or use of other IT resources.
And the integration eforts have paid of: Avayas current NPS
is 59 and rising.
We wanted to be the easiest company to do business with,
and thats all about a connected experience for the customer,
says Fari Ebrahimi, senior vice president and CIO at Avaya.
Its the interaction between our sales team, partners, and support team that creates this type of experience.
A Laser Focus on the Customers

Disconnected systems on the back end meant that to deliver
a good customer experience, users had to manually navigate
through diferent systems views, diferent resources, and a
bunch of documents and handouts in order to process sales
orders, schedule an installation, or get technical support.
The business units were disconnected, and that was

a major source of dissatisfaction for our customers, says
Ebrahimi. Our goal was to put the customer irst and ill all of
our integrated processes around what they want, so that their
experience is seamless.
Avaya uses Oracle Sales Cloud and Oracle Marketing Cloud
to handle its modern sales and marketing processes and to manage its nearly 10,000 partners in more than 46 countries. Thirdparty solutions handle billing and order management and supply chain management. Oracles Siebel Customer Relationship
Management applications help manage customer service.
Finally, a mix of legacy and new on-premises and cloud custom
applications help users handle quotes, sales, and services.
Avaya deploys its applications using a custom-built, Javabased engagement platform called Breeze, a cloud-based system that enables users to create worklows to install, conigure,
and manage Avayas customer and team engagement solutions.
The collaboration platform gives customers, employees, and
partners the ability to custom-build their own solutions on top
of it, according to how their business engages customers.
Partners are an important part of Avayas business, accounting for more than 70 percent of its revenue. The Avaya Breeze
Platform enables partners to take customers from lead generation
through order placement and provisioning to customer service.
Another partner technology Avaya developed is Partner
Portal. This portal enables partners who sell Avaya solutions to
INTEGRATION IN THE HANDS OF BUSINESS

Hybrid IT infrastructures are the
norm in todays enterprise. Data is
stored everywherefrom legacy onpremises solutions to relatively new
cloud applications. Getting these
systems to talk to each other once
required manual data management
and extraction, which resulted in
high maintenance costs and longer
cycle times. It also required largeresource capacity models between
business and IT to manage a complex customized process.
Now, Oracle Integration Cloud
Service simplifies how companies
build integrations between systems. It enables business users to
define secure workflows between
cloud applications, and between
applications that are on premises
and in the cloud.
Oracle Integration Cloud Service
comes with a library of prebuilt
integrations and adapters from
Oracle and its partners. With these
packages, business users can integrate their software-as-a-service
(SaaS) applications in hours instead
of months. A browser-based visual
designer tool lets them point and
click to create integrations that
enable the seamless flow of information across the enterprise.

Business users are having more
of a say in the technology tools
that enable their processes and
goals. With Oracle Integration
Cloud Service, they can decide how
the systems best support their
tasks and objectives and configure
them accordingly.
Behind the scenes, we have to
maintain some legacy platforms and
extract information from them into
cloud applications, says Hazem
Morsy, vice president of global IT at
Avaya. The Oracle integration tool
is helping us shield the business
from that complexity. This model
helps the business deal with a unified experience when it comes to
managing their sales, services, and
support models. They just see one
integrated solution for them to manage and execute through.
Such integration has streamlined
the opportunity-to-cash business
process, allowing the company to
reduce its cycle times from months to
days and in some cases, to minutes.
This has resulted in significantly
improved customer satisfaction.
PROFIT AUGUST 2016
42
95
Percentage of
Fortune 500
companies that
run Avaya
solutions
3040
Percentage of
cost reduction
from greater
integration
between
Avayas systems
80
Percentage of
reduction in
Avayas custom
code after
implementation
of integration
tools
manage their customer accounts and services and to ind new

opportunities to sell more.
We created Partner Portal on Oracle technology to
bring everything as a dashboard in front of our partnersfor
example, what quotes they have created, where is the deal in
the cycle, what kind of tickets were open against that account,
says Hazem Morsy, vice president of global IT at Avaya. They
log in and see everything in that one view.
In addition, the Partner Portal engagement, along with a
uniied and integrated partner quoting experience that uses
the Avaya One Source Platform, has utilized Oracle technology to streamline the coniguration, pricing, and ordering
experience. This has resulted in shortening quote-to-cash cycle
times from months to daysand in some cases, to minutes
saving the company and its partners millions of dollars in
operational eiciency.
Oracle Integration Cloud Service and Oracle Java Cloud
Service function as vessels that seamlessly transport data between
diferent parts of the business. Oracle Integration Cloud Service
connects information between Avayas internal on-premises systems and its cloud systems. Oracle Java Cloud Service provides
standardized, upgradable extensions to Avayas third-party
applicationsenabling, for example, the team to build code that
links the Avaya Breeze Platform with Oracle Sales Cloud.
With our new model, we are using standards, and a lot of the
integration comes prebuilt and is maintained by Oracle, says
Ebrahimi. The model uses standard security models and object
Oracle Integration
Cloud Service has
enabled an exceptional
customer experience,
says Fari Ebrahimi,
senior vice president
and CIO at Avaya.
models and provides the same user experienceso its all consistent, reducing the cost and the time for us to make changes.
Ebrahimi says Oracle Integration Cloud Service is like
Oracle Fusion Middleware built on the cloud for integration.
Oracle Integration Cloud Service is a layer that takes care
of integration with a variety of cloud providers and helps us
have a standard interface through our on-premises and cloud
systems. That is a much simpler thing and a more cost-efective
way to go than having to do tons of custom coding.
Most importantly, Ebrahimi says, it enables an exceptional
customer experience. This high level of integration ultimately
enables us and our partners to have a 360-degree view of a customer as the demand is generated, the opportunity is managed,
the quote is generated and processed, the order is processed
and fulilled, the service is conigured, and support is provided.
So when a partner is speaking to a customer, they can help
them with any step along the way.
Power in the Hands of Business

The Avaya Breeze Platform allows business users to deine
worklows, working with either Oracle Integration Cloud Service
APIs or Avayas internal APIs, which are mostly automated.
Users can modify the worklows, which enables them to
manage the interaction theyre going to have with the customer.
The APIs basically mask the diference between an on-premises
system and an external system, and they become a set of consumable microservices, changing their interaction to a multi-
43
OUR GOAL WAS TO PUT THE CUSTOMER FIRST,

AND FILL ALL OF OUR INTEGRATED PROCESSES AROUND
WHAT THEY WANT, SO THAT THEIR EXPERIENCE IS SEAMLESS.
Fari Ebrahimi, Senior Vice President and CIO, Avaya
touch experience, says Ebrahimi. But the users see it as worklows that they can change on their own, so they dont need to
come to IT. They dont need to spend lots of time understanding
the interaction between the systems and the data models.
With Partner Portal, users no longer have to log in to
multiple systems to answer simple questions about products or
customers. Now, they only go to one place, and they see a uniied dashboard of the data they need thats real time, already
integrated, and available for them, says Morsy.
Ebrahimi says IT used to spend a lot of time iguring out
how to connect diferent systems together, implement new
systems, and manage infrastructure standards so that systems
were always fast, available, and secure. Now, he says, the good
thing is that a lot of cloud providers like Oracle are building
their infrastructure with standards, scalability, and security
best practices. That frees up the IT team to concentrate on
strategic initiatives.
Our IT team is spending time understanding, for example,
where things are slowing down, how to improve the performance of our infrastructure, or how to expose more commercial services so we can interact with customers in more interesting ways, says Ebrahimi. They can focus on the customer
rather than on technology integration issues.
Taking Control of Workflows

For example, partners may decide to ofer Avayas Aura solution, a uniied communications platform, to their customers.
Leveraging the Avaya Breeze Platform, the partner can choose
how those customers will be engaged. Partners may ofer a live
chat with an agent from Avaya, and if they see a lot of chat
demand, they can increase the number of agent sessions ofered.
They can change the distribution of calls to diferent regional call
centers, or ofer video chat for a certain time period each day.
In the past, you would have had to ask IT to write the code,
and it would take months to enable and test, says Ebrahimi.
All of it now can be done graphically using a worklow designer,
and the change can be instituted within hours. If you like it, then
great. If you dont like it, you can go in and change it yourself.
When partners sell Avayas solutions to customers, they
often need information from Avaya to conigure and create a
quote. Prior to implementing Oracle Java Cloud Service, partners would have to go to multiple sources to gather the relevant
customer information, such as what products or services they
had already purchased that might afect the pricing. In some
cases, partners didnt have vital information such as how many
opportunities customers had with Avaya, or how many trouble
tickets had been created against their accounts.
With the integration between legacy systems and Avayas
Partner Portal, which is enabled by Oracle Java Cloud Service,

Avaya is creating a one-stop shop where partners can go to see
all relevant information on customers.
Another system that uses Oracle Java Cloud Service to
bridge to other applications is Avaya Intelligent Analytics,
a centralized warehouse from which business intelligence
reports are generated. The system is built with Oracle Business
Intelligence Enterprise Edition technology and extracts data
from almost all of the business systems. It dictates the views
of our revenue, sales, deals, quotes, and pricing its almost a
decision support system, says Morsy.
Increased Value for Customers

In addition to increased customer satisfaction and better business insight, greater integration between parts of the business
has led to major cost savings. Ebrahimi says the company has
reduced costs by 30 to 40 percent, with much of the reduction
coming from the elimination of custom code and the integration of diferent datasources that were reducing business agility.
In working with Oracle, weve reduced our custom code by
80 percent, says Ebrahimi. This means fewer resources spent
on creating and maintaining the code, freeing up money to add
value for customers through innovation.
One of Avayas innovative projects is Customer 360, a
platform that will allow Avaya salespeople, representatives,
and partners to have a complete view of any customer by
account, location, and services. This view is allowing Avaya
sales staf and partners to incorporate an intelligent upsell- and
promotions-driven model. This is the next phase in our evolution toward a more customer-centric business, says Morsy.
And it was possible because we were able to complete our
systems integration in the irst phase.
Ebrahimi hopes to reach the NPS gold standarda score in
the 60s or 70s. He sees the right integration strategy and technology as an essential part of the plan to reach that goal.
Integration tools are yet another way to make it easier for us
to create a fantastic customer experience, says Ebrahimi. If you
have the ability to serve customers needs at any point through a
multitouch experience, your customers are going to promote you
to others, and as a company youre going to do better.
Monica Mehta is a frequent contributor to Proit.
ACTION ITEM
Scan to learn more about the Oracle solutions featured in this story.
PROFIT AUGUST 2016
A HEALTHIER
INFRASTRUCTURE
Centered around Oracles JD Edwards EnterpriseOne, Pharmavite rebuilds
its IT systems from the ground up.
BY TARA SWORDS
PHOTOGRAPHY BY MHER VAHAKN/SPIDERBOX PHOTOGRAPHY
45
From left: Pharmavite Vice

President of Corporate IT
and Business Resilience
Brian Beams, Director of
Finance and Corporate
Controller John Wilson,
and Divisional Vice
President of Corporate IT
Solutions Mike Kuban
46
SNAPSHOT
PHARMAVITE pharmavite.com
Headquarters: Northridge,
California
Industry: Vitamins, minerals, and
supplements
Employees: Approximately 1,300
Oracle products: JD Edwards
EnterpriseOne, Demantra Demand
Management, Oracle Advanced
Supply Chain Planning, Oracle
Hyperion Financial Management,
Agile Product Lifecycle
Management
BRIAN BEAMS
Vice President of Corporate IT and
Business Resilience
Length of tenure: Six years
Education: BS in computer
technology, Purdue University

Personal quote/mantra: Focus
on the What and Why; only then

determine the How.
ead to the vitamin aisle in your local

grocery, pharmacy, or big-box retailer and
youll almost certainly find supplements
sold under the Nature Made label. Its a top-selling
vitamin brand in the United States, but you could
just as easily find it gaining strength in international
markets such as Japan, Taiwan, Mexico, South
Korea, and China. The company behind Nature
Made and the snack bar brand SOYJOYis
Pharmavite, a 45-year-old company headquartered
in Northridge, California. Pharmavite was founded
in 1971 by two entrepreneurs, one of them a pharmacist, and today the company makes products
that sit in the cabinets of millions of homes around
the world.
Pharmavite, like many vitamin and supplement companies,
has been on the receiving end of the worlds growing healthconsciousness, as consumer obsession with wellness fuels steady
growth in the industry. According to a McKinsey report, the
US market grew by US$6 billion between 2007 and 2012 and
is expected to grow 5 to 6 percent each year through 2017, both
in the US and globally. Today, tens of millions of Americans
take a daily multivitamin, and many millions take dietary
supplements such as ish oil, probiotics, or glucosamine.
Pharmavite has experienced double-digit growth for much
of the last decade, putting it in an enviable position. But growth
almost never comes without pain, and for Pharmavites leaders,
that pain was in the rigidity of its IT systems. A deployment
of Oracles JD Edwards EnterpriseOne solutions in the early
2000s had given the company a foundation for enterprise
resource planning (ERP), but the company had customized so much of the system over the yearsalong with the
many solutions that connected to itthat they soon found
themselves stuck.
The prior team installed the system about eight years ago,
and we have been unable to take any upgrades since then,
says Brian Beams, vice president of corporate IT and business
resilience at Pharmavite. In that time, we have doubled and
tripled in size.
Rapid growth tends to make the weak spots show and, for
Pharmavite, one such weak spot was the companys inability
to upgrade its highly customized ERP system. Even a simple
upgrade would have been an enormous undertaking, requiring
IT staf to rewrite code and redo dozens of custom integrations
only to go through the process all over again with each
future upgrade.
It put us in a bad state of afairs for meeting the needs of
the business, says Mike Kuban, divisional vice president of
corporate information technology solutions at Pharmavite. If
you cant upgrade, you have two choices: You dont do anything, or you continue to customize. We had to get to a position
where IT could be business enablers, but to do that, we had to
get our house in order irst.
A cross-functional team was created to develop a clear vision
for ixing things, but with so many systems afected, they knew
47
Were creating a relationship where the
business sees us as partners, says Divisional
Vice President of Corporate IT Solutions Mike
Kuban (left), pictured with Director of Finance
and Corporate Controller John Wilson (center)
and Vice President of Corporate IT and
Business Resilience Brian Beams.
it wouldnt be easy. Pharmavite turned to Oracle and implementation partner CSS International, Inc. (CSS) to help make it
happenand the company is already reaping the beneits.
Program Phoenix Takes Flight

Beams and his senior leadership team imagined a complete
rebirth of the companys IT infrastructure, from the data
centers to servers to applications. The irst step was to lay the
foundation. They closed down a backup data center, swapped
the primary and secondary data centers, and created a hybrid
cloud environment. After nearly four years, they were ready to
start work on the enterprise solutions layer. They named this
undertaking Program Phoenix, a total business transformation
that would take ive to seven years.
The idea was to eliminate customization as much as
possible to install of-the-shelf solutions that would allow
for fast, painless upgrades whenever necessary. They called it

vanillaication, and it meant upgrading nearly 80 applications
in their vanilla or of-the-shelf form. That way, when the
business wanted to make a change, the IT department could
support it with agility.
Their philosophy was not only to get more scalability, but
also to get more lexibility in adapting to whatever the future
brings, says Kenny Ecton, vice president of consumer goods
solutions at CSS, Pharmavites Oracle implementation partner.
Whether they would be doing an acquisition, going into a
new line of business, harvesting new sources of data, or investing in new technology, they wanted to be able to do it quickly
and eiciently.
Beams likens Pharmavites JD Edwards system to the tent
pole that holds up the whole application infrastructure. That
system was at the center of everything, so it would have to
PROFIT AUGUST 2016
48
This will create capacity for
employees so we can focus on
other value-added work, says
Pharmavites John Wilson of
the companys upgrade project.
be upgraded irst. After that, they would upgrade dozens of

their other applications, including Oracle Hyperion Financial
Management, Oracle Demantra Demand Management, and
Oracle Advanced Supply Chain Planning.
Kuban says there was never a question that Oracle was still
the right partner for Pharmavite.
Oracle has been a strong partner for us, Kuban says.
Weve had great support, from a service and directional
standpoint, and we felt the vision was something that we could
get onboard with.
Healthier Data at the Ready

Aside from the inability to take advantage of the latest software releases, another problem was inconsistent data across
the enterprise. Data sprawl afected all areas of the company,
including inance.
Finance is often the recipient of everyone elses transactions, so when things go wrong somewhere else, they always
wind up here, says John Wilson, director of inance and corporate controller at Pharmavite and the programs business sponsor. A lot of the problems were due to one system having data
one way, the master data calling it something else, then it being
called something else in Oracle Hyperion and JD Edwards.
Pharmavites leaders needed not only to make sure data was
consistent across the enterprise but also to access it quickly and
derive insight from it at a moments notice. Because Pharmavite
produces consumer health products, it follows strict manufacTECHNOLOGY POWERED. BUSINESS DRIVEN.
turing requirements. The companys leaders need the ability

to validate data and ensure that every process is traceable
for auditing purposes. Theyll improve this ability with JD
Edwards EnterpriseOne One View Reporting solutions, which
will provide intuitive, user-friendly reports that will increase
productivity and enable decision-makers to act quickly.
The opportunity that JD Edwards EnterpriseOne One
View Reporting solutions are going to bring to us is going to be
phenomenal for day-to-day execution, Kuban says.
These new solutions will enable much better decisionmaking on the inance side of the house as well.
Im really looking forward to having more real-time metrics
like daily dashboards, so we dont have to spend so much time
trying to pull data and then create all of those dashboards ourselves just to see where we are, Wilson says. When responding
to an issue or a change in the business climate, being able to get
at your data quickly and efectively is really important.
No More Manual Workarounds

Many of the companys customizations had led to complex
manual workarounds. For example, accounts payable ran on
manual processes, requiring paper for invoice approval and
matching. Demand planning was also done manually, and then
loaded into the Demantra system. A central goal of the upgrade
project was to automate these and countless other processes,
freeing up employees.
This will create capacity for employees so we can focus on
49
80
Pharmavite is a top-selling brand

in a market thats expected to
grow 5 to 6 percent each year
through 2017.
Number of applications requiring upgrades
57
Number of years necessary to complete the IT transformation
other value-added work, and their jobs can transform over time
into more-analytical roles, Wilson says. People can respond
to exceptions and focus on insights as opposed to getting
bogged down in manual work.
The newest version of JD Edwards will also enable
employees to work from mobile devices, making processes
much more eicient.
Well be able to bring other technology into play, Beams
says. Right now, we have computers on our forklifts, but in
the future we could have iPads, iPhones, and smaller handheld
devices that will function better.
Ready for the Future
MAKING CHANGE EASIER

A transformation as major as
Program Phoenix requires deep
planning on the process and technology side, but Pharmavites leaders have put just as much planning
into the people side. The team leading the project decided that their
vision for the company included
more cross-functional collaboration, and that includes the way they
approached change management.
The steering team is made up of
key executive sponsors and their
direct reports who lead the business, plus members of the workforce
who make the products and use the
systems every day. A wiki collects
project information that employees
might need to know, and constant
communicationsincluding informa-
tive posters throughout the offices

keep employees updated.
Were making sure that people
are coming along with us rather
than just having this be something
that we do to them, Beams says.
When it comes time to go live, we
would like everyone to feel like the
change is manageable and they can
continue to do their job seamlessly
in the upgraded systems. We have
a very robust change management
component, including early communication and training so that when
the new system hits the ground,
people are confident with the
changes and the service desk phone
wont be ringing off the hook.
Program Phoenix has already brought about signiicant

change in Pharmavite, and more exciting developments are
on the way as the team completes upgrades to its dozens of
enterprise applications.
For Kuban, the biggest beneit is that IT now doesnt just keep
the lights on; it plays a very diferent role in the organization.
In the past, the business would request something and
wed go do it without really understanding or asking whether it
was really the right thing to do, Kuban says. But now, were
creating a relationship where the business sees us as partners.
Were developing our staf to understand how the business executes and what their goals are so we can enable them through
technology and systems.
For Beams, one exciting outcome of the project is that it
will enable some innovative uses of technology down the road.
For example, he envisions a digital transformation that will
change how consumers experience Pharmavite products at the
retail shelfa way to inally connect the work of IT with the
end consumer.
We have diferent types of shoppers and consumers. How
do we create that analytic infrastructure to help determine
what we should be doing in the way of advertising, marketing,
and education at the shelf? Beams says. Ill know we made it
when we start helping our marketing and sales teams with that
data. That is where I really want to get to.
Tara Swords is a frequent contributor to Proit.
ACTION ITEM
Scan to learn more about the Oracle solutions featured in this story.
PROFIT AUGUST 2016
50
BIG IDEAS
THOUGHT LEADERSHIP Cloud Challenge THOUGHT LEADERSHIP Cloud-Condent

DATA WATCH Can the C-Suite Set the Enterprise Security Agenda?
LEADING STRATEGIES
Hunting for Growth

Dow Chemical uses technologyand a human touchto connect
with customers around the globe.
BY AARON LAZENBY
PHOTOGRAPHY BY TON HENDRIKS
The Dow Chemical Company is a

diverse multinational company with a
business-to-business-to-consumer model
that touches agriculture, packaging, industrial manufacturing, and more. The company creates more than 5,000 products for
customers in more than 150 countries.
Take packaging, for example, says Dows
Hubertus Devroye, director of marketing

and demand generation and director of commercial discipline for Europe, Middle East, Africa,
and India (EMEAI). You obviously have people
that use our science and solutions to manufacture the packaging, but then you also have, for
example, food companies putting their products
in that package. Ultimately, you have a consumer
who expects value and who needs to have a
convenient experience using that package. Our
company actually needs to inluence all those parties in real time.

Within Dow, Devroye has a complex job. On
the one hand, he is in charge of commercial products for a large and diverse region that stretches
from Great Britain to India. On the other, he has
the global responsibility for aligning outbound
strategy and execution across numerous organizations at Dow. His think local, act global experience has paid of: Devroye is a two-time winner of
Oracle Marketings Markie Awards for his work
introducing and implementing data marketing,
driving change management around the importance of audience segmentation, and more, and
he won the Markie for Global Modern Marketing
Leader in 2013.
Here, Devroye talks to Proit about listening to customers, creating unique solutions, and
how technologyincluding Oracle Marketing
Hubertus Devroye,
Director of Marketing
and Demand Generation
and Director of
Commercial Discipline
EMEAI, Dow Chemical
51
WE ARE A
SCIENCE AND
TECHNOLOGY
COMPANY, SO
DATA IS PART
OF OUR DNA.
Cloudis helping Dow reach customers in the

right way.
PROFIT: How do you drive growth within a large,
global, decentralized organization?
DEVROYE: We are a global company, and we touch
pretty much every point in the value chain, but
we are also a local company. We obviously have
a phenomenal business with mature markets,
but we also have markets that are growing and
emergent. So a one-size-its-all approach doesnt
really work for us.
It is essential to know our customers, talk to
them, listen to them, gather information, channel leads to the global and local sales force, and
gather insights that you share with R&D to
drive customer- and market-driven innovation.
Modern marketing technologies enable you to do
this quickly, cost eiciently, and with measurable
impact. In addition to driving external customer
experience, at Dow, we have also focused on the
user experience of our own employees who are
working with these new capabilities.
PROFIT: With so many diferent kinds of customers
across the value chain, how do you know which
solution will work for a particular market?
DEVROYE: The model that we have been applying
in our company is a centrally governed, decentralized model. We have central governance, because
we are a global brand, and we drive reliability to
our markets and customers globally. But we create local solutions based on what the market and
customers need. When it comes to marketing, one
broad message doesnt work anymore, so we must
continuously nurture diferent audiences in real
time, in their local language, and with relevant
local content.
Because we are dealing with complex markets
and various customer demands, we continuously
innovate our go-to-market approach market by
market; we often do small experiments, make
them work, and then scale them quickly.
For example, in Kenya, we communicate
directly to tens of thousands of farmers to drive
demand for our solutions. Farmers are not working regular hours in an oice. Instead they are
spending the majority of their time in a ield.
Markets such as Kenya have a phenomenal
mobile presence. Therefore, the channel of choice
was text messaging instead of emailwhich is
convenient for the target audience to access in real
time. Ultimately we know that the ones who are
interested will look up our solutions on the web or
via other information channels.
In Germany, on the other hand, we took a
diferent approach because most of our audiences
were more easily reached through traditional
media. To drive the audience to mobile, we actually sent a traditional postcard with a personalized message and URL for the farmer to opt in
and provide a proile. The whole idea behind this
campaign was that the farmers would keep the
postcards and would go to the online channel
at a time convenient for them. This was another
experiment, and here we are three years later,
with farmers still accessing the same campaign
through their personalized URLs. We have used
this strategy now in multiple markets and on different parts of our portfolio.
PROFIT: How do you use data to improve and grow
your business?
DEVROYE: We are a science and technology
company, so data is part of our DNA. We are
always hunting for growth, whether its in
mature or emergent markets. For example, in
mature markets, we mine existing customer
and market data to learn more about customers
we have been working with for many years, for
cross-marketing and cross-selling new innovations and solutions. This is a signiicant growth
opportunity for us.
Data also drives a phenomenal change in
our transformation from a product-focused to
a solution- and market-focused company. Data
determines how to use diferent technologies and
solutions for diferent audiences, how to apply
diferent go-to-market processes, how to execute
high-impact product launches, and how to nurture the entire value chain.
We had to recognize that we needed to look
at good data as much as at bad data. When
campaigns were not as successful as we thought
they would be, or when we had less audience
engagement, looking at the bad data gave us
insights into how we could continue to improve
our messaging and content. It kept us honest.
Finally, very often in companies with people
who have lots of sales and marketing experience,
there are lots of opinions. You can actually turn a
very opinionated, heated debate into a meaningful discussion, because data doesnt lie.
PROFIT: What role does Oracle play in helping
you grow?
DEVROYE: At the beginning of 2012, we brought
Oracle Marketing Cloud capabilities in on the
commercial side of our business to drive marketing execution and close the vacuum between
marketing and sales. Oracle Marketing Cloud
helps us to optimize our channels in all markets
to ultimately sell our solutions and products and
satisfy our customer base.
A great example of this is our sample management follow-up campaign we have executed with
PROFIT AUGUST 2016
52 BIG IDEAS
SNAPSHOT
DOW CHEMICAL
dow.com
Location: Midland,
Michigan
Industry: Industrial
manufacturing
Employees: 49,500
Revenue:
US$49 billion
Oracle products:
Oracle Marketing
Cloud, Oracle
Social Cloud
HUBERTUS
DEVROYE
Director of
Marketing and
Demand Generation
and Director of
Commercial
Discipline, EMEAI
Length of tenure:
Six years
Education:
BS in applied
linguistics and
economics, University
of Brussels,
Belgium; MS in
integrated business
communications,
HogeschoolUniversiteit Brussel
Personal quote/
mantra:
Smart technology
or digital is only
an enabler.
Oracle Marketing Cloud for a few years. We ship

thousands of samples to customers and prospects
to pilot new products and drive innovation and
sales. We know that when someone requests a
sample, he has a speciic use in mind. For us, on
the commercial side of the business, he becomes
a lead. So we started asking the recipient of the
sample about the end use of the sample, the trial
times, and other important information in order
to adjust our services and our follow-up based on
customer feedback.
If the recipient of the sample says trials were
successful, the system automatically triggers a
message to the account manager. If trials failed,
the system alerts our applied technologies team to
provide technical support. If the recipient needs
more information, the system alerts the marketing
team to follow up.
We have had a response rate of more than 50
percentwhich is very, very impressive. Oracle
Marketing Cloud lets us reach people very quickly
and easily. However, the principle behind this
campaign was just bringing a personalized and
human touch to an important commercial process. Many of our customers responded and said,
Thank you for asking.
PROFIT: What role does cloud computing play in
your commercial strategy?
DEVROYE: For me, its always about business
optimizing our commercial processes and hunting
for more business. Ultimately, no one gets paid
according to tweets, clicks, and Likes. We get
paid according to sales and customer satisfaction. We had to build the foundation irst. Oracle
Marketing Cloud helped us to make the connections between our marketing and sales funnel and
our customer relationship management capabilities. Now that we have end-to-end transparency
between marketing and sales, we continue to
optimize and innovate.
In recent times, we started to experiment with
Oracle Marketing Cloud to work on several social
listening initiatives. There is so much noise out
there that we need to translate into something
that makes sense for our customers and ourselves.
I hope our eforts on social ultimately become a
lead for sales, an insight for our technology teams
to follow up on, or an important data point for us
to improve on.
Modern marketing capabilities also help us
to continue to improve inside the company as
well, whether its in employee communications, in
improved user experience on internal processes,
or in the important area of talent attraction and
retention. After all, we all are also consumers
inside our company.
ACTION ITEM
Copyright 2016, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Oracle and Java are registered trademarks of Oracle
and/or its affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners.
54 BIG IDEAS
OF ORACLE CLOUD PLATFORM products
24+ NUMBER
Oracle has released since 2015
THOUGHT LEADERSHIP
CLOUD CHALLENGE
Five projects show the many use cases for cloud platforms.
BY CHRIS MURPHY
For Debra Lilley, the time feels right to

stop thinking about building something
with a cloud development platform, and
start doing it. So what else to do but sign
up for an event challenging teams to build
a cloud-based project in a single day?
CONTINUOUS INNOVATION
Project: A mobile app that lets you share travel

plans with colleagues, so you can book at the
same hotel or share a cab if youre attending the
same conference.
Tools: Oracle Mobile Cloud Service,
Oracle Integration Cloud Service, Oracle
Java Cloud Service
All the teams were made up of Oracle ACE
Directors, and, although theyre from separate
companies, they often travel to the same Oracle
ACE events and want to coordinate where they
stay and when they come and go. Debra Lilleys
team felt that by creating an app using Oracle

Mobile Cloud Service, pulling data from Oracle
Database Cloud Service using REST services,
you dont have to rely on people pushing you
information, because its going to be available
there in one place, Lilley says.
Lilley thinks IT teams especially enterprise
IT shops dont fully appreciate how cloud has
changed the pace of software innovation, including how quickly Oracle is adding new features
and reinements to its cloud services based on user
feedback. While it used to take years to revise and
upgrade on-premises applications and databases,
now she sees new features and functions added
even in the monthly patches, which are more typically used just for bug ixes.
This continuous innovation really is there,
Lilley says. While she wants more APIs and builtin integrations to cloud services, she notes, I said
that a year ago, and its a lot better now than it
was then.
Lilleys second team also planned to use Oracle
GoldenGate Cloud Service, Oracle Application
Container Cloud, and Oracle Data Visualization
CONTINUOUS
INNOVATION
REALLY IS
THERE. I SAID
THAT A YEAR
AGO, AND ITS
A LOT BETTER
NOW THAN IT
WAS THEN.
Debra Lilley, Vice President
of Systems Integration,
Certus Solutions
WES ROWELL
The best way to learn something is to dig

in and have a go, says Lilley, an Oracle ACE
Director and vice president at systems integration
irm Certus Solutions.
That attitude explains why Lilley joined
not one but two teams taking part in the OTN
Developer Cloud Challenge, held outside of
Amsterdam, the Netherlands, in early June 2016,
as part of the AMIS Oracle Conference in the
Netherlands. One of Lilleys teams used Oracle
Cloud Platform tools to craft an app for sharing
light and lodging details with your travel companions to an event such as this cloud challenge.
The other worked on reining an extension to
Oracle Human Capital Management Cloud for
managing the HR policy for bringing complaints
against senior stafers.
Events such as the Amsterdam cloud challenge help systems integrators get hands-on with
the tools and projects theyre increasingly going
to use in their work with customers. Here are ive
projects from the challenge, with insights from
the Oracle ACE Directors leading the projects on
what theyre learning about cloud platforms.
55
Cloud Service. Lilley says not all these cloud products are as integrated yet as the team would like,
but its still easier to manage those pieces in the
cloud than it would be on premises.
TREASURE CHEST OF DATA
Project: A cloud-based conference-planning

tool to share information on speakers, sessions,
and more.
Tools: Oracle Database Cloud Service, Oracle
Mobile Cloud Service, Oracle Integration Cloud
Service, Oracle Java Cloud Service, Oracle
Application Container Cloud, Oracle SOA Cloud
Service, and more
Lucas Jellema, CTO of Oracle Platinum
Partner and conference host AMIS, helped plan
this Oracle ACE event. Jellema pictures this application being used by people around the world planning an event such as this conference and cloud
challenge. The cloud ofers the perfect platform for
that kind of shared, collaborative application.
If we create it once, we can use it all over
the world, and make it available from a single
instance to all the user groups, Jellema says. Not
only can people use it from around the world, but
they also can contribute to its ongoing development from diferent companies and geographies.
Like Lilley, one of the main things Jellema
hoped to learn from the cloud challenge is how
various cloud services work together. For example,
in Oracle Mobile Cloud Service he can select
APIs to connect with other services. Using Oracle
Integration Cloud Service, he built a connection
to Twitter in about 15 minutes with no coding.
Jellema wants more of those prebuilt connections,
and he sees Oracle creating them very rapidly. If
that Twitter integration is an example of what is
to come with more-complex integrations, I have a
very positive outlook, he says.
Jellema sees companies eager to use cloud tools
to make better use of the data they hold. When
Jellema spoke with Proit, he had just met with leaders at a company thats eager to share its treasure
chest of data with stakeholders inside and outside
the company, but they werent sure how to do that.
Jellema explained what Oracle Mobile Cloud
Service does, and the companys IT leaders thought
it sounded like the silver bullet for that particular
challenge. Oracle Mobile Cloud Service adds
capabilities that dont exist in an on-premises tool
today, Jellema says, and he predicts that it will help
a lot of companies with these kinds of data-sharing
tasksmuch as it does for AMISs own conferenceplanning app for the cloud challenge.
It seems like one of the most natural its for
many organizations to get going, and it helps with
exposing data that you have already to all your

stakeholders, he says.
EFFICIENT INTEGRATION
Project: A system aimed at reducing car pollution in Mexico City, Mexico, by tracking how
much a given vehicle travels through tapping into
the citys license plate readers.
Tools: Oracle Mobile Cloud Service, Oracle
Database Cloud Service, Oracle Business
Intelligence Cloud Service, Oracle Data
Visualization Cloud Service, Oracle Internet of
Things Cloud Service, Oracle Integration Cloud
Service, Oracle SOA Cloud Service
Does crunching data on all the cars in a gridlocked and pollution-racked city of 20 million sound
a bit ambitious for a one-day cloud development
challenge? John King wont argue with you on that.
Its a pretty ambitious projectIm pretty
sure we cant get it all done during the time
allotted, said King, who is a partner in King
Training Resources, in the week before the event.
But we thought we would try to dive into something that would have some real worth afterward,
and be worth working on after the challenge.
The teams idea was to take data from license
plate readers, and crunch that data to learn how
much a given vehicle is driving. Then, the system
would combine that information with data relating to heat and the pollution index, and notify
drivers via mobile app how far they are allowed
to drive on a given day, along with how far they
have driven so far. Today, Mexico City is trying
to control pollution with a program called Hoy No
Circula, which prohibits vehicles from driving on
certain days based on their license numbers. One
problem, says King, is vehicles can drive unlimited miles on the days theyre not prohibited.
The project ties to two priorities King sees
from a lot of companies: a strong interest in
exploiting cloud and the Internet of Things (IoT),
and the need to maximize the value they get from
the data, systems, and infrastructure they already
have in place. Often that means adding cloud
services for analysis and sharing that data.
The Internet of Thingsin particular, the
industrial application of IoTwill thrust more
companies into massive-scale computing projects. To compete, companies will have to put
sensors on a growing number of products and
production equipment, and analyze the data from
those sensors.
Companies will need not only eicient data
processing to do that, but also eicient, cloudbased integration to tie these many assets and
sensors together. Companies cant aford to
PROFIT AUGUST 2016
56 BIG IDEAS
waste money redoing things, King says. (Kings

team took irst place in the challenge. His team
included three other Oracle ACE DirectorsBiju
Thomas of OneNeck IT Solutions, Plinio Arbizu
of Global Business Solutions, and Timo Hahn of
Virtual 7 GmbHand one Oracle ACE, Arturo
Viveros of Sysco.)
THE MOBILE MANDATE
Project: A mobile dashboard to let DBAs track

metrics and detail pages, with the ability to do
drill-down analysis and even make changes using
their mobile phones.
Database Cloud Service, Oracle Business
Intelligence solutions
For Bjoern Rost and his team, this project
focused on something they know deeply
databasesand something they want to know
more about cloud development and analysis
tools. I just wanted to learn more about mobile
and business intelligence cloud services, says
Rost, a principal consultant at Pythian Oracle
DBA Services. I want to know them and be able
to apply them whenever the time is right.
When it comes to using cloud platforms and
infrastructure, Rost thinks theyll typically be
applied to two kinds of companies and projects.
One includes the valuable but, frankly, least interesting initiativesmoving an existing workload
to the cloud, in a cost-cutting, bottom-up strategy.
More interesting are those using cloud platforms
to take a fresh run at long-standing problems.
Thats where you get the most beneit, and thats
where the cloud is most exciting, Rost says.
Not every aspect of the cloud lives up to Rosts
expectations yet, including ease of access to trial
systems, the interaction of diferent cloud services,
and user experience. But Oracle is moving fast to
ix problems when theyre raised, he says.
Rosts team focused on taking database information mobile, but creative IT people should be
ready to meet that mobile demand from every
corner of the enterprise. Rost has high hopes that
Oracle Mobile Cloud Service will help IT teams
develop high-performing enterprise apps without
having to dig into the OS-level details the way
developers of native mobile apps must.
Everybody and everything has to go to
mobile, Rost says.
RESHAPING OUR SKILLS
Project: A mobile app that merges a public

REST feed of restaurant data with ratings data
from a review site to provide a choice of restaurants based on a users location. A Twitter feed
would let a user send a tweet on how they liked

the restaurant.
Integration Cloud Service
Simon Haslam, technical director and partner
at the system integration irm eProseed, classiies
himself as an infrastructure person, so he wanted
a cloud project that connected a classy mobile app
front end to an on-premises back-end system, since
cloud-to-on-premises solutions are what many
companies need today. Haslams team included IT
pros from eProseed and the Future Group.
That link is probably where all the action
is going to be for the next three or four years,
Haslam says. Nobody Im working with today
who has a data center is going to get rid of it any
time soon.
On-premises technologies such as serviceoriented architecture have let companies build
data-sharing ties with many more trading partners
over the past 15 years, Haslam says, as companies
connected on-premises systems. But that integration complexity will shoot up as the cloud lets
companies dramatically expand those links.
The next generation of really interesting
problems will revolve around multiple data centers and multiple-continent, really sophisticated
integrations, Haslam predicts. Instead of dealing with 10 or 15 applications, well suddenly ind
ourselves dealing with 30 or 40 applications.
Just the idea of trying to build an app in a day
at a developer challenge shows how platforms like
Oracle Cloud Platform rev up the pace of change,
Haslam says. In the past, just building one or
two data feeds into an app would be seen as a
days work.
If cloud-based integration makes some of those
links easier, it does present a risk to IT professionals like Haslam on the infrastructure side. But hes
convinced cloud will create exciting new challenges around factors such as latency and security
that will keep IT pros employedif they keep up
their skills with events such as the cloud challenge.
Says Haslam, Its all part of how all of us
in IT, particularly those of us who are more
infrastructure-focused, are reshaping our skills to
make them more relevant.
Chris Murphy is director of cloud content at Oracle.
ACTION ITEM

THE NEXT
GENERATION
OF REALLY
INTERESTING
PROBLEMS
WILL REVOLVE
AROUND
MULTIPLE DATA
CENTERS AND
MULTIPLECONTINENT,
REALLY
SOPHISTICATED
INTEGRATIONS.
Simon Haslam, Technical Director
and Partner, eProseed
Sept. 1822, 2016

San Francisco
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their respective owners.
THOUGHT LEADERSHIP
CLOUDCONFIDENT
Top Oracle partners are building successful
ERP cloud businesses. Heres how.
WES ROWELL
BY ALISON WEISS
Today, leaders across all industrieseven those in traditionally

change-resistant sectorsare looking to embrace digital business
by moving some enterprise resource planning (ERP) operations
to the cloud. A 2016 report from Loudhouse Research (Modern
Finance: Driving Transformation from Within) reveals that
74 percent of senior decision-makers surveyed believe that using
inancial software in the cloud is critical to reach their digital
transformation objectives. And an IDG cloud computing survey
found that in 2016, enterprise executives expect to invest an average of US$2.87 million in cloud technologies and will allocate
25 percent of their total IT budgets to cloud computing.
This growing demand for ERP cloud solutions presents an abundance of opportunity
for Oracle partners. However, helping clients
implement cloud technology can be very diferent
than traditional on-premises ERP projects. But
two pioneering Oracle partners with lourishing
cloud practices demonstrate that it is possible to
conidently make the transition to the cloud with
potent and proitable results.
CREATING BETTER BUSINESS VALUE
Deloitte started working with Oracle to develop

cloud technology in 2007 and recently became the
irst partner to achieve Diamond Global Cloud
Elite status in the newly launched Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN) Cloud Program (see sidebar).
Deloitte has certiied several of its more than
17,300 Oracle practitioners to work across Oracles
portfolio of cloud solutions, invested in industryspeciic accelerators to reduce the time to implement cloud-based ERP projects, and transformed
their implementation and support methodologies.
According to Mark Hulyer, partner and
Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) Oracle
practice leader at Deloitte, cloud projects involve
PROFIT AUGUST 2016
60 BIG IDEAS
a series of steps prior to helping clients devise a

plan for cloud. First, Deloitte practitioners articulate a common understanding of what Oracle
Enterprise Resource Planning Cloud (Oracle
ERP Cloud) is, to dispel myths and misconceptions. They then help clients identify the business
changes they want to efect with cloud technology.
Our clients need to consider how cloud can
help them be more eicient or reduce costs, Hulyer
says. What does it mean from a people aspect?
Whos going to have to do something diferently?
What business processes need to be changed?
Compared to traditional, on-premises implementations, the cloud time frame is accelerated by
minimizing customization. Streamlined projects
also mean that clients can realize beneits more
quickly, which is why long-time Deloitte client
and London-based global banking giant HSBC
decided to leverage Oracle ERP Cloud to fundamentally re-engineer the inancial management
processes across its global Operations, Services,
and Technology division.
Evolving bank regulations in the UK require
all large UK banks to ring fence their retail
banking operations from their investment banking operations by January 1, 2019. In response
to this, HSBC, which has complex banking
businesses around the world, is in the process of
establishing a new global services company structure. The implementation of Oracle ERP Cloud
has enabled HSBC to quickly operationalize the
Global Service Companies organization.
In addition, HSBC is leveraging its investment
in Oracle ERP Cloud to implement procure-topay, expenses, and project accounting across all of
the banks global businesses and functionsnot
just in the Global Service Companies organization. Ultimately, all of its third-party spending and
a signiicant proportion of its global cost base will
be managed through Oracle ERP Cloud.
QUICKER IMPLEMENTATIONS
Historically, HSBC built much of its own technology or adapted technology to it its processes.
But Joanna Fielding, CFO for the Global Service
Companies organization at HSBC, knew that the
cloud would standardize process and functionality, allowing the platform to be rolled out globally
without changing from country to country.
With the support of Deloitte, Fielding and her
team implemented Oracle Enterprise Performance
Management Cloud (Oracle EPM Cloud) for
planning as well as project accounting, procurement, and expense management. Using an agile
approach, it took just nine months to deploy Oracle
EPM Cloud globally. And just one month later,

the company went live with Oracle ERP Cloud in
the UK, and in July 2016, 20,000 service company
employees and 30,000 UK expense users were
migrated to the platform. Eventually all of HSBCs
operating entities across more than 60 countries
will make the transition by 2018.
We took an out-of-the-box solution and
plugged it in to our infrastructure without changing the underlying functionality, says Fielding.
We had far fewer bugs compared to a traditional
on-premises implementation.
To ensure the standardized Oracle ERP Cloud
solution could scale for current and future needs,
the Oracle ERP Cloud development team worked
alongside HSBC to create the speciic functionality
HSBC required. As an example, HSBC needed
the ability to calculate value-added tax at the
individual cost center level rather than at the entity
level. As a Diamond Global Cloud Elite Partner,
Deloitte and its customers beneit from Oracles
engagement and commitment to help transform
their business on an accelerated basis. Oracle has
NEW PROGRAM STRENGTHENS PARTNER

CLOUD OFFERINGS
Enterprises everywhere
are seeking to implement
ERP cloud solutions,
which is good news for
Oracle partners. Here,
Shawn Price, senior vice
president of Oracle Cloud,
discusses how partners
can successfully meet
this growing demand.
PROFIT: How does delivering ERP cloud solutions
difer from implementing
on-premises solutions?
PRICE: It is imperative for
partners to really listen to
customers, understand
where they are in their
cloud journey, and present
solutions and roadmaps
to unlock business value.
Because customers are
empowered to seek the
best solutions, they can
switch as their needs
change. Partners must
prioritize customer success to ensure that their
customers get value
from ERP cloud solutions

every minute/day/week/
month/year.
PROFIT: How important
is agility for partners
to build a successful
cloud business?
PRICE: Agility is critical
because it allows partners to react to expansion
opportunities by quickly
and safely deploying
cloud solutions using
best-practice business
processes across global
locations. Customers
beneit because they
are keeping pace with
changing compliance
and regulatory rules,
while remaining ahead
of competitors.
PROFIT: What kinds of
innovative cloud support
services can partners
ofer to customers?
PRICE: Customers can
beneit from services
such as roadmap plan-
ning, system design and

integration, cocreating
breakthrough solutions,
and consulting. Partners
can deliver further value
via expertise, industry
experience, or geographic
focus. Embracing the
cloud can result in
tremendous growth
opportunities and even
bigger opportunities to
help customers transform their business and
the markets in which
they compete.
PROFIT: What services
are ofered by Oracle to
support partners building
cloud practices?
PRICE: The new OPN
Cloud Program provides partners with an
accelerated opportunity
to grow their business
successfully with Oracle
Cloud and strengthen
their oferings with
mutual customers.
Choose Oracle
Cloud Partners
Cloud Skills Certified by
Independent Testing
Successful Implementations
Confirmed by Customers
Verified by Oracle
5,000 Cloud Partners with 28,000 Specialists
oracle.com/partners/goto/cloudpartner
Copyright 2016, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Oracle and Java are registered trademarks of Oracle and/or its affiliates.
62 BIG IDEAS
PERCENTAGE OF SENIOR DECISION-MAKERS who believe using nancial software in the cloud is critical for them to reach
74 their
digital transformation objectives
(Source: Loudhouse Research and Oracles report Modern Finance: Driving Transformation from Within)
been very willing to work with us, says Fielding.

There have been many advantages with our three
organizations working in partnership.
ENABLING DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION
Accenture has also maximized its relationship

with Oracle to build a thriving cloud practice.
In 2015, Accenture and Oracle launched the
Accenture Oracle Business Group to deliver
industry-speciic solutions, prebuilt accelerators,
and tools built on Oracles software-as-a-service
(SaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS), and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) oferings. Further,
Accenture has obtained Diamond Global Cloud
Elite status in the OPN Cloud Program.
Brian Sullivan, managing director of the
Global Oracle Cloud Practice at Accenture, says
he believes that todays enterprise leaders are
looking to the cloud for more agility, elasticity,
and lexibility to be able to make quick business
decisions, increase top-line revenues, and decrease
expenses. Accenture Oracle Business Group
experts ofer their extensive industry, technology,
and delivery experience to help enterprises create
a lexible digital roadmap for migrating to the
cloud. This can mean migrating an entire ERP
footprint to the cloud or taking a hybrid approach.
Moving ERP to the cloud is more than just
implementing module functionality, observes
Sullivan. Enterprises now have the agility to create a standard, modern ERP cloud platform that
can lex as the business changes. It can extend to
incorporate social, mobile, and the Internet of
Things to drive greater business results.
This focus on elasticity, agility, and lexibility
is what recently encouraged a global wireless technologies manufacturer to work with the Accenture
Oracle Business Group to implement Oracle ERP
Cloudin the companys headquarters in 14 different countries that had never used any type of
ERP solutionas the launching point for a broader
corporate ERP cloud modernization plan. The
company has been an Oracle customer for years
and uses two instances of Oracle E-Business Suite
on premises for manufacturing and corporate operations. In addition, the company uses Accenture to
provide business process outsourcing services for
some of its entities. According to IT decisionmakers, migrating to Oracle ERP Cloud provides
the lexibility to grow its cloud ERP footprint across
the company and transform its business.
FLEXIBLE FOUNDATION FOR GROWTH
According to Sullivan, numerous ERP cloud strategies were considered for the projectbut ultimately,
leadership determined the best return on investment would come from implementing Oracle ERP
Cloud across the 14 smaller countries and integrating the cloud solution with the on-premises Oracle
corporate system. The reasoning? The countries
without an existing ERP system would quickly beneit from better control and streamlined processes.
And, immediate savings could be realized by eliminating the need to pay accounting irms for inancial support services in each of these 14 locations.
In addition, there would be intangible beneits to
piloting the entire corporate functionality in the
cloud and demonstrating that it could scale.
With the Accenture Oracle Business Groups
help and the use of its proprietary Cloud Connect
accelerator, the customer has already been able
to implement Oracle ERP Cloud in 7 of the 14
countries, with the remaining 7 expected to go live
by fall 2016. In addition, an Oracle service-oriented
architecture and the necessary security controls
have been put into place to support a cloud/onpremises hybrid approach to enable ERP cloud
modernization across the entire organizationwith
the goal of moving 100 percent of corporate Oracle
functionality to the cloud over the next two years.
IT leaders dont know precisely every step of the
process, whether it will be module by module or
by country, but they do know they want to expand
their cloud footprint every year. With the support
of Accenture, theyve created a foundation that can
lex diferent ways depending on what the business
needs, with the eventual goal to have 100 percent
of corporate Oracle functionality on the cloud.
For Accenture and Deloitte, the ERP cloud
market holds many opportunities to expand their
practices and help customers navigate their digital
transformations. For some Oracle partners, continually keeping abreast of new cloud developments
and solutions might seem daunting. But Deloittes
Hulyer sees this as only positive.
In the past with on-premises solutions, it could
take two years before new features became available. But today, cloud products get updated two or
three times a year with new functions. Its exciting
for my people, who are really interested in learning, he says. They actually like the new world of
cloud and the way its changing all the time.
Alison Weiss is a frequent contributor to Proit.
ACTION ITEM

OUR CLIENTS
NEED TO
CONSIDER
HOW CLOUD
CAN HELP
THEM
BE MORE
EFFICIENT
OR REDUCE
COSTS.
Mark Hulyer, Partner and
EMEA Oracle Practice Leader,
Deloitte
Oracle Cloud
Applications, Platform, Infrastructure
Oracle
Cloud
Oracle Managed
Private Cloud
and
Our Data Center
Your Data Center
Run some of your applications in the Oracle Cloud

and others in your Private Cloud. You Choose.
Copyright 2016, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Oracle and Java are registered trademarks of Oracle and/or its affiliates.
64 BIG IDEAS
Are you ready for the future?
Is the C-suite providing the budget to

fund cybersecurity?
67% of more successful companies say yes.

25% of less successful companies say no.
rms are
41% ofconlessdentsuccessful
or very condent that they
can address future attacks.
successful rms are
67% ofconmore
dent or very condent that they
can address future attacks.
Successful companies have a proactive strategy that mobilizes the workforce, engages
customers and suppliers, and anticipates potential threats.
Corporate
Espionage
AT TA C K S
28%
25%
CY
BER
Hacking
Financial
Theft
11.3%
17%
WES ROWELL
Companies with a successful

counter-cyberattack strategy
saw a significant reduction in
attacks over a two-year period.
DATA WATCH
THE ENFORCERS
RECENT RESEARCH SHOWS THE C-SUITES INFLUENCE ON SECURITY POLICY. If members of the C-suite are
enterprise caretakers, what role do they play in protecting the business? This is a question that the Economist Intelligence Unit asked
300 executives in a recent Oracle-sponsored paper entitled Data Security: How a Proactive C-Suite Can Reduce Cyber-Risk for
the Enterprise. The results? Of the companies that took a proactive cyberdefense posture, 28 percent were able to cut the growth of
cyberbreaches by more than 50 percent. So mindshare matters and attentive C-suite executives are doing a better job of protecting
their systems. Read more at bit.ly/29nYgL1. AARON LAZENBY
TIME TO
CLEAN
YOUR
ADDRESSES
Supported Integrations:
The integrated address verification

solution that corrects and standardizes
postal addresses in Oracle
Siebel
Customer
Relationship
Management
877-784-0003 | www.RunnerTech.com
Contact us today for a quote & demo!

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Oracle OpenWorld 2016

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