Today's guest post is from Kelly Goetsch. Kelly is a Senior Product Manager for Oracle's vertically-integrated hardware and software stack, Exalogic. Kelly came to Oracle through the ATG acquisition, where he spent over six years as a Senior Architect with ATG's Professional Services organization. He spent his last three years at ATG with Walmart Global eCommerce, serving as their chief ATG consultant. Kelly has published numerous white papers on topics including Exalogic, distributed computing, large-scale eCommerce deployment architectures, performance tuning, and maximum availability. He holds a M.S. in M.I.S. and a B.S. in Entrepreneurship from the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Over the past decade, online customer experience has evolved from requiring a single application supporting a single channel to an ecosystem of related applications, middleware, and core technology supporting an increasingly converged set of all physical and virtual channels. For some Oracle customers, the web is the sole channel. For those that have a physical presence, many trips to a store now begin with online research. Even most post-sales service is being moved online. Here's how customers are beginning to interact with their brands:
The Increasingly Complex Customer Journey
Customers are no longer satisfied dealing with siloed organizations. Customers want a seamless interaction across all channels. As a result of these changes, many purchases today, even those that take place in-store, are driven by the online channel. In fact, a 2011studyshowed that 48% of all retail sales are either online purchases or web-influenced purchases.
Oracle technology can power the entire online customer experience ecosystem, from marketing driven sites to eCommerce sites and self-service portals. Oracle WebCenter Sites often plays a key role in delivering the online customer experience due to its exceptional ability to deliver content effectively to different customers on different devices.
As a result of these additional touch points and the increasing traffic on each channel, the traffic that WebCenter Sites needs to support has grown exponentially while customers are increasingly expecting that pages load instantaneously.
Oracle WebCenter Sites on Exalogic Benchmarking Results
So what's the solution? Oracle's engineered systems –Oracle ExalogicandOracle Exadata– are supercharged platforms comprised of hardware and software that are designed for these ever-increasing workloads. Oracle Exalogic runs the app and middle tiers whereas Oracle Exadata runs the database tier. Oracle's engineered systems contain all of the storage, x86-based compute power, networking equipment, virtualization, management software, and unique optimizations for Oracle WebCenter Sites to ensure that Oracle WebCenter Sites runs exceptionally well. Since Oracle owns all layers of the stack, from storage to networking to Oracle WebCenter Sites, Oracle has been able to vertically optimize the entire hardware and software stack to work better together. As a result of all this engineering, uncached pages are delivered 11.6x faster on Oracle Exalogic and Oracle Exadata when compared to an equivalent commodity-based system. Publishing is 3.7x faster. Cached pages are served 2.2x more efficiently per core. It's these numbers, along with all of the other benefits of running engineered systems that has our customers adopting these systems in droves.
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White Paper: Exalogic and Exadata - The Optimal Platform for Oracle WebCenter Sites
Exalogic and Exadata should be considered whenever a new Oracle WebCenter Sites environment is built that requires the utmost in performance and scalability, whether for a new implementation, a hardware refresh, or an upgrade of Oracle WebCenter Sites. Exalogic and Exadata bring increased topline revenue, reduced total cost of ownership, and faster time-to-market, all of which act together to provide the best return on investment and make Exalogic and Exadata the best platform on which to deploy Oracle WebCenter Sites. To learn more about Oracle WebCenter Sites on Oracle Exalogic and Oracle Exadata, download this white paper.