Recent Posts by Alan Joch

By Alan Joch August 2011 At a fundamental level, business agility comes down to quickly changing business processes or incorporating new business functionality whenever new opportunities or challenges arise. How does this happen in today’s most progressive IT environments? Coexistence is one answer. A key component of the Oracle Fusion Applications strategy, coexistence allows IT organizations to adopt new applications modules over time and add new capabilities to their...

By Alan Joch May 2011 CSX used its Oracle E-Business Suite and Oracle’s PeopleSoft Enterprise upgrade project as an opportunity to consolidate and modernize the underlying infrastructure. This included virtualizing the servers that would run the new PeopleSoft software, and the benefits of virtualization appeared early in the modernization process. A fleet of virtual servers meant that CSX could quickly set up and reallocate test bed servers and storage resources to run...

Upgrades to Oracle E-Business Suite and Oracle’s PeopleSoft systems help CSX ride the expanding railroad industry. By Alan Joch May 2011 America’s railroads are experiencing a back-to-the-future moment. The backbone of freight shipping in the U.S. since the 1800s, trains are enjoying renewed interest by customers eyeing rising energy costs that are forcing them to find more-efficient and more-economical ways to ship materials throughout the country. Railroads are coming into...

The latest implementation best practices and technologies deliver tools for better business decisions. By Alan Joch August 2008 When the management team at Equinix wanted to improve how new customers are cultivated and brought into one of the company’s high-tech data centers, it didn’t print reams of marketing brochures or hire more operations staff. Instead, it put an analytics framework in place to study customer interactions as they progressed from new prospect to paying...

By Alan Joch February 2011 Oracle’s Cindy Reese, senior vice president for worldwide systems operations, and Kurt Doelling, vice president of supply chain operations, know what it’s like to serve on the IT front lines. For the past year, they’ve helped overhaul and modernize the Sun manufacturing and supply chain operations, knowing all the while that Oracle CEO Larry Ellison and Oracle President Safra Catz set the project in motion and were taking ongoing interest in...

Executives overhaul Oracle’s hardware manufacturing and supply chain. By Alan Joch February 2011 It’s not every day you’re asked to reinvent one of the high-tech industry’s most iconic companies. But that’s exactly what’s been driving Cindy Reese since she arrived from Sun Microsystems to become Oracle’s senior vice president for worldwide systems operations early last year. Reese’s task was not for the fainthearted. Her staff examined every aspect of the manufacturing and supply...

Oracle’s next-generation applications will set new standards for business. By Alan Joch November 2010 When the order processing system red-flags a customer’s credit status, the IT department doesn’t get the customer’s call. When a supplier misses a delivery date for a key automotive assembly, it’s not the CIO who has to answer for the error. Knowledge workers (known in IT circles as “users”) are on the front lines when an exception occurs in an established business process....

By Alan Joch November 2010 Technologists looking under the hood of Oracle Fusion Applications will find six technical components that combine to create these next-generation applications: Open standards. Java, BPEL, and other industry protocols build on Oracle’s existing strategy for lowering IT costs and risks. SOA. Oracle Fusion Applications’ use of Web services and industry-standard frameworks ease customizations and integration among Oracle Fusion Applications, other...

By Alan Joch November 2010 The ability for Oracle Fusion Applications to create a more flexible and productive user experience wouldn’t have been possible without extensive feedback from end users. “It is very important to us to truly understand what our users do on a day-to-day basis,” says Steve Miranda, vice president of applications development at Oracle. The first wave of feedback came from Oracle’s advisory board, which includes experts in specific disciplines, such as...