Monday, September 27, 2010

New Application Management Suites from Oracle

Oracle OpenWorld is over! It was a busy week filled with presentations, demonstrations, customer meetings, hands-on labs, etc... On the other hand, it was also a relatively quiet week on the news front for Oracle Enterprise Manager, as the 11g version of the product was released only a few months back so there was not a whole lot of new news to talk about. The major news was on the application management front.

New Application Management Suites are available!

These management suites are the results of development efforts that began several years ago with the release of Application Management Pack for PeopleSoft, which was followed by additional Application Management Packs that covered Oracle E-Business Suite, Siebel, PeopleSoft, and Oracle Communications Billing & Revenue Management. To further expand Enterprise Manager's product platform capabilities, we also acquired several emerging companies, including Moniforce for real user monitoring, Auytuma for Java diagnostics, ActiveReasoning for IT compliance management and mValent for configuration management, and the new Application Management Suites added these technologies to provide more complete solutions for managing Oracle Applications.

We have followed three key principles in designing these management suites. First, we offer complete management solutions. Administrators are constantly faced with a wide array of management problems, which require different tools to address. Take diagnostics, for example. Depending on the nature of the application problems, different diagnostic tools are needed to determine problem root cause. Some problems are caused by mis-configurations, which are best solved by performing configuration analysis. Others are caused by inefficient application implementation, in which transaction diagnostic provides the much needed visibility to find the bottlenecks. Some problems may not even be caused by software, as end users may be using the applications improperly, and data collected from real user monitoring tools can help spot this kind of errors much more effectively. Point products only exasperate the problem by giving administrators incomplete set of tools to work with.

Second, we aim to provide integrated user experience for our management tools. Much of the functionality of our Application Management Suites run within Enterprise Manager Grid Control, a highly integrated management platform that is also used to manage everything from Oracle Database to Oracle Fusion Middleware to O/S, virtualization, and storage devices. The integrated capabilities make it easier to deploy and use the management tools. Another aspect of integration is with My Oracle Support. Traditionally, system management tools and vendor support were two completely different domains. Administrators used tools that were deployed on-premise to perform various tasks. When they needed help, they logged on to vendor support website and used a completely different set of tool to work with tech support. This sort of arrangement was highly inefficient. Oracle Enterprise Manager is the only management tool on the market that is connected to My Oracle Support, and this integration facilitates a more collaborative approach between customers' IT staff and Oracle support associates to manage Oracle technologies more effectively.

Third, and most important of all, we focus on providing application management tools that are designed specifically for managing Oracle Applications so that they work better out-of-box than 3rd party tools. This is an important distinction, as the IT market is flooded with management tools from vendors large and small. Most management products on the market, however, provide what I call "generic" management tools. They are used to monitor servers, or operating systems, or network devices. They can generate alerts and display data in dashboards. These are rather commoditized technologies. The difference between generic management tools and specialized management solutions that we offer for managing Oracle Applications is that our management suites provide much better visibility of our application artifacts and in-depth capabilities that address the unique management needs of Oracle application products. Features such as Siebel Workflow Process Monitoring, PeopleSoft Domain Administration and Oracle E-Business Customization and Setup Management are simply not available from major management tool providers. These capabilities were developed by our application experts using the best Oracle Applications insights available in the industry across our development, support and services organizations.

We hope that you find our new management suites compelling. Additional information about these products are available on Oracle Technology Network. Click here for more information.