Australian retail distributor Metcash, owner of IGA distribution and IGA Fresh, discusses its upgrade to Oracle Database 11g earlier this year with ZDNet Australia.

Metcash highlights some of the benefits it realized from its upgrade, including reducing batch report production time, cutting out the use of Excel spreadsheets, and the ability to store more data online. It also realized other performance benefits from query caching, which helped avoid duplicating retrieval as well as the ability to make structural changes to the database without having to rebuild the "materialised database view aggregate" — a process that used to take 24 hours.

Read the full article from ZDNet Australia here.

"The best companies use economic downturns as a time to innovate and make strategic investments," says Maneesh Joshi, a senior group manager, product marketing for SOA at Oracle. As evidence, Joshi cites a recent long-term study by analysts at McKinsey & Company called Managing IT in a Downturn. "In a downturn, conventional wisdom suggests cutting costs and reducing expenses while compromising on innovation," says Joshi. "But conventional wisdom is wrong."

The McKinsey & Company study, which tracked nearly a thousand industrial companies over 20 years, found that industry leaders and successful challengers increased spending on mergers and R&D during economic downturns. "These successful companies dialed up their volume on strategic spending during recessionary times," says Joshi. "They maintained their appetite for innovation and even dug into their cash reserves to act while others were not. They had a much greater chance of emerging successful and maintaining a leadership position or seizing it from competition during the successive expansionary period."

Innovate with SOA
According to Joshi, now is a great time to introduce or expand your service-oriented architecture. "SOA gives you a more flexible infrastructure that makes your business more agile today and adaptable to growth opportunities in the future."

A smart SOA road map, says Joshi, leverages quick returns on highly visible projects to free up budget and support for longer-term projects. "Prioritize your SOA road map," he advises. "Focus first on a small yet important process that is critical to your business or cash flows. Use SOA to fix this process that has high visibility and is infamous for its inefficiency," he adds. "By showing savings and benefits on a visible project, you can catch management's attention and use it to make the case to grow your SOA initiative. It is extremely important to pick a process that is manageable and improves your chances of success. You are going to get one chance and you certainly do not want to bite off more than you can chew."

Think Long Term
"Be sure to focus on short-term progress, like three months or six months out, but do not lose sight of longer term value and goals," says Joshi. "With SOA, you can generate savings and create incremental opportunities that far surpass what you would have achieved from cost reductions alone. The 20-year McKinsey & Company study makes it pretty clear that the big opportunity is right now."

Learn More
Learn how Oracle SOA Suite can help your company win in the short and long term
See how Australian Vintage inspires change by innovating with SOA (video)
Read the McKinsey & Company study, Managing IT in a Downturn

Note: This article was recently published in the May 2009 edition of the Oracle Fusion Middleware Newsletter. Many thanks to Jeff Erickson for authoring this article and Marti Bowman for her nifty edits while helping me put this article together.

I wrote about a gotcha in the Oracle Reports to BIP conversion libraries last week. Not long after that, 'friend of BIP', IceMan aka Ike Wiggins, self confessed 'lazy man', read the article to realize this is not a bad trait :0) dropped me a not
e to say that he had developed a tool to aid in the process of converting a batch of Oracle Reports.

So, if you are starting to convert your 600 Oracle Reports and find the whole thing a little daunting. Never fear, IceMan is here. Get on over to Ike's blog entry, check out his dulcet tones on the video he recorded and then down load the converter client and you'll be 'off to the races' in no time.

While you are there, check out the BI Publisher IDE that Ike has developed. If you are working with the BIP APIs or want a one click, load test and generate tool for BIP, Ike has just what you need.

Didn't get to post these last night:

• Registered users: 41,907
• Active users (30-day): 5,073 (12.1%)
• Active users (60-day): 8,982 (21.4%)
• Page views (30-day): 60,166
• Twitter followers: 911

A look at what's commonly referred to as user-generated content:

• New ideas (30-day): 20
• New questions (30-day): 62
• New comments (30-day): 266

Last week, a number of people reported problems with both the email confirmation process as well as with sending feedback via Mix. We're looking into both issues right now and will post an update shortly.

Hey Guys:
I like to post case study's that we've done with our customers and partners to keep the information flowing about the reality of modernization. Often, when we talk with customers, it is viewed as a bit of a science experiment. It is being done all the time on a grand scale.

Government/Public Sector is a place that is keeping me quite busy these days. The following a is great webcast and white paper that my boss (Lance Knowlton, VP of Modernization) did with Forrester and Accenture recently.

It is important to keep the reality check going and see that modernizatin is going on all the time, and in the big enterprise. It's is why I'm on a plane every week helping customers get to where they need to go!

So, check out the following white paper and web cast. Good stuff.

WebCast http://www.computerworld.com/html/webcasts/custom/oracle/modernizing_it/

White Paper http://www.computerworld.com/action/whitepapers.do?command=viewWhitePaperDetail&contentId=9132285

Here is the White Paper Abstract:
As IT budgets are slashed, IT management pressures rise and legacy systems linger in government organizations, modernizing the IT infrastructure and applications has never been so important. Find out how government IT organizations can modernize IT to become more efficient and offer better services to the public while keeping upgrade costs low.

I've been working quite a bit of Sybase, SQL Server and Adabas Natural migration lately, so we can talk a bit about those in the next blogs.