Oracle 11g – Taking database compression to the next level

As of March 2011, Oracle RDBMS occupies 48.1% of the market share (according to Gartner Worldwide). With each new release; a lot of known security vulnerabilities, security holes and other bugs are rectified. But more importantly, with each new version release you’ll find a new feature or accompanied by an introduction to a new system or a new feature. Database compression is one such factor each version release tries to enhance; and in Oracle 11g, compression has been claimed to achieve a 3:1 ratio. What Oracle claims is impressive, but it needs to be substantiated with a proper case. Along with a case study, it’s important to understand what the new version of Oracle brings to the table. So, let’s start with taking a long look at Oracle compression techniques and how it’s evolved over the past few versions.

Evolution of compression techniques

Before we get on with 11g’s compression algorithm, let’s take a quick look at the algorithms employed by the previous versions. Enhancing database compression ratios means working on the compression algorithm itself. Till Oracle 11g, table compression was not recommended for OLTP environment or table with high OLTP. But from 11g onwards, OLTP compression is supported, so that’s a step forward for database compression.

Oracle 8i employed a simple index compression algorithm first. Then, in Oracle 9ir2, the algorithm was shifted to table-level compression. The next change happened in Oracle 10g, with the company deciding to use the LOB compression algorithm. Now, the latest release (Oracle 11g) employs a new algorithm that follows row-level compression. Oracle 11g also employs columnar compression for Exadata storage servers.

Advantages of 11g’s compression algorithm

This new algorithm not only compresses at a better ratio (as a result, saving your hard disk space), but it also promises the benefits given below:

1. Better network traffic flows: This is possible because the actual compression-decompression process is done within Oracle itself. As a result, the sizes of external network packets are small, giving a better traffic flow.

2. Better I/O operations: Since the tables reside in fewer data blocks, index range scans and full table scans will result in less I/O operations.

3. Significant reduction in buffer cache requirement: Another benefit of better compression is the better utilization of buffer cache. In this case, both disk and buffer cache requirements are reduced.

4. Cheaper investments in solid state disks: Compressed tables will only need lesser data blocks to be stored on. Because of that, organizations can be able to afford solid state flash disks. Investing in solid state disks can result in I/O operations speed up to 300 times faster than platter disk.

Some concerns are there with regards to Oracle 11g’s compression, such as overhead costs. First and foremost, the exact overhead cost of Oracle 11g is not known. For calculating such an estimate, DML operations (such as hot blocks, outbound data block, data block unlinking, incoming disk blocks and RAM demands) must be taken into account.

Oracle 11gr2

The release of Oracle 11gr2 also sees the introduction of the ‘Exadata Hybrid Columnar Compression (EHCC)’. Claiming to significantly increase performance while reducing the overall cost of storage, EHCC is a feature that will benefit data warehousing on exadata database machines.

When comparing columnar compression to row-level, it’s shown that compressing data column-wise is more effective. Oracle explains this as follows – compression works when there’s a repeated pattern in data. And since there’s more repetition present in columns than in rows, compression works better column-wise. It’s important to note that EHCC is only available for exadata database machines.

Now, the downside to this algorithm is its overhead costs. DML operations are expensive, since a single row insert will result in updating all the other data present in the columns. To implement columnar compression in Oracle 11gr2, you can use the “COMPRESS FOR ARCHIVE LEVEL=compression_level” syntax in the CREATE TABLE statement. Compression_level can also be assigned the value of 1, 2 or 3. A higher value does lead to a higher compression rate and a decrease in table scan times, but its associated costs also increase along with the DML operation times. Whether your database server is Exadata or not, you’ll find that compression using Oracle 11g is impressive.

Database compression is out there, offered by companies like Oracle, Microsoft etc. So, it’s imperative that new RDBMS releases feature new compression algorithm s that are capable of better database compression than their predecessors. Hence, to check whether the compression rate claimed by Oracle 11g is accurate or not; we, at Nous Infosystems, conducted a case study to see firsthand what Oracle 11g’s compression is capable of.  But before getting on with the case, let’s take a quick peek at how Oracle 11g’s compressed database information and what are the processes through which it follows.

Oracle 11g’s compression process

As mentioned previously, Oracle 11g offers two kinds of compression algorithms – row-level and column level.

Row-level

Let’s take a look at how Oracle 11g row-level compression works.

The above diagram gives you a pictorial representation of how the compression system really works. It follows these steps:

1. Even though a table is created using the compression command, initially it is uncompressed.
2. Once the table is created, new data is loaded directly and also updated accordingly.
3. Once the data gets loaded and the PCTFREE limit is attained, then Oracle’s algorithm works it magic and starts compressing.
4. Accordingly, data is inserted and deleted from the table and updates decompress the table rows.
5. After the PCTFREE limits are reached again, the data is compressed again and then rows are packed down.

Column level compression

When Exadata servers are used, then 11g gives you the option to compress data column wise. As previously noted, column-wise compression provides you with a better compression ratio when compared to row-wise, but at the cost of load times and system performance. If you look at the chart below, you’ll find the results of a benchmark test performed by Oracle guru Guy Harrison.

Results of a benchmark test performed by Oracle guru Guy Harrison

From the above chart, you can see that the data was compressed at three levels, using the command ‘COMPRESS FOR ARCHIVE LEVEL’. The highest compression level commanded the highest load time too whereas the lowest compression level did not experience any significant numbers in load time. Nonetheless, the compression ratios are still very impressive figures and can positively affect database performance. So, Exadata storage server will benefit from this feature exclusively.

Both compression algorithms are different but still offer a lot when it comes saving database space, enhancing performance and securing database information. So, Oracle 11g is a safe bet regardless of whether the database storage server is Exadata or not.

Case Study to investigate Oracle’s compression claims

Claiming to compress data up to 3 times its original size, Oracle 11g does promise a lot and fortunately, it delivers too. Following a new algorithm, Oracle 11g can provide gains in both storage and performance; because of the reduction in the number of the blocks that has to be read while performing I/O.

Here at Nous Infosystems, a case study was done to measure how effective Oracle 11g’s compression techniques were. Claiming to compress data up to three times its original size, the case study was conducted to see whether these Oracle claims were accurate or not.

For the case study, a dual core Intel processor CPU running on 2 GB of RAM was used. The operating system used for this test was Linux 2.6 and Oracle 11g (with the advanced compression option license) was installed. Under these testing conditions, the case study was performed as follows:

1. First, two tables were created. One with the compression option enabled was named MY_COMPRESSED_TABLE and the other one without compression was named TEST.

2. Once these tables were created, data was loaded onto both the tables. In both tables, the number of rows inserted was of the same size and same length. This way, the compression rate of the application can be accurately shown.

3. As expected, the table with the compression option enabled consumed less space than its counterpart; but by how much? Well, the results of the case study is as follows:

1. MY_COMPRESSED table (compressed) = 9077 blocks.
2. TEST (regular) = 18257 blocks.

The compressed table is almost half the size of the uncompressed one. Compression at this rate is definitely impressive.

4. Such high compression is explained as follows – Instead of compressing the rows of the table while being inserted to the table, a different algorithm is used where the uncompressed rows in the block are compressed. Also, since no compression happens during the data insert, the impact on the performance of the system is minimal. The case study also observes that the threshold is defined by the RDBMS engine.

The case study consisted of a simple test. Create two identical tables, compress one of them and see by how much 11g compressed the table. While the case study didn’t achieve the rate at which Oracle 11g claims to compress at, the results of this case study are still impressive. Plus, the case study observes that less consumption of database space reduces the I/O operations drastically, hence boosting the query result performance. Such compression rates will guarantee any organization not only savings in database space, but also an increase in productivity too. So, even if the ratio is 3:1 or 2:1, using Oracle 11g is going to give you impressive compression ratios.

Summing up Oracle 11g’s compression feature

Other than saving space, using Oracle 11g’s advanced inline compression system benefits you by reducing the time taken for data retrieval and creating less network traffic. In short, the case study shows that using Oracle 11g for compressing data not only saved hard disk space, but also reduced the time taken to go across the network, saved additional space while creating a backup and most importantly, maintaining production database copies for QA and testing.

Oracle 11g offers two different compression algorithm, depending on whether your database storage server is Exadata or not. Exadata servers have the additional option of enabling column wise compression, which offers better compression ratios than row level compression. But both these compression algorithms deliver,

The case study conducted on Oracle 11g’s efficiency presents an interesting view on data management and performance; particularly on the fact that performance won’t be compromised for the sake of compression anymore. Even though, Oracle claims their compression ratios are 3:1, this case study does show that it is capable of attaining a compression ratio of 2:1. Plus, you’ve got the added bonus of not experiencing real performance overheads when deleting or inserting into compressed data.

After analyzing Oracle 11g through the case study, it’s clear that the compression technique used is effective and it drives productivity upwards. Overhead costs issues aside, Oracle’s latest RDBMS release is a sure bet for increate database security and performance. Regardless of whether operations are OLTP or not, Oracle 11g has added support for OLTP operations, along with an additional feature of columnar compression for its own Exadata storage servers. In a nutshell, for better database information management, Oracle 11g is the RDBMS you can turn to.

Authored by Ponnusamy Rangasamy and Ashley John Sales

References:

http://www.articles.freemegazone.com/oracle-compression.php?ref=2

http://www.oracle-base.com/articles/11g/TableCompressionEnhancements_11gR1.php

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/community/database-11g-product-family-technic-133664.pdf (White paper, only contains a paragraph on it)

http://gavinsoorma.com/2009/09/oracle-11g-advanced-compression/

http://www.rittmanmead.com/2008/09/testing-advanced-oltp-compression-in-oracle-11g/

http://www.dba-oracle.com/images/11g_block_compression_changes.jpg (Picture recreated from this link)

http://www.articles.freemegazone.com/oracle-compression-concerns.php (Compression algorithms for different versions)

http://guyharrison.squarespace.com/blog/2009/9/2/columnar-compression-in-11gr2.html (Oracle 11gr2 info)

http://www.morganslibrary.com/pres/oow09_hcc.pdf (Compression process explanation)

Mobility – The Next Big Thing

Introduction

Today, Mobile Phones are not just used for taking calls or sending messages but have been moved beyond the wildest imagination of mankind. The applications that were primarily limited to the desktop/laptops are now easily available on the mobile phones. Mobile growth has introduced mobile applications that allow users to do more than usual on their mobile phones anytime, anywhere.

The mobile program growth is “the next big thing” in the market. The mobile program growth is the pulse of mobile device growth, where programs that may be used on mobile phones are created. These mobile applications supply access to real- time data at will. Besides easy access to real time information, mobiles now provide various mobile applications such as connectivity with GPRS, personal applications, photo auxiliary facilities, videos, sounds, etc. Various mobile applications like high definition camera, xtreme gaming, multimedia applications, use of internet have done mobile program growth critical for entertainment. At present, most of us are primarily using our cell phones to download media and check our email; however there is an abundance of amazing services that we can have hands on access to, through the Mobile Web. Equipped with a smartphone, PDA, or other Internet-ready mobile devices, users can retrieve local traffic information, bus, train, airline schedules and also look up weather reports. As the world of Mobility grows rapidly, the competition of the brands and their offer also grows, which has a marginal variance in each other which makes it difficult to choose the devices. The top 5 competitors in manufacture of mobile devices are as below.

• Nokia
• Samsung
• LG Electronics
• Apple
• RIM(Research In Motion)

As per the subscriptions of the devices below are the operating systems that are popular and have venomous competition for each other.

• Android
• iOS
• RIM
• Symbian
• Microsoft Windows
• Others

Market Snapshot and Comparative Analysis

As the market of the Mobility has steep challenges in the software (Operating System), where the hardware would become of 2 or 3 chips added, there is a marginal difference in what the vendor’s offer, which makes one choose a device over the other. The competition is steep because of the operating system, application, ease of use and even the hardware. The top competitors are presently looking at the future where one can choose the OS for the phone with the best hardware, which is not too long to expect.

Below is the chart that gives the picture of the market share of the devices.

The vendors are having a mix and match of the OS from Symbian to Android. For example Nokia builds all their devices with the Symbian OS, on the other hand Nokia has also made a pact with Microsoft for building up high end smartphones with Windows 7 OS. Samsung which had its own proprietary OS BADA is now tied up with Google and is manufacturing the devices with Android OS which is a hot cake in 2011 sales; LG and HTC are also tied up with Android OS by Google for their smart phones which have become popular for its usability and the service it provides. Apple has its own OS called iOS which is popular for its service and user friendliness.

Features – Smartphone’s

To be precise, not everything that we talk about is accurate or to be made flawless. The smartphones have their flaws too, which accounts in various scenarios to perform the routine actions. Below are some of the flaws that can be noticed easily:

• Small Screen Size: The smartphones screen measure about a few inches wide (Max 2”) and long (Max 4”). This will make the job cumbersome as the user needs to scroll a lot to view the complete mail conversation or to view a document.

• Awkward Keyboard Size: The alphanumeric keyboard or the qwerty keyboard are placed intact to mimic the original computer keyboard which still doesn’t help in typing the words as fast as in the normal one considering a hand holding the smartphone.

• High Cost: The data plan which needs to be activated with the service providers is high which starts from 100 INR to 2000 INR per month. In case of 3G data plans ranges from 300 INR to 3000 INR. While some devices requires long term connection agreement with the service provider with extra data and voice plans.

• Website Access: The websites are viewed on the smartphones using the WAP (Wireless Access Protocol) which compresses data on the website to fit the phone. Not all the websites are WAP enabled which makes the site inaccessible and if they do the contents would not load completely and scrolling the webpage up and down will be a tedious job. In the world of smartphones, where there is a vast varieties of devices manufactured by different manufacturers, Blackberry stands apart as the pioneer or say a highly preferred phone by professionals. What is the reason behind the scenes for this popularity is the question among the customers which even we have.

As we think of blackberry, we think of it as a business phone, because, they are famous for inventing business phones which provide a variety of business applications like Microsoft communicator, CRM client etc. The primary reason for the popularity of Blackberry is the user friendly QWERTY keypad, the internet browser which ranks as the 3^rd best mobile browser, multitasking, regular OS upgrades, Blackberry Mail and Messaging capabilities, Blackberry Messenger which is used to share the contents to another Blackberry user who’s Pin is known. The most important feature is the encrypted communication which provides a safest way to communicate. Each Blackberry has a unique PIN, which is used to track the device and also render the blackberry to be useless when stolen. The email client is one of the outstanding features which it provides for the corporate crowd, as email is the important form of communication and represents the person’s presence. The other great feature about blackberry is that it provides Calendar which allows us to synchronize the availability and to mark important dates; it also provides an easy synchronization for the media between the phone and the computer.

Smartphone Market Share – 2011

Below is the statistics diagram of the mobile subscriptions as per Jan 2011.

Blackberry – 360⁰ view

As discussed above when Blackberry stands for professionals/business people, we will take a tour into what it offers as solution for Enterprise. Yes! Blackberry does provide a solution for enterprise where the Administrators can have control on the Blackberry devices that is used inside its domain or its facility or registered for the enterprise users. There are 2 types of solution provided which is as discussed below:

• Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES).
• Blackberry Enterprise Server Express.

Blackberry Enterprise Server

BES is a middleware software package that connects the messaging collaboration and application software like Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft OCS, Lotus, CRM, etc. on an enterprise network and synchronizes data between the servers, the desktops and the mobile devices i.e. Blackberry. BES consists of a set of Windows Services that carry out the basic function. The services include the below.

• BlackBerry Alert
• BlackBerry Attachment Service
• BlackBerry Collaboration Service
• BlackBerry Controller
• BlackBerry Database Consistency Service
• BlackBerry Dispatcher
• BlackBerry Instant Messaging Connector
• BlackBerry Messaging Agent
• BlackBerry MDS Connection Service
• BlackBerry MDS Services – Apache Tomcat Service
• BlackBerry Policy Service
• BlackBerry Router
• BlackBerry Synchronization Service
• BlackBerry User Administration Service

BlackBerry Enterprise Server provides a number of features which are as follows:

• Support expanded enterprise device wipe and management.
• Support for Microsoft Office Communications Server, Microsoft Lync Server 2010 (IM component only) and Microsoft Office 2010.
• Support for digitally signed attachments.
• Optional firmware upgrades and firmware rollbacks.
• BlackBerry Administration Service, data reporting, including sortable columns and export functionality.

The Blackberry Administration Service is a web based console which provides management, access to deploy, manage applications. IT Policy Updates, Manage User Settings etc. The BES uses Push Technology to deliver messages, which helps in the synchronization of the mails, calendar, contacts and tasks with the device in seconds. The security is the main feature in Blackberry which accorded as one of the best in the world. The BES uses Triple DES or AES standards. The intranet access to the users of the smartphone is provided through wireless using the MDS Service in the BES. The administrator can also administer the applications that can be installed using the IT policies and rules. The most important factor is that the administrator can wipe all the data on the Blackberry device if stolen or lost once it is connected to the internet.

Blackberry Enterprise Server – Express

Blackberry also provides a free version of maintaining the enterprise domain using the Blackberry Enterprise Server Express (BES Express), this version of server is similar to the BES but lacks some features that the later has. The features are:

• Facilitated end-user migration: When the enterprise is going through the upgradation or implementation of a new BlackBerry Environment, it does not require user interaction which BES Express lacks.
• Proactive monitoring: We can monitor the overall performance of the architecture and also troubleshoot which is not possible in the BES Express.
• High availability: Built in high availability architecture in BES, allows us for fast recovery of the environment which is a major feature that BES Express lacks.

Below Chart provides a comparison between BES & BES Express

This is the present version of the smartphones what is that we can expect from the future. The Future phones will have more AI (Artificial Intelligence), better speech recognition, better gesture control, context awareness, and more integration with sensors, increased processing power better energy efficiency, management and also with a Pico-projector.

Authored by Vinay Kumar, Dharmedra S.K and Sameer H

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Checklist for Project Managers

Introduction

Staying competitive in today’s economy involves delivering projects to the client faster than ever before and with significantly higher quality. Making the switch to new technologies challenges our traditional notions of software engineering best practices, project management methodologies and team leadership styles.

Myths

Companies define completion and success:

• If, despite the odds, projects are completed faster, cheaper and better
• By adopting a logic for IT infrastructure projects to shorten the planning process, with an emphasis on jumping right in and starting the work
• By segregating Business Analyst and Project Management roles and get them to follow some goofy trends that are made on the fly

However these aspects impede a successful delivery most of the time. This shortfall could be overcome by use of effective project management processes and techniques. A check list of such practices is as provided below.

Project Management Practices Checklist

1.    Define roles and responsibilities up front

It is imperative to outline resources’ responsibilities as to who in the team will manage issues, scope change, risk, quality, communication, and so on. It is important to be able to manage the project rigorously and proactively and to ensure that the project team and all stakeholders have a common understanding of how the project will be managed.

2.    Converge PM & BA Roles

Need for efficiencies and doing more with less is also driving the convergence of Project Management and Business Analyst roles.  For example, who should gather requirements – the PM or the BA?

As each company and project determines what the best fit is for them, some will require specialists and others will leverage generalists to lead the way.  The need for PM’s to be more of a Product Owner that owns the definition and delivery of the solution will continue to emerge. S/He should be able to lead the entire SDLC from market research, requirement definition to development onto product launch.

Project Managers can utilize stakeholder analysis technique to see the bigger picture by:

• Understanding the business – market and technology needs
• Liaison between customer/business and the development team
• Leading (not managing) the project team from concept/initiation to launch/close

3.    Do Project Planning progressively

Success of the project depends on acquiring the skills necessary to progressive plan a project throughout its life cycle rather than just at the onset. The planning of the project should ideally end only with the closure of the project. Each member of the team has to be a member of the planning process at some stage.

Some of these time tested tools and techniques maybe used for planning the project including:

• Brainstorming, Delphi Technique
• Work break down structure
• Rolling wave planning
• Precedence diagramming method
• Analysis and estimations
• Cost-benefit analysis
• Benchmarking
• Networking
• SWOT analysis
• Fast Tracking
• Schedule Compression
• Make or buy analysis

4.    Coordinating Planning and Execution

• Project planning and execution are intertwined and inseparable activities.
• Those who will do the work should help to plan the work.
• Project managers must solicit input from the team to develop realistic plans.
• Project managers must lead by example to demonstrate the importance of creating and then following good project plans.
• Organizational culture can help project execution by:
• Providing guidelines and templates
• Tracking performance based on plans
• Executives may still need to break the rules to meet project goals, and senior managers must support those actions.

Establish the steps and guidelines required to manage the projects and deliverables including monitoring and reporting on the project performance.

5.    Execute the Project

Important skills required for effective project execution are:

• General management skills such as leadership, communication, and political skills.
• Product, business, and application area skills and knowledge.
• Use of specialized tools and techniques.

6.    Differentiate Execution from Monitoring and Control

• Clearly define, auditing and inspection. Auditing is done when the project or module is developing and results in improving the processes whereas the inspection is done for a product and results finding defects and improving the product.
• Understand that two important outputs of monitoring and controlling project work include recommended corrective and preventive actions.

7.    Monitoring and Controlling Project Work

Changes are inevitable on most projects, so it is important to develop and follow a process to monitor and control changes.

1. Monitoring project work includes collecting, measuring, and disseminating performance information.
2. Usage of specialized tools and techniques like:

• Change control meetings
• Inspection
• Variance analysis
• Performance reviews
• Project Management software
• Resource levelling
• What-if scenario analysis
• Adjusting leads and lags
• Schedule compression
• Scheduling tool
• Earned value management
• Forecasting
• To-complete performance index
• Cause and effect diagrams
• Flowcharting
• Histogram, Pareto chart, Run chart
• Statistical sampling, scatter diagram
• Reporting systems
• Risk reassessment
• Risk audits
• Reserve analysis
• Status meeting

8.    Project Closure

Close a project, by finalizing all activities and transfer the completed or cancelled work to the appropriate people. Specialized tools and techniques include:

• Procurement audits
• Negotiated settlements
• Records management systems

Conclusion

This narration is an attempt to introduce Project Management practices. The Project Manager has to be responsible in coordinating the team to achieve a project’s goals by selection of appropriate tools, techniques, people and technology by providing adequate guidance and leadership at different stages of the project.

Authored by Puneet Wadhwa

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Mobile Application Development – Choosing between Native Applications and Web Applications

Overview

Just as the personal computer transformed business, the era of Smartphones and tablets is all set to do the same in altering the landscape of business. Most enterprises are now beginning to recognize the importance of Smartphones and Tablets.

Following are some recent studies and statistics which indicate the growing importance of Mobile Application Development, and emphasize the need to incorporate mobility into the business strategy of enterprises:

• A recent Gartner survey reveals that, going into 2011, mobile computing (Tablets/Smartphones) is one of the top priorities of CIOs
• According to Gartner, Smartphone sales rose 72% in 2010, with 101 million Smartphones sold in the 4th quarter alone. By comparison, PC sales in that timeframe only reached 92 million. Gartner also reports that 20 million tablets were sold in 2010, and estimate those numbers will triple in 2011
• A study by the Deloitte consulting firm estimates that Smartphone and tablet sales will exceed PC sales in 2011. Experts predict that by 2014, four out of every five phones sold will be Smartphones
• Deloitte’s study also estimates that out of all tablets sold in 2011, 25% of sales will come from businesses

 This white paper aims to address the questions and considerations which arise when enterprises consider incorporating mobility into their business plans.

Types of Mobile Applications

One of the primary considerations in creating mobile applications for your business is the ‘type’ of the application. This requires an understanding of the different options available in building mobile applications. Mobile applications can be built as:

1. Native applications (or)
2. Web/browser applications.

Native applications

A native mobile application is a piece of software for Smartphones and tablets. These applications are built specifically for each mobile platform and are installed on the device. The application is specifically designed to run on the device’s operating system and machine firmware.

Native applications can be built as:

• Device specific applications – These applications are developed using proprietary or device specific languages/tools like Objective C, Android SDK, Blackberry SDK etc.
• Multiplatform applications – These applications can be deployed on different devices using the same codebase. Frameworks like Rhodes, Phone Gap, Mother App etc. are used in building these applications.

Web applications

These applications are designed for use on specific Smartphones or Tablets and are accessed through the device’s web browser (Safari, Internet Explorer, etc). Each time an application is run on the device, all or some parts of the software is downloaded from the Web. Since mobile web applications are accessed through the browser without requiring installation on each device, they are platform independent.

The key difference between the above mentioned application types is that

• Native applications are installed directly on each device, whereas
• Web applications are served from a central location (Web Server) and accessed through a web browser

Advantages of Native Applications

Performance

Web applications largely depend upon the browser’s performance. The browser resides between the application and the OS. If the browser is not functioning well, the performance of the web application will also be affected. For example, if the user opens a large number of tabs in the browser, the response of the web application running on one of the tabs will be considerably slower. Also, the pages of the Web application are dynamic i.e. the browser loads the page’s data and UI content in the web application each time the user moves to the next page. This makes the application relatively slow. On flaky or slow internet connections, the speed of the applications is further affected.

But in the case of Native Applications, all the screens load instantly. If the screen depends upon dynamic data from the server, the complete screen comes up first and the data is loaded as-synchronously i.e. in background. The advantage here is that the users will not have to wait for the UI to load. This makes the application very fast and usable. Native Apps directly deal with the OS and hence run consistently in all conditions. Further, the user’s data is safe in critical conditions like low battery or phone-call interrupts.

Limited Device Feature Access

Web applications run on browsers and hence may miss out on many very useful features such as access to the Photo library, the Address book, the Camera, the Accelerometer, the Music Library, Voice recording, device specific data etc.

Animation and Performance

In case the application’s user experience is enhanced with rich graphics or animations, the web applications performance becomes slow as the browser will have to show those animations depending upon the web application’s code. The images would be loaded from the server which would involve them being downloaded making the experience slower.

Native applications directly deal with hardware API’s for animations and images are already bundled with native app while installing.

Alerts

Native Applications can accommodate alerts using which the user can be notified for future tasks. Alerts cannot be accommodated in Web Applications.

Data Management

Web Applications support offline SQL databases and the records are stored locally. This will reduce performance when compared to native applications as the browser would communicate with the local database and with multiple tabs open, the speed of the application would go down. Also, if the browser data is cleared, all local data would be deleted, thus affecting the performance of the web application.

As native apps have direct access to the database, this accelerates the speed of data communication.

Business Model

Web applications can be propagated via internet search or advertisement but the payment options are considerably complex.

Native applications can be dispersed via App Stores which provide a solid platform in terms of “reachability”. Users can find appropriate apps based on their requirement and the payment model is stable.

Dependencies

Native applications help mitigate the following dependencies faced by web applications:

• Web connectivity is always necessary for browser applications
• If the browser hangs due to one of the open web applications, the browser would have to be restarted, thus affecting web applications running on other tabs
• Inconsistencies in rendering HTML5/Web pages might occur for different browsers in different mobile devices. Native application have a consistent look and feel / UI since they are designed and developed specifically for the devices

Advantages of Web Applications

Development

Developing Web applications is simple and developers with popular and generic skill sets can create these applications. Unlike native apps, developers are not limited to one development language. Mobile apps can be built many languages including .NET, Java, PHP, Python etc.

Security

Since web applications are hosted inside a secure firewall they are more secure than native applications which may access enterprise infrastructure. Native applications can store data in encrypted form in the local device or access it real time, thus mitigating this problem.

Application Update

It is easier to update web applications since changes have to be made only on the server. Native applications require distribution infrastructure such as application stores and updating servers.

Multi-platform Access

Since web applications are “multi-platform”, their development and management is easier as compared to native applications.

Choosing the right mobile application development option

The options discussed above come with their own unique benefits and drawbacks. Choosing between the two is a key decision and it would largely depend on the company’s needs and specific mobility goals.

Following is a list of considerations that will help in analyse and understand business needs and thus help choose the appropriate type of application:

Number of platforms to support

This is one of the primary considerations in understanding the requirement. The target platforms for the development of the application will depend on the target user base. Following are some of the major platforms that can be considered:

• Smartphone platforms:
  • iOS
  • Android
  • Blackberry
  • Windows Phone 7
  • WebOS
  • OS
• Tablet platforms:
  • iOS
  • Android
  • WebOS
  • Blackberry OS

For developing mobile applications that work across all Tablets and Smartphone platforms, the following options need to be considered:

• Develop separate applications for all the different platforms
• Design web applications for all the different browsers and devices
• Develop applications using cross platform frameworks like Rhodes, Phonegap, Appcelerator etc.

Security

Security is one of the biggest challenges in mobile application development, given the diversity of standards and devices that are in use. Different security risks on the available options for mobile application development are:

• Native applications pose the risk of the device getting stolen, resulting in a security breach. These applications can store data in encrypted form on the local device or access it real time, thus mitigating this problem to a large extent.
• Web applications access data stored in a centralized server thus mitigating the above risk

The following security considerations need to be addressed while developing mobile applications:

• Transmission Security
• Storage Security
• App Management
• Enterprise Authentication

Access to Hardware devices

An assessment has to be made on the required ability of the application to access hardware sensors of the target device such as the camera, the accelerometer, the gyroscope, the microphone etc. Native applications have an edge over web application in this is scenario.

Users and Purpose of the Application

The type of users and the purpose of the application have to be analysed for choosing the right option. Different criteria like internal usage, revenue generation and customer usage have to be ascertained. It is also important to understand different user profiles like internal employees, customers and the general public. This information is key in evaluating application distribution and application management mechanisms.

Data integration

Data integration is another key consideration for an enterprise mobile application. Integrating a native application to an enterprise environment which is not mobile friendly, will require more effort when compared to developing a web application that can be hosted inside the enterprise firewall. The type of data that needs to be integrated and the storage of this data are primary considerations on this front.

Authored by Bijoy A. Kurreekkal

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Protect and Manage Your Virtual Infrastructure

Virtualization is a proven technology that is rapidly transforming IT landscape and fundamentally changing the way people compute. Running several virtual machines can completely take advantage of a physical server’s compute prospective and afford a swift come back to shifting datacenter hassles. Today virtualization is used in more than 80% of companies. There are lots of interesting changes that can be observed this year (2011).

• Increase in automation – Automation will be central to the future of IT – When the number of virtual machines increase, it is easy to service these virtual machines more efficiently and clearly. Maintenance of thousands of machines is a laborious process and this is one of the reasons why companies need a consistent automation solution.  Sustainable management efforts today must take a comprehensive approach at process level and this is a must especially in Virtualization. Otherwise, you will lose the benefits of virtualization and dynamic resource allocation, when you have to manually handle it. This is the crux of virtualization – you need a tool that automates management, tasks across the borders of the system and platform.

• More room for growth – The recent Intel Market group’s report (over the period 2011-2016) predicts that cumulative global markets topping 290 billion dollars in the Virtualization sector and 300 billion dollars in Cloud computing sector. These figures will force companies to adopt virtualization technologies as they help in saving money.

• Better Backup, Recovery, Live Migration Tools and Business Continuity – Back recovery and migration are frequent tasks performed by admin’s on regular basis. The need for these tools is increasing as they ease the administration of virtualized environments. According to Forrester report, virtualization delivers better business continuity and disaster recovery. It offers improved service levels for several systems, virtual machines can run almost anywhere because of their portability and virtual infrastructure shields the physical systems too.

You need to move your attention from maintenance to efficiency and innovation. You can help to grow your business as you completely can modify financial assets across IT and conserve Earth’s energy. This helps your organization in reducing capital and operational expenses.

Virtualization Adoption in Cloud Computing

Today Could Computing has surfaced as the biggest catch phrase with industry experts debating the contingency and business dependence on underlying technology.  The current state of cloud computing is just a tip of the iceberg and many more innovations are expected to hit the market in the coming years.

Virtualization technology has many features but it is successful in data center consolidation and optimization. This technology also assists in answering scalability issue to a certain extent, because of its capability of multi tenancy and distributed nature. It also helps to understand that virtual machines are components that can startup, shutdown and migrate as a FILE in the distributed environment. One can understand the significance of this with the fact that a company like VMware is spending billions of dollars, and the virtualization market share in the computing industry is growing with large margins. Latest technologies in the cloud are based on core virtualization, for example – VM provisioning, VM Migration and so on. Even Amazon claims that virtualization solutions facilitate you to clone a virtual machine with just one click.

Since 1980, virtualization has made a huge impact on the computer industry. In many contexts, it definitely makes good judgment to use virtualization for cloud computing. Cloud computing still has to influence the complete prospective of virtualization. Uniform ways to represent virtual machines as FILE, managing virtual infrastructure in a standard way and other solutions play a very important role in designing future data-centers. This will certainly have place for both Public and Private Clouds.

Monitoring and Management of Virtual Environment

Proponents of cloud computing may have felt a little shiver in the spines recently when there was a cloud crash in Amazon Web Services (AWS). This pulled down many popular sites and small businesses that depend on it. These include social networking sites like Quora, Reddit, Foursquare and so on. Now the question arises: if a giant cloud of Amazon can be crashed, what about the rest? Is cloud computing as reliable as we think?

A fault in the cloud is, certainly one of the critical issues that its critics constantly point to. Yes, you can save money, time and effort by structuring your IT and infrastructure services to a vendor. But when these services unpredictably crash, you and others who depend on the same infrastructure – wonder what is happening and when it is going to be fixed.

Knowing the root cause of failure is undoubtedly useful and credits are a pleasant gesture. Those who can demonstrate that they have the best disaster recovery protocols are likely to draw and retain customers. In any case Amazon has come out, that, in reality, it was human error that finally dismissed speculation that Terminator Skynet was involved.

Management and Monitoring of Your Virtual Infrastructure

Monitoring and managing your virtual infrastructure is very vital. vServe24/7 manages hundreds of virtual server farms, built on virtual platforms, ranging from Citrix, Zen Windows Hyperv and VMWare. We facilitate a convenient user familiarity across various client podiums, make over the way you deliver applications, cope with the exploding range of clients and devices. Whether it’s raising server and storage deployment in a virtualized data center, or a drift from client structural design to cloud computing, vServe24/7 help its patrons choose the right approach to accomplish the desired result. vServe24/7 virtualization solutions assist the organization’s transition to the cloud by conceptual complexity and creating flexible storage and network resources

Benefits

• Enhanced IT infrastructure uptime and productivity
• Simplified operations management and focus on core competencies
• Capability to adopt new technology
• Transparency and control
• Better ROI
• Scalability – upgrade or downgrade according to the requirements and avoid fixed overhead costs
• Access to domain expertise and 24/7/365 availability
• Industry best practices and quality
• Cost efficiency – drive down the IT infrastructure costs
• Proactive problem identification and preventative problem resolution

Authored by Mayuri R., Santosh Punagin and Sridhar Mohanraj

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T2S, IT Backbone of European Capital Market – Demystifying The NXT GEN

Abstract
Trading is a bundle of Risks, Rules, Regulations and Rotation of assets. The process of trading is simple (buy or sell using your DEMAT account), but the actual Risks and Regulations are critical when performing post trade functions. In Capital Markets, payment and securities settlement systems play a crucial role. The importance of cash and securities settlement systems in modern economies has grown considerably over the last two decades due to the growth in the volume of foreign exchange and financial markets globally. Indian Capital Markets (majorly BSE and NSE) have been trading with a single currency and performing domestic transactions; rolling settlement is done on (T+2) cycle basis. In the EUCM (European Capital Market), settlement has to be done not only for domestic trading (within a country) but also for cross-border trading (across countries with multiple currencies). If the EUCM plans to do the settlement (domestic or cross-border) intraday (T+0), would it change the financial market structure of the whole of Europe? This paper gives an overview of how Europe is planning to achieve this using T2S (Target 2 Securities) – an enhancement service of the existing TARGET2 application. This paper also gives an idea of various post trade functions of EUCM and how T2S helps in bringing down the time and cost.

Introduction
European Post-Trade Market services are required to execute the transfer of ownership and cash after a securities trade has been made. There are five distinct post-trade functions: clearing, settlement, custody, safekeeping, and the notary. Various providers such as Central Securities Depositories (CSD¹), International Central Securities Depositories (ICSD), different types of custodians including global custodians, sub-custodians & agent banks and other banks offer post-trade services.

The reason for touching upon post trading functions is to stress how complex it is to monitor and execute settlements for millions of transactions every day. The below illustration highlights the actions taken by the Eurosystem² to set up an integrated European securities market:

Why T2S on top of TARGET 2
Even after the introduction of the euro, a single currency area across 16 countries (in 1999), the provision of post-trading services remains highly fragmented along national lines. The main consequences of this lack of integration are:

• Very high cost of cross-border settlement – Currently, settlement across European countries is extremely complex, involving at least two CSDs and very often one or several custodian banks as well. In addition, settlement is in fact a national monopoly, with little or no competition among European providers. For these reasons, cross-border settlement fees are today many times higher than domestic fees.

• Complex settlement procedures and high level of risk – The high cost of cross-border settlement is also caused by the lack of harmonization on legal, technical and fiscal levels. Such non-homogeneous market practices make settlements complicated and entail a high level of risk.

But this new enhancement, T2S on top of TARGET 2, will remove barriers across countries and eliminate differences between domestic and cross-border settlement, offering a solution to the drawbacks of the current fragmentation. It will bring down cross-border settlement fees by fully exploiting the economies-of-scale resulting from the use of a single IT settlement platform, a single set of standards and a single operational framework. Since it’s a single platform for cash as well as securities accounts, settlement is done within a day of trading with harmonized transactions.

What is T2S?
T2S is a state-of-the-art settlement engine, built on top of TARGET 2, catering to the whole European market centralized Delivery-versus-Payment³ (DvP) settlement in Central Bank money. It will be operated by the Eurosystem on a cost-recovery basis, to the benefit of all users. With T2S, Cross-border fees will be considerably lowered, making the European securities markets more attractive and cost-effective. Transactions in T2S will be final and safe. The use of DvP on a real-time gross basis will eliminate the counterparty risk, ensuring that a participant’s counterparty fulfills its obligations. The use of Central bank money, i.e. the transfer of cash between participants’ accounts held at the respective national central banks, will eliminate the settlement agent risk. In short, TARGET2 takes care of only settlement of the Cash, but T2S takes care of both Cash and Securities settlement in a secured and harmonized way.

Post effects of T2S implementation
The implementation of T2S makes the CSDs, ICSDs and Custodians to upgrade their technologies in order to connect to T2S and perform the transactions more effectively than T2. The major effects are modified account structure of the participant and T2S application connectivity.

Account Structure: In the context of DvP transaction settlement, the T2S engine will make use of the dedicated T2S cash subaccounts. The guiding principle is that all securities and cash accounts should be maintained and operated within the same infrastructure (and IT platform). The dedicated cash sub-accounts are part of the RTGS account structure opened in TARGET2 (as in the picture) and technically dedicated to the T2S functionality. For T2S to be efficient in offering settlement services across different markets, the account structure must be uniform at the central operational level, in order to provide efficient checking and booking of securities balances via the T2S Settlement Engine.

Application Connectivity: Proprietary and non-standard formats and processes will continue to exist in some of the domestic markets and their CSDs. T2S, however, will be built as much as possible on a unified set of processes, formats and standards. In particular, it will provide standardized interfaces to all its participants (CSDs and users), and a standardized set (or at least a significantly reduced variety) of processes. As an example, the use of any CSD proprietary formats for messages sent to and received from the T2S interfaces should be excluded. In the case where the required and expected market harmonization has not been concluded by the time T2S goes into production, appropriate converting mechanisms should be established at the CSD level in order to map the proprietary formats into the harmonized T2S ones. The industry is currently planning the introduction of the ISO 20022 XML standard and, given the T2S implementation horizon, this development will be taken into consideration accordingly. The development of messages under this standard is currently being undertaken by SWIFT⁴ and the market participants. It is expected that the prospect of T2S as a single pan-European platform will drive the harmonization of these standards even further, by setting a de facto⁵ standard with regard to how the different fields in the SWIFT messages will be used when communicating with T2S.

Benefit summary to Trader

• With T2S, the major benefit to the traders is cross-border settlements (both cash and securities) also can be done with same fees as for a domestic settlement
• Settlements are done intraday with accelerated process of harmonization⁶ and standardization
• Risk of delaying implementation of solutions aimed at taking apart of Giovannini barriers⁷ is mitigated
• The market and every post trading function would be transparent as T2S is an online direct connectivity to the trading application

Secured risk profile can be achieved by handling project risks, operational risks, systemic risks and securities lending activities effectively.

Index
¹ An organization holding securities either in certificated or un certificated (dematerialized) form, to enable book entry transfer of securities

² An entity made of the European Central Bank, ECB, and the 15 central banks of each European Union member that accepted the Euro as their currency

³ A link between a securities-transfer system and a funds-transfer system that ensures delivery of securities; occurs only together with the delivery of cash

⁴  Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) operates a worldwide financial messaging network which exchanges messages between banks and other financial institutions.

⁵ A de facto standard is a custom, convention, product, or system that has achieved a dominant position by public acceptance or market forces (such as early entrance to the market). De facto is a Latin phrase meaning “concerning the fact” or “in practice”

⁶  Since both securities and cash accounts are placed on a single platform, transactions with respect to every trading are harmonized

⁷  The “Giovanni Barriers” are classed as technical or market-practice barriers, legal barriers and barriers related to tax procedures

References

• http://www.ecb.int/paym/html/index.en.html
• http://www1.deutsche-boerse.com/INTERNET/EXCHANGE/zpd.nsf/Web+Publikationen/HAMN-698JWV/$FILE/WP_European_Post-Trade_Market.pdf?OpenElement
• http://www.icmagroup.org/ICMAGroup/files/04/0402d70a-9600-4f1f-9ebc-aecab10549f9.pdf

Authored by Uday Kumar K

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Should you move to a Cloud?

IT departments play a pivotal role in connecting businesses to their customers. From high speed to reliable and secure systems, their support is crucial for today’s business. In the past decade, it was hardware systems that facilitated scalability, reliability and security of business environments. Over a period of time, as business and competition grew, organizations realized the need to optimize operation costs and review capital expenditures. Hardware boxes consume space, power, time and effort as they need all these to function. Hosting started becoming a popular option especially as a medium for reducing OPEX charges. It provided all the functionality of the hardware without the OPEX charges associated with space, power and human power.

Hosting was and is popular till date, but, even hosting is setup keeping in mind the average and peak utilization trends, which may not be the best methodology for sizing. Organizations ended up paying more than they actually use.  An organization which intends to implement a disaster recovery or any other major IT initiative will eventually go on to add more boxes to already existing ones.  Dealing with change is hard and is one of the most difficult and costly jobs for an IT department. Boxes are inflexible and take lots of resources, need investment of more funds and require more time to scale and adapt to your company’s every changing needs. The emphasis here is more to understand the needs that led to the rise of this revolutionary concept of cloud computing.

Cloud paves the path for organizations where there are no more boxes, no more racks, no costly engineers for support and maintenance and no more large CAPEX costs. Having services in the cloud allows organizations to scale to their current needs, treating IT as a service and pain free utility. Cloud computing aids organizations to increase speed, agility and optimize service delivery for consumer & business needs. Cloud computing also helps businesses meet the customer needs effectively.

Cloud Computing Attributes:

• Scalability and Elasticity – Designed to meet peaks in demand for a particular application or service. Helps converting the computing resources into a commodity so this can be increased over time as per the requirement just to make certain that systems are considerably scalable.
• Pay Per Use Computing – Payment of computing resources for actual usage like gigabytes of storage or amount of time used to compute. Billed as per availability per unit of time or per transaction.
• Service Level Agreements (SLA’s) – Scalability, elasticity or pay per use computing all need a cost-effective way to achieve the desired service levels at all times even when demand peaks intermittently.
• Low Cost or Cost Effective – Cloud computing provides an opportunity to reduce costs. The computing resources can be placed at low cost location that can be managed effectively through automation. This can also be maintained through economies of scale, resulting from the usage of expert personnel to handle large amounts of computing resources.

Private Cloud Computing

Different applications can be built using various types of cloud – the public cloud and the private cloud. The most effective approach is the private cloud computing. Private cloud computing basically refers to a pool of computing resources that are dedicated to meet your business needs. The important factor that sets the private cloud apart from the public cloud is where and how the hardware is maintained. This may include feature and functionalities that are driven by the demands of business.

A private cloud is normally hosted on a company’s own servers within their own network infrastructure Private cloud is completely designed and dedicated to an organization and its business needs. With dedicated resource and proven security, you can take complete control. There is no outside influence inside the infrastructure environment. Organizations can mould the private cloud to fit the business requirements as and when business grows.

The main advantages of using Private cloud are:

• Direct Control – You can control every aspect of implementation of the cloud which may include hardware, networking, operating system and software
• Private cloud can be built on a reasonable commodity
• Security – One will certainly take complete control and there is no fear of outside influence inside your environment

vServe24/7 Capabilities and Service Offerings

vServe24/7 takes a comprehensive analysis of different types of clouds and its applications. We offer flexible and successful cloud based solutions to environments of any size and intricacy. Our service offerings help organizations to meet a range of operational challenges that are critical and include:

• Cloud Computing Infrastructure Services: Offer consulting, prerequisites, site readiness check, infrastructure assessment and analysis and Private Could implementation.
  • Infrastructure Virtualization
  • Network Performance Monitoring
  • Application Availability Monitoring
  • Uptime and Performance of Cloud
  • Monitoring, diagnostics and optimization services
  • Reporting and Analysis
  • Event Management
  • SLA-driven service assurance and support

• Private Cloud Computing Services: This new approach of computing assists organizations
  • Reduce complexity in IT infrastructure
  • Optimize performance and increase flexibility
  • Optimize management costs

The services and benefits from vServe24/7:

• Infrastructure assessment
• Business continuity and process consulting
• Disaster recovery
• End-User computing and virtual client service
• Application and data security, infrastructure, network and virtualization security
• Respond more rapidly to changing business requirements
• Additional security
• Optimize IT assets through processing and automation services
• Availability
• Improved Management efficiency
• Increased resource utilization rate
• Scalability and extensibility for elastic cloud environments
• Intuitive visualization and reporting
• Minimize infrastructure risk
• Increased pace of innovation
• Reduced costs and increase revenue
• Flexibility to run workload and applications in the most efficient way
• Minimize infrastructure risk
• Reduced TCO

Authored by Mayuri R. & Santosh Punagin

Achieve Greater Business Value with New Products and Features of Oracle E-Business Suite R12

IT organizations know that their core business applications should be developed on a regular basis in order to take advantage of the latest application updates and expert skill availability. However, amendment of any business critical applications must be done carefully, to ensure optimal performance and guarantee business continuity. With help of an expert IT service provider, organizations can ensure that they are leveraging the best practices for all upgrades to get the maximum benefit from new implementations.

Oracle has announced that Oracle E-Business Suite R11i Premier Support ends in November 2010 and will be replaced with Extended Support for a period of 3 years. The higher cost of Extended Support has been waived for a period of 12 months starting November 2010. However, from November 2011, your support costs for R11 will be 20% more than your current Premier Support fees.

As a business user of R11, you have 3 options to stay with Oracle E-Business Suite:

• Remain on your current version and budget for 20% increase in support costs
• Upgrade to R12 and enjoy the benefits
• Re-implement to R12

Oracle E-Business Suite R12 provides business foundation across all industries and sectors. This helps organizations to reduce costs and proportionally increase productivity through a range of solutions, business processes and industry based solutions. vServe24/7 adopts flexible and scalable solution for updating the life cycle of projects of different sizes. This methodology has been continuously improved; taking into account several critical factors of success and mitigates risk.

vServe24/7 Upgrade Services

With the latest release your organizations can achieve independent solutions that are complementary to existing 11i or Release 12 environment. vServe24/7’ “InsiteApps” – is designed specifically for a smooth Oracle R12 migration. It helps the customers to feel easy and comfortable with the whole upgrade process by leveraging vServe24/7 R12 expertise with significant savings in the upgrade cost. We have the expertise and experience you need, to evaluate and update your E-Business Suite Release 12 environment.

vServe24/7 Upgrade Methodology
Our upgrade methodology identifies the required changes and challenges. Our experts will perform a thorough assessment of the existing setup. This assessment includes checks on software and hardware requirement or disk space allotment. On a successful back up of the existing set up, our experts will highlight the benefits of new technology and add Oracle related fusion modules. Then, enter into test phase by optimizing the upgrade downtime. If any issues found during the test phase, a close interaction between Oracle Customer Support and Critical Accounts Manager is carried out to ensure a timely resolution. This is followed by quick escalation assistance. The final phase is the Upgrade Path

With consistent and cost-effective upgrade services, our customers can exploit the new features of R12 to benefit their business. The R12 upgrade services assist your organization with swift migration and faster deployment of applications. In addition, our techniques can reduce downtime because it automates the upgrade media using scripts for customizations and scripts / test suites for regression testing to speed up post-upgrade.

Significant benefits of upgrading R12 with vServe24/7
• Extensive experience in handing complex upgrades across the world
• Subject matter expert with the experience of several updates R12 Oracle E-Business Suite implementations
• Complete lifecycle services through consulting, training, support and web services
• With consistent operational and financial information drive performance
• More adaptable platform for global business
• Extend global business processes with Oracle Application Integration Architecture
• Our expert services assist your organization in improving operational efficiency and inventory management expertise to fight against the narrow margins in today’s rapid and tough economic environment
• Industry standard certified resources
• Increased support for global shared services
• Assist you in mitigating risk
• Increase upgrade efficiency
• Reduce business disruption
• Leverage new functionality
• New or enhanced functionality, improved reporting capability
• Potential to reduce customizations

Our experts have been working with R12 since its initial release and fully understand its technical and operational degree. Our upgrade methodology reveals the impact of the R12 on your current business processes and end users, and assists you in mapping the recommended approach, the time and effort necessary to improve your application to R12 successfully. Our focus will be to assess the impact of the upgrade of all existing customizations and extensions to identify opportunities for improving business processes through R12 new functionality. Also we will create a training plan to ensure that your team is comfortable with new features, and perform several test upgrades, to reduce the risk while updating to final production.

Authored by Ponnusamy Rangasamy & Mayuri  R.

Application Assurance Analyzer (AAA) Services

The IT infrastructure of every organization is increasing in size and complexity at a rapid pace. The web services, in-house applications, virtualization, and legacy systems add substantial value but proportionally increase significant management complexity.

More often than not, one tends to fail to notice details, in order to cope up with strict deadlines for application rollout or due to enormous pressure to expand within a stipulated amount of time. Analyzing your IT infrastructure behavior, application performance and meeting customer demands entail a degree of IT flexibility. This can be offered only through extensive automation and can only be effective if it is blended with intelligence. This is the one of the reasons that IT processes and intelligent decision making are incorporated into vServe24/7’s AAA services.

vServe 24/7 AAA services offer a 360 degree overview of your IT infrastructure by looking at interdependencies of various infrastructure layers that include Network, Servers, Security, Database, Web Services, Middleware and so on.

Trend analysis on infrastructure behavior and application performance will aid you in knowing how your IT infrastructure supports your applications. This will also assist you in analyzing trends over a period of time and arrive at application stability index. The critical infrastructure related performance bottlenecks that are degrading application performance are identified and proper measures are defined and implemented. Capacity planning and a roadmap for future scalability will also be provided by analyzing current and future requirements. Our AAA services will definitely assist you to move away from silo-based monitoring services to a single view.

Challenges that vServe24/7’s AAA service address:

• Applications which are designed for the LAN rather than WAN
• Increasing number of applications centralized at data centers
• Multi location availability and performance optimization
• Limited resources at IT departments

Advantages of vServe24/7 AAA solutions:

• Understand your infrastructure layer
• Understand application’s dependency on infrastructure
• Identify tunable performance parameters with respect to application framework
• Adapt proven methodologies to optimize application performance
• Plan infrastructure for future expansions
• Increased application performance and availability
• Align business demands and IT performance in real time

Highlights:

• Understand your IT Infrastructure
• Move away from silo-based analysis to a single view
• Understand interdependencies between various technology layers
• Know your IT Infrastructure behavior and Application Performance
• Recommendations/ Suggestions on Optimization – Expert Advisory Report
• Capacity Planning for Future – Scalability

Authored by Santosh Punagin, Sridhar Mohanraj & Mayuri R.

(Shared by Nous Infosystems’ IMS practice vServe24/7)

The “Right PMO”

“95% of a problem is due to the process, only 5% due to the people”.  – Edward Deming 

Like individuals, organizations today have developed the tendency to upgrade their behavior to achieve better market positioning and are keen to embrace procedures, rules, tactics and methodologies around the project management field. It is very important in this context to recognize that today’s organizations will only succeed and survive if their projects are managed effectively – on time, within budget and deliver stated business results for clients. However in most organizations, projects are initiated irrespective of the resources available to perform the projects. Senior managers feel that their project is vital to their success and to their survival. Many projects are initiated without collaboration and coordination between functional executives. Resources are multi tasked among projects in order to keep all functional executives pleased. Project managers and functional executives are frequently in conflict over deadlines and resources. 

Given this situation, the Project Management Office (PMO) becomes an integral part of the organization’s project management practice. The PMO has the direct responsibility of delivering results that are critical to business by enhancing the management and delivery experience and enabling the delivery of results critical to the organization’s business and mission. Increasing the value of the PMO thus directly relates to the organization’s ability to compete in the market and deliver quality services to clients in a timely fashion. However most companies today are faced with a dilemma over the responsibilities of a PMO. While some PMO initiatives are restricted to bare essentials and involve only helping out on projects as needed with a minimal staff, other initiatives involve larger structures, with rigid centralized planning, control and methodology. Many organizations have a huge resistance to implementing a PMO and find it difficult to maintain it once it is implemented. All of these lead to the question – what is a “right PMO?”

Based on many articles and surveys (Dr. Hobbs’ study) on PMO implementations and readings based on these publications, it is very interesting to present a summary of the findings of the top 10 most important functions of the PMO: 

• Project status reporting 
• Monitoring project health and performance 
• Formalizing and implementing standard methodologies 
• Project management mentoring and training 
• Project portfolio analysis for upper management 
• Identifying project issues by communicating with project managers 
• Developing and maintaining a project scoreboard 
• Promoting project management best practices within the organization 
• Monitoring and controlling performance of the PMO 
• Researching project management information systems tools 

Out of these top 10 functions, it is worth noticing that some of the “strategic” functions, such as management of benefits, portfolio management and management of customer interfaces, are not included in the top 10. In the absence of clear reasoning and specification of what the PMO will and will not do, many PMO implementations fail and many more do not see the light of the day. Here are some reasons why organizations fail in their PMO implementations. By avoiding these, companies can hope to obtain the benefits of implementing a PMO. 

Lack of definition of the PMO value metrics 

The need for implementation of a PMO is felt so that it can help the organization meet its goals. For a PMO to run successfully and demonstrate results in its first few months of implementation, it should have tangible, measurable value points that it can deliver on. One measurable value could be ‘improving project delivery speed’. It may take months for project managers to realize that a project management methodology that the PMO is pushing, would yield benefits and result in faster delivery. Staying focused on the metrics and the drive towards achieving results should enable the PMO to ascertain and define key value points rather than running out of time trying to achieve results. In many organizations, many teams see PMO initiatives as an unnecessary overhead. Such PMOs will fail to sustain themselves. The work community simply does not see any benefit in using the PMO to help themselves. Project teams must see something in the PMO for themselves if the PMO is to prosper. The PMO must enable and have a baseline measurement of its values it delivers. 

PMO is seen to micro-manage

There are many organizations where PMOs operate in a strict adherence to authority. Such organizations are required to follow strict project delivery guidelines such as “Earned Value” techniques. Such implementations of PMOs can sustain themselves because there is a clear value proposition. However, the downside of this approach also needs to be understood. If the PMO becomes too intrusive or tries to micro-manage projects, managers could possibly come together and question the PMO sponsors. This could lead to a case where the PMO sponsors are cornered to choose between the PMO and the managers. 

PMO does not have buy-in 

PMOs should be careful to ensure that there is adequate sponsorship and buy-in from the senior leadership of their organization. Many organizations have witnessed some initiatives that led to rolling out of processes, tools, all of which focuses on the project management community. These initiatives required diverting project manager time away from their regular projects time and into providing data and learning methodology and tools. Such initiatives will definitely fail to make their mark and also fail to add value to the community to which the PMO is dedicated. Often project management community is left to choose priorities between the project sponsor objectives (e.g. fiscal year strategic objectives) versus the PMO initiatives. As a matter of fact, it becomes quite evident that the project managers would listen to the project sponsor objectives; the PMO loses every time in this scenario. 

PMO does not add value to project delivery abilities 

Many PMOs that are focused primarily on delivering administrative reports, information providers or process developers tend to have an early death, both in terms of sustenance of the program as well as in delivery of value over a period of time. Such PMOs start out by fulfilling a critical senior management need for information. To enable this, PMOs start interacting with project managers and other units in an attempt to gather data. This presses the project management team who needs to now cater to PMO needs in addition to regular project needs. If the project managers do not receive tangible help from the PMO, the resistance to churn out and share information becomes more serious over time. Over time, the PMO loses out on its mission and its importance. When this happens, the PMO will cease to exist; therefore it of utmost importance to the PMO to have a tangible value to prove its worth. 

A right PMO should begin to show tangible results in its first few months of existence. To do so, the PMO must help the project management team and executives to directly link their strategic planning process to project management across the organization. A PMO aligned with customer needs will constantly seek to have innovative ways to accelerate project delivery. This requires mentoring the project teams to develop skills to recognize delivery opportunities as well as manage risks and threats as they uncover them. 

Shared by Nous PMO Desk