Oracle Acquires Instantis For Cloud-Based Portfolio Project Management

Oracle has entered into an agreement to acquire Instantis, a project portfolio management (PPM) technology vendor. Instantis offers both on-premises and cloud-based versions of its PPM solutions.

Instantis’ main product, known as Enterprise Track, is designed to ease the management of multiple corporate initiatives by providing a single interface for management of all projects for all players. The solution uses a “top-down” approach that approaches initiatives starting from high-level strategies, metrics and processes, and also offers financial reporting capabilities.

Oracle says it intends to combine Instantis functionality with its Primavera PPM toolset and Fusion middleware application. As a result, Oracle expects to offer a more comprehensive PPM package with both cloud-based and on-premises hosting options. The platform will connect executive leadership with departments including corporate, professional services, IT, R&D, manufacturing, operations and capital projects for the purposes of integrated PPM execution. Specific enabled PPM tasks will include capacity planning, business metrics tracking, ideation and contract execution.

Oracle ‘Bulks Up’ Cloud

In its coverage of today’s acquisition, the Wall Street Journal focused on the cloud computing aspect of the deal far more than the added PPM functionality Oracle will obtain. “The company is nevertheless aggressively targeting cloud-computing rivals like Salesforce.com and SAP AG with its own suite of products served up through the Internet,” stated the Journal. The Journal also commented that buying Instantis reflects Oracle’s “longstanding strategy of sucking in small (niche) software companies on a steady basis.”

Keeping It Small

The “longstanding strategy” of buying small niche players referred to in the Journal article appears to be sticking around for a while. As reported by CMSWire, about a month ago Oracle CEO Larry Ellison told CNBC's Maria Bartiromo that now that Oracle has moved into the cloud, the company will focus more on growing internally and less on buying up other vendors.

"I am just saying over the next couple of years, senior management down to individual programmers and sales people, are focused on one thing; selling applications in the cloud," said Ellison, who clarified in other remarks that Oracle in particular would not focus on large acquisitions. Instantis does offer Oracle new opportunities to sell niche PPM applications and services in the cloud, so this purchase appears to be right on track.

Let’s see if Ellison keeps his word about not pursuing earth-ratting acquisitions in 2013, especially as the economy is showing signs of a possible early recovery in the works.

The Instantis management team and employees are expected to join Oracle as part of the Oracle Primavera Global Business Unit. Notable Instantis clients include DuPont, Lilly and Verizon.The transaction is subject to customary closing conditions and approvals and is expected to close this year. Terms have not been released.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Cisco Takes WebEx to the Private Cloud, Expands Hosted Collaboration Solution

Cisco announces changes to its collaboration portfolio, with a strong focus on improving collaboration in the cloud.

WebEx Heads to the Cloud

Let's start with the web conferencing. Customers now have choices for how to support their meeting needs. Prior to this release, WebEx was an on premises solution for organizations. Many organizations also used the Cisco Public WebEx cloud offering (usage has increased 38 percent year over year according to Cisco). But for those who want to take advantage of the cost efficiencies of the cloud and keep control of their own content, something new was required.

Cisco has announced the Cisco WebEx Meeting Server built to run in private cloud environment where organizations can ensure data privacy. It's also a great solution for those who are still tied to a capital expenditures model as opposed to the new utility model that comes with cloud-based hosted solutions. This is a virtualized server solution that is designed for the Cisco Unified Computing System, so deployment and management is simplified.

If you also have Cisco Unifiied Communications Manager, you can extend IP telephony to your web conference. And this is a nice capability coming in January of 2013: if you are doing an IM session using Jabber, you can quickly turn that into a web conference directly from the Jabber interface.

Cisco Host Collaboration Solution

Whether you have the entire Suite of capability or only a couple of modules, there are some updates to the Hosted Collaboration Solution (HCS) that you will be interested in hearing about:

Telepresence capabilities have been enhanced: This includes enabling partners to conduct meetings at any time without a reservation, expanding intra- and inter-company collaboration with video experiences. The Cisco TelePresence Exchange (CTX) is now integrated into HCS which means partners can manage their infrastructure across all their customers. It also means that customers can now connect multiple locations at the same time.

HCS for Customer Collaboration (Contact Center): The workflows and management capabilities for each customer contact center can now be integrated together offering a more seamless way to support clients across the board. This includes a new Web 2.0 customizable desktop that supports call center agents.

Advancing Unified Communications: Enhancements for HCS here include supporting third party SIP endpoints and an expansion of the IMS Jabber integration to support third party phones in the Cisco UC environment.

Taking Collaboration to New Levels

Sometimes we talk about collaboration like it's something we've not been doing for years. The tools have changed though to support quicker ways to work together, often more efficient ways. And that's what we are seeing with much of the Cisco announcements today. This "collaboration" as Cisco clearly notes is not just internally focused, it's something we need to get better at with our partners, our suppliers and our own customers.

Much of the functionality announced today is expected to be available in the fourth quarter of this year. 

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Oracle Updates ATG Web Commerce & Endeca Commerce, Business Users a Key Focus

Oracle has been hard at work on the commerce portion of its customer experience portfolio. Today it releases updates to two of its Commerce products and offers a chance to dig into the details at Oracle OpenWorld in San Fransisco the end of this month.

Oracle's Commerce strategy focuses not only on helping deliver great customer experiences, but also ensuring that the business user can easily create and manage these experiences across channels without needing to hold IT's hand. It has also ensured that the commerce platform is the best it can be to support a wide range of scalability and performance requirements.

So what's new and improved?

Oracle ATG Web Commerce

Oracle ATG Web Commerce sat at the top of Gartner's Magic Quadrant for e-commerce last fall after Oracle acquired it in November of 2010. Now at release number 10.1, ATG Web Commerce has a number of updates that support merchants. These include:

• Visual Merchandising: Merchants can now edit content with visual tools that show the shopper's perspective. Tools such as Layout View, Light Table (drag and drop ordering of products) and a contextual menu are new and are meant to reduce the amount of work required to design the shopping experience.
• Editing Multiple Items: Get things done faster by changing a number of items at once.
• Time Based Preview: Want to see what your site looks like at a time in the future? Now you can.
• Mobile and Cross Channel Selling: You can build mobile web sites or iOS web apps using the Commerce Reference Store (a customizable pre-built storefront). Also included are starter applications, best practices examples, and more.
• Global Scalability: There are new business model, performance and international commerce features including a merged B2B and B2C set of capabilities and localized UIs for the business tools. Web Commerce is now integrated with Oracle Coherence (an in-memory data grid solution), and it is certified run on Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud and Oracle Exadata Database Machine.

Oracle Commerce Reference Store

According to Oracle, recent benchmarking tests showed ATG Web Commerce improved response times by 50% and delivered 3x more page views per second when it was run on Oracle Exalogic compared to a traditional blade system of similar size and configuration.

Oracle Endeca Commerce

Oracle acquired Endeca back in October of 2011. It has worked hard to integrate Endeca Commerce into the overall Oracle platform. The Endeca product line has been combined into two offerings: Oracle Endeca Guided Search and Oracle Endeca Experience Manager, both elements of Oracle Endeca Commerce.

 

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Source : cmswire[dot]com