For any big data effort to succeed, an organization needs to figure out how to combine the right data from the right sources to generate the right insights to achieve its goals. Transactional applications might hold data on customer purchases, for instance. But their browsing patterns, loyalty interactions and responses to tweeted offers are probably in web-based systems. You need to pull all the pieces together to solve the puzzle and exploit new opportunities.
Oracle understands this problem well, as evidenced by the four new products and three new services they’ve announced in recent weeks.
The new products include:
- Oracle Big Data Discovery—variously dubbed “the visual face of Hadoop” and “the foundation for data innovation,” it offers a straightforward, unified way for business users to explore data from multiple sources and then analyze it and share the actionable results… in minutes, says Oracle. The benefits include radically accelerated time-to-value for big data “projects” plus increased participation by a wider range of business users, adding up to bigger insights all around.
- Oracle GoldenGate for Big Data—a Hadoop-based tool that supports streaming of real-time, unstructured data from multiple transaction systems straight into popular big data systems like Apache Hadoop, Hive, HBase and Flume. Essentially it replicates data between systems in real-time in your choice of forms, without impacting source system performance.
- Oracle Big Data SQL 1.1—said to offer a query performance boost of up to 40% over previous versions.
- Oracle NoSQL Database 3.2.5—which includes several new features including new APIs, as well as improved security, usability and performance.
Together these new products “further Oracle’s vision to enable Hadoop, NoSQL, and SQL technologies to work together and be deployed securely in any model—whether public cloud, private cloud or an on-premises infrastructure.” It’s all about “operationalizing insights” by integrating new data sources with existing infrastructure, applications and databases.
The new big data services, all cloud-based are geared toward helping companies leverage big data specifically for marketing:
- Oracle Data as a Service for Marketing is aimed at generating sales leads. It offers a staggering 300 million profiles of business users and companies, which can be used to prospect for new business-to-business customers as well as improve your insight into your customer base and drive smarter cross-channel marketing.
- Oracle Data as a Service for Customer Intelligence is designed to provide a clearer picture of customer feedback on products and services, as well as offer insights into emerging trends or customer concerns. Among other data sources, it uses public information from 700 million social networking messages that Oracle collects daily.
- Oracle Marketing Cloud for Student Engagement offers templates that universities and others can use to attract students and improve retention among enrolled students. It essentially packages for the higher education vertical a range of existing Oracle cloud services. Similar packages are already available for a wide range of verticals including manufacturing, insurance, entertainment, nonprofits and many others.
These new offerings join two recent Oracle acquisitions (I know I promised I’d stop at seven, sorry…):
- The BlueKai platform, “the industry’s leading cloud-based big data platform that enables companies to personalize online, offline and mobile marketing campaigns…”
- Datalogix, whose technology “connects offline purchasing data to digital media to improve audience targeting and measure sales impact.”
All these offerings are aimed at helping Oracle customers advance their big data capabilities faster and with greater ease and success. “More people want to use Oracle software without having to run Oracle software,” said Thomas Kurian, Oracle’s VP of product development, at his Oracle OpenWorld 2014 keynote.
Is your IT department looking to respond to business demands for big data analytics that wring new insights and competitive momentum from your Oracle databases? Do you have the expertise you need in-house to address these new challenges while continuing to maintain current databases and applications? Contact Buda Consulting to discuss options for augmenting your core team with an expert Oracle DBA partner that can help with new demands or backstop everyday processes.
