Paid social media is becoming increasingly crucial as marketers seek to amplify content for greater reach, higher engagement and better concentration of resources on the most likely of targets.

To better facilitate the integration of paid media with other social relationship management functions, Oracle Social Cloud is announcing an open API-based paid media solution bringing customers vendor choice, flexibility, and expertise. Our inaugural partners in this endeavor are social ad platform leaders Kenshoo, Nanigans, and SHIFT.

What this means is customers already on their way to becoming social enabled enterprises with the Oracle SRM can capitalize on the top ad technologies available, connecting content creation & management in SRM to promotion of that content with the paid social partners’ platforms.

Without question, our inaugural partners represent the best in the field, chosen based on criteria including platform capabilities, technology innovation, strategic partnerships with major social networks, customer base and scale capabilities.

Oracle Social Cloud Group VP Meg Bear says, “This strategic approach signals our belief in the power of an open API strategy, and we believe this is the best solution to meet our customers’ needs to leverage performance-based, targeted advertising at scale.”

Just look at the advantages of such an API partner strategy:

• Technology Expertise: SRM customers quickly benefit from years of focused development in the social paid media space by our partners.

• Analytics: Comprehensive analytics will be available to users through SRM and partner sites, helping them understand the metrics behind paid, owned and earned content.

• Coordination & Collaboration: Oracle SRM’s workflow functionality will enable better coordination and conversation between the community manager (owned and earned content), and the agency or media manager (paid content), facilitating greater efficiencies and effectiveness.

• Custom Audiences: Customers will be able to take advantage of SRM’s Custom Audiences capability via SRM and Eloqua integrations.

Why put yourself in the best position to act on paid social possible? Advertising Age has noted nothing has bested TV’s reach since the early '50s. Now, Facebook alone surpasses the reach of the 4 broadcast networks 18-to-24 and 25-to-34. Meanwhile a Nielsen study shows 3/4 of respondents use Paid Advertising, with 64% looking to increase spend in 2014.

It’s a massive audience of prospects. And if you’re spending ad dollars to engage with them on social (as a growing number are), that paid social spend should be as informed as possible.

The choices, flexibility, connection and collaboration offered by Oracle Social’s Paid Media Partnership Program offer a tremendous opportunity to move social marketers much closer to the real-time, right people, right-time strategies that lead to measurable success.

Post by Mike Stiles, Senior Content Manager, Oracle

This week, Oracle attended the XChange Solution Provider event in Los Angeles, CA, where over 225 solution provider decision makers joined together from across the US and Canada. Oracle was honored at the 24th annual Channel Champion Awards Ceremony held during the event – winning across the following categories:

• Middleware: Overall category winner including Technical Satisfaction sub-categories and Financial Satisfaction sub-categories;

• CRM Software: Financial Satisfaction sub-category

Kim Lasseter, Director, Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN), personally accepting this year’s award on behalf of Oracle.

The 2014 Channel Champion survey rated 135 vendors in 31 key product and service categories this year, and received more than 6,000 individual ratings across all criteria in all categories. The awards rank vendors across areas of technical satisfaction, and solution providers rated vendors on approximately 12 criteria. The vendor with the highest overall average rating in each category was named a Channel Champion.

The Channel Champions survey is the largest and broadest-based technology integrator market study in the industry, measuring IT solution providers’ overall perceptions of vendor products and services. In addition to defining which vendors are leading the way in partner satisfaction, the scores – including year-to-year comparisons – also provide a snapshot of the competitive dynamics in each category.

Tom LaRocca, Senior Vice President, North America Sales - Alliance & Channels, Oracle, presented at the XChange event and could not have been more pleased to see Oracle recognized for accomplishments in these areas.

Oracle continues to work hard to deliver the best products and solutions across Oracle’s Red Stack equipping our partners with products, programs and solutions to drive their business forward.

Engineered to be the highest performing and most available platform for running Oracle Database, the Oracle Exadata Database Machine X4-2 is the fifth generation database machine. It features the most advanced architecture, using industry-standard database servers, built-in management, intelligent storage servers, and a high speed InfiniBand network that interconnects servers and storage for faster data access and delivery.

There are a number of new innovations and enhancements in the latest release, delivering higher consolidation density, lower total cost of ownership and improved performance.

Greater Performance and Capacity

Designed to work together, Oracle Exadata releases have continued to build upon integrated hardware and software advancements, optimizations and performance that make it the best platform to run Oracle Database, consolidate both OLTP and analytic workloads, and deliver database as a service.

Key database optimizations include:

• More database query offload to storage can offload searches of LOBs
• Database optimized compression now includes Hybrid Columnar enhancements for transaction processing
• Database optimized PCI Flash enables ultra high speed flash compression (X4) at multi-million IOs/second, as well as caching for table scans and faster file initialization
• Database optimized QoS prioritizes CPU and IO use by multitenant pluggable database (12c)
• Database optimized availability allows for prioritized recovery of critical database files
• Database optimized messaging prioritization of critical database messages, including log writes and Oracle Real Application Clusters

Conclusion

Organizations are faced with an increasing need to process more and more data, and do it faster while their IT budgets are being squeezed. Examining the total cost of ownership for IT staff – as well as software and hardware – leads to choosing a common high performance, highly available infrastructure for deployments of all applications. By implementing Oracle Exadata into their IT infrastructure, organizations can not only accelerate database performance to accomplish a lot more in the same amount of time, manage scale and growth in incremental steps by consolidating deployments, and deliver mission-critical data protection and availability, and at the same time lower the overall cost of computing.

The choice is simple, make it Oracle.

Lindsey Pickle is Senior Director, Database & Engineered Systems Partner Enablement at Oracle. Monthly guest blogs such as this one are part of The VAR Guy’s annual sponsorship. Read all of Oracle’s guest blogs here.

Let’s face it; our New Year’s resolutions are long behind us. Hopefully you held on to yours, but if you didn’t, don’t sweat it. And if one of your resolutions is to become an Oracle Specialized partner, then there’s no better time than now to act on it.

The OPN Specialized Program is the most significant evolution of the OPN program in more than a decade. The focus of the new program is on specialization, which you achieve through competency development, business results, expertise and proven success. The program is designed for our most experienced and committed partners to gain a competitive edge by spotlighting their strengths and special skills. For partners who resell and implement Oracle solutions, Specialization allows them to showcase their expertise in over 100+ Specializations within our growing product portfolio.

OPN Specialized partners are recognized by Oracle, and preferred by customers. And it’s simple to become Specialized:

1: JOIN OPN SPECIALIZED
Go to partner.oracle.com > Join Now
2: JOIN KNOWLEDGE ZONE
Go to partner.oracle.com > Knowledge Zones
Select the Knowledge Zone of the solutions area of interest
3: CHECK BUSINESS AND COMPETENCY CRITERIA
Go to partner.oracle.com > Knowledge Zone > Specialize tab
Meet the business and competency criteria.
Apply for specialization once the required criteria are met.
4: TRACK Competency Status
5: Apply Now!

Additional information on enablement criteria, Specialist Exam types and beta exams and vouchers can be found here.

So what are you waiting for? Join the OPN today!

Well, we have your answer, partners: The Oracle Partner Business Center (PBC). The PBC is comprised of experienced Oracle Partner Business Consultants stationed in seven locations around the globe to provide you with around-the-clock support for your questions and trouble-shooting needs. Consultants support 25 languages and are available here through the following mediums:

• Telephone
• E-mail
• Live Chat
• Twitter (@ORCLPartnerBiz)

Additionally, the PBC offers tiered support by membership level, so you know exactly what you’re getting.

• Silver: Assistance via inbound calls, emails and service requests;
• Gold: Proactive engagement from Oracle, including business/administrative support and priority renewal;
• Platinum: Dedicated virtual account manager and channels to optimize your partnership benefits, including development of joint business plans and top priority renewal;
• Diamond: High-level engagement with the Partner Business Center and the Oracle Global Alliance Manager provides seamless support for your company.

Cheers!

Your Oracle Partner Business Consultant

As big data continues to infiltrate transaction systems, appliances and devices from a variety of applications – including social media – organizations are facing a number of challenges as they attempt to capture and utilize this data. While industry solutions are offering new and more digitally compact forms of data storage, these solutions don’t get to the meat of organizations’ chief issue: data must be managed and integrated closely into the business from the get go.

How exactly do we do this? Good question.

We conducted a survey[1] on database growth with more than 300 data managers and professionals who are members of the Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUG). After reviewing the results, we took away the following top-line challenges related to managing and storing big data, and the opportunity for partners that lies within.

1. Business challenge: The need to reduce infrastructure costs. Organizations struggle as they attempt to manage large amounts of unstructured data without improvements and updates to their data environments.

2. Technical challenge: The need to improve performance and availability. Database administrators are mostly concerned with performance and consolidation efforts.

3. Application performance challenge: Survey results showed that the most critical performance issue is data growth outpacing storage capacity and the need to purchase additional hardware.

4. Data growth challenge: Half of our respondents stated that in order to combat and manage data growth they have to add more disk storage. Very few plan to use database level compression as a way to address growth.

Opportunity: Three words: Hybrid Columnar Compression (HCC). As you may have caught above, challenge #1 is at odds with challenge #3. How can a business minimize infrastructure costs and put more hardware in place? You can’t, really. Enter HCC, an Oracle Database feature supported by Oracle ZFS Storage ZS3 Series, but unavailable to third-party storage systems. HCC uses both row and columnar methods for storing data. By doing this, HCC reaps the benefits of columnar storage while avoiding the performance shortfalls of a pure columnar format and can dramatically improve storage efficiencies. HCC compression ratios range from 6x to 15x, significantly reducing storage capacity required and enhancing performance, while enabling customers to significantly reduce their storage costs.

Partners, it’s up to us to engage our Oracle Database customers with storage cost saving messages by raising awareness and adoption of HCC. Here are a few ways to do so:

• Consult with customers: Run Oracle Advanced Compression Advisor to estimate potential storage savings. Use ’DBMS_COMPRESSION’ package included with Oracle Database 11g Release 2 or higher.
• Use an HCC customer reference: This Starbucks case study is a great example. Architect, sell, and implement the ZFS Storage ZS3 Series.

Best of luck!

Joel Borellis is group vice president, Partner Enablement at Oracle. Monthly guest blogs such as this one are part of The VAR Guy’s annual sponsorship. Read all of Oracle’s guest blogs here.

[1] Achieving Enterprise Data Performance 2013 survey underwritten by Oracle Corporation and conducted by Unisphere Research, a division of Information Today, Inc.

Oracle and China UnionPay will be working together to increase awareness and use of the Java Card platform in the Chinese financial market. UnionPay is a bankcard association established under the approval of the State Council and the People’s Bank of China (PBOC). UnionPay has become a central and pivotal part of China’s bankcard industry, and plays an essential role in industry development.

The collaboration between Oracle and China UnionPay will provide current Java Card licensees and new prospects with the confidence to develop and utilize Java Card–based applications. Oracle will help develop and test the Java Card platform for use in the Chinese banking system, while Oracle and China UnionPay will offer technical support and service on Java Card to help the effective use of the Java Card platform depending on the requirements of Chinese enterprises and banks.

The Java Card Platform provides an open, interoperable environment enabling the development and deployment of portable trusted identity services to individuals and personal devices, such as SIMs and Smart Cards. To date, over 12 billion Java Card units have been shipped.