Oracle - Profitability and Cost Management Cloud Service

Often it is hard to find the true costs of a product and ensure you make a true calculation for the profitability of a product. As an example, a retail organization might figure the sales price minus the purchase price is the profitability of a single product. The hidden overall costs for overhead, transportation, IT services and others are often deducted from the overall company revenue. Even though this will ensure you have the correct overall company revenue it is not giving you the correct profitability figures per product of services.

Not being able to see on a product or service level what the exact profitability is might result in having a sub-optimal set of products. Being able to see on a product or service level which products and services are profitable and which are not can help companies to create a clean portfolio and become more profitable overall.

With the launch of the profitability and cost management cloud service Oracle tries to provide a solution for this.

It takes information streams like production cost figures, facility costs figures and human resource cost figures and combines those with the information from your core general ledger. The combined set of figures is loaded into the performance ledger to enable the profitability and cost management cloud to analyze and calculate the true costs of a product.

The core of the product is a web-based interface which allows analysts to combine, include and exclude sets of data to create a calculation model which will enable them to see the true costs which included the hidden costs.

As profitability and cost management cloud makes use of Hyperion in the background you are also able to use the smart view for office options and include the data and the data model results you crate in profitability and cost management cloud in your local excel. As a lot of people still tend to like Microsoft excel and do some additional analysis in Excel the inclusion of the smart view for office options makes a lot of sense to business users.

In the above video you can see an introduction to the new cloud service from Oracle. 

Room rates based upon big data

Hotels traditionally do have flexible rates for their rooms, the never ending challenges for hotels however is, when to raise your rates and when to drop the rates. A common seen solution is to raise prices as closer to the date the room will be occupied and one or two days in advance drop the price if it is not sold yet. On average this is working quite well however it is a suboptimal and unsophisticated way of introducing dynamic pricing for hotel rooms. The real value of a room is depending on large set of parameters that are constantly changing.

For example the weather, vacations, conventions in town or airlines that are on strike will all influence the demand for rooms. If you are able to react to changing variables directly you will be able to make the average hotel room more profitable. Keeping track of all kinds of information from a large number of sources and benchmark this against results from the past is a extremely difficult task to manually or even to code a customer application for. Duetto recently raised $21M in venture capital from Accel Partners to expand their SaaS solution which is providing exactly this service to hotels.

Duetto provides a SaaS solution from the cloud that will keep track of all potential interesting data sources and mines this data to dynamically change the room rates for a hotel based upon the results.

By mining and processing big data Duetto is able to advise hotels on when to drop or raise the price. This can change in a moment notice and without the hotel employees to keep track of all things that are happening in the area. Duetto provides all hotels an easy solution for implementing intelligent dynamic pricing. The big advantage Duetto is offering is that it is a SaaS solution that is ready to run from day one instead of building a home grown solution which might take a long period to develop, test and benchmark before it will become usable.

It is not unlikely that Duetto will be expanding their services in the near future to other industries. The demand for dynamic pricing based upon big data will only be a growing market in the upcoming years and Duetto will be in an ideal position to expand their services to new growth markets.

Oracle SAAS

SAAS or Software As A Service, also Oracle is working hard on the SAAS part. I even worked some time at a company providing Oracle solutions like E-Business suite as a SAAS solution. Wikipedia has the following to say about SAAS:

“Software as a service (SaaS, typically pronounced 'sass') is a model of software deployment over the internet. With SaaS, a provider licenses an application to customers for use as a service on demand, either through a time subscription or a “pay-as-you-go” model. Also known as “software on demand,” the SaaS model allows vendors to develop, host and operate software for customer use. Rather than purchase the hardware and software to run an application, customers need only a computer or a server to download the application and internet access to run the software. The software can be licensed for a single user or for a group of users”

Oracle is already running a large datacenter in Austin Texas so they can host their own SAAS solutions called the Austin datacenter for Oracle On Demand.




Oracle has to state the following about SAAS:
"The Oracle Platform for SaaS includes Oracle Database, Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle Enterprise Manager, and Oracle VM, a comprehensive, open and integrated set of technologies that allow ISVs to build, deploy and manage SaaS and cloud-based applications. The Oracle Platform for SaaS provides ISVs a single, integrated platform for both on-premise and cloud-based deployments, allowing ISVs to offer their customers a choice in where to run their software. Additionally, the Oracle SaaS program provides business and technology support to ISVs, hosting service providers and system integrators."

I just came across a nice recording about Oracle SAAS solutions you might want to check.

Oracle GoldenGate LIVE STANDBY

Oracle announced this week that they closed the deal of buying GoldenGate Software. Another company joins the ranks of Oracle. Looking at the products offered by Goldengate some of them look real nice and promising.

If we look at the data integration and high availability solution products of GoldenGate we can find some very nice products. With those new products Oracle is strengthening his position even more for high availability. For example the life standby solution which enables a even better switchover and synchronize solution for oracle databases. Some of the key benefits named on the website are:

• Minimizes business interruption and data loss by enabling a standby database that is always ready for immediate failover
• Offers seamless, real-time data flow between heterogeneous primary and backup databases
• Updates the primary source system with new transactions that occurred during the outage, once it is back online
• Isolates data corruption during replication to provide a reliable and completely up-to-date standby system
• Eliminates geographical distance constraints
• Provides point-in-time data recovery and selective rollback of erroneous transactions
• Applies changed data to the standby system with a user-defined delay when desired
• Detects source system performance issues and alerts IT teams
• Maximizes backup system value by allowing it to also support real-time reporting

If you look at the course Oracle is taking by hosting applications itself, having its own operating systems and even its own hardware you can expect that Oracle will be making its own SaaS datacenters even more robust. Within a short while we could possible see Oracle running on Sun hardware having Oracle Enterprise Linux as the operating system and having things in sync using the solutions from GoldenGate. I really wonder about the roadmap for their new datacenter. In the video below you can see that Oracle is running NetApp in its datacenter in Austin. However, now Oracle and Sun are getting to know one another I would not be surprised if Oracle will make a shift to Sun Storage solutions in the upcoming time. Sun is providing some very nice storage solutions.

The future of productivity

The future of productivity, how will we work with computers and how will they influence our daily lives in 2030. For some people a mystery and not something on there minds. For some companies and researches already a point on the agenda to discuss. Watching trends and be able to predict those trends are vital in some market segments. And maybe it is not the market who is following the trend but the market who set the trend. Even do we, the people or consumers so to say, have a more and more influencing role in the future of products and especially the IT market still big companies are for a large portion responsible for the road to follow for most of us.

Even do we can influence by open source and all kinds of platforms where we can spill our thoughts about how things should be done it is still good to look at what research companies believe the future will bring for us.

Some of the things mentioned in the graphs will be coming from research labs around the world and some, and I think personally a larger and larger number will come from the open source world. It is good to keep the graphs in mind when planning a future road for your company.


Thing like SaaS, Software As A Service are now already in place. SmartApps for example if providing Oracle Applications like the e-business suite in a SaaS model. Social Networking, a common good those days, think about LinkedIn for example and so are most of the things in the Web 2.0 part quite common those days and even some of the Web 3.0 parts are already know like widgets and Semantic searches.

Just some things to look into already because I am quite sure you will encounter them quicker than you personally think at this moment. The images and most of the research I was inspired by for making this post was done by Radar Networks.