Profit Magazine - May 2008

Building an Adaptive
Infrastructure with HP and Oracle

Organizations are continually exploring new ways to personalize experiences for their customers by taking advantage of modern tools, such as help desk software, e-mail organizers, and Web-based applications. Optimizing customer relationship management (CRM) solutions helps you improve the overall customer experience, earn and retain customer loyalty, and provide more-timely responses to customer needs and buying habits.

HP and Oracle have a successful, long-standing relationship and together they bring more than 25 years of collaboration and engineering to more than 140,000 joint customers. As one of the largest Oracle Applications customers in the world, HP leverages its own knowledge and experience to benefit the joint customer base and help customers build the foundation for a comprehensive and extensible CRM environment— an adaptive infrastructure.

HP and Oracle enable an adaptive infrastructure through the HP reference architectures for Oracle. These tested and proven integrations of HP and Oracle technology help customers achieve the full potential of their Oracle environments while ensuring availability and controlling administrative costs. HP provides technical specifications, demonstrations, and associated services to help put these capabilities to work in your data center. “By focusing on maintaining an adaptive infrastructure, customers can maintain an efficient cost structure while maximizing performance, server utilizations, availability, and maintenance costs,” explains Chuck Hall, Siebel technical team lead for HP’s Oracle Global Alliance. “Through our close alliance with Oracle, HP provides flexible, innovative, and reliable CRM, marketing resource management, business intelligence, and business integration solutions.”

An effective approach to pooling and sharing IT resources—virtualization—is essential for creating a truly adaptive infrastructure. Virtualization makes your

IT environment more flexible, letting you speed the deployment of infrastructure and applications, keep them up and running more efficiently, and adjust your infrastructure quickly when business demands change.

By decoupling applications from the infrastructure, virtualization lets you more closely align IT with the needs of your business. Virtualizing servers, storage, networking, and other resources helps reduce IT costs by consolidating and improving asset utilization. Virtualization solutions from HP also lower other fixed costs, from power and cooling to systems administration.

HP helps build an IT infrastructure in which service levels flex to match the flow of real-time business activities. HP reference architectures for Oracle grid computing can accelerate time to production and optimize resource utilization. You can also integrate the Oracle Fusion Middleware stack to enable a service-oriented architecture for greater IT agility.

HP is a leading infrastructure partner across all of Oracle’s application suites, including Oracle E-Business Suite, Siebel, PeopleSoft Enterprise, JD Edwards EnterpriseOne, and Oracle Retail. In fact, HP is the #1 provider of infrastructure solutions for Siebel CRM customers and is consistently the top platform choice for customers purchasing new Siebel licenses. HP leverages its knowledge and experience as one of the largest Siebel CRM users in the world, with more than 67,000 active seat license users in place for sales, marketing, call centers, and the HP partner network.

“HP’s relationship with Oracle helps propel and enhance our role in helping customers maintain costs and work toward a profitable customer service environment,” says Hall. “Optimizing CRM through building an adaptive infrastructure positions HP’s customers to directly address a business climate that offers constant, relentless change due to market fluctuations, consumer demand shifts, vendor competition, organizational changes, and regulatory mandates.”