For the week of June 8th, 2012:

• Oracle Acquires Vitrue and Collective Intellect
• Tom Kyte on Dr. DBAs
• IOUG’s Free Online Technology Training

“IOUG Podcast 08-JUN-2012: Oracle Getting Social / Dr. DBAs”

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Oracle Acquires Vitrue and Collective Intellect

After the announcement of plans last month to acquire Vitrue, a cloud-based social marketing and engagement platform, Oracle says it has also entered into an agreement to acquire Collective Intellect, a provider of cloud-based social intelligence solutions.

The Vitrue platform is designed to help centrally create, publish, moderate, manage, measure and report on your social marketing campaigns and activities on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Google+., similar to other offerings such as Radian6, HootSuite, and others. Vitrue’s social media SaaS marketing applications help organizations enhance their social marketing efforts with the ability to scale across multiple social networks, provide location-based message targeting, and consolidate social media efforts under a single management platform.

Collective Intellect’s solution is designed to provide insight into the massive amount of data that is typically generated from cross-channel social media campaigns. By providing conversation, keyword and target visibility and tracking across multiple media channels spanning variable time frames and with recursive channel depth, these BI products deliver insight into the sentiment and direction of communication threads which help drive customer relations awareness and insight.

Both of these acquisitions are SaaS (Software As A Service) solutions and will be delivered initially by Oracle as cloud-based service offerings in its expanding portfolio of information resource management products with expectations that they will be eventually incorporated and integrated into the suite of Fusion Applications.

More information about the planned acquisitions can be found at oracle.com/collectiveintellect  and oracle.com/vitrue.

Tom Kyte on Dr. DBAs

Tom Kyte, author of the popular AskTom.oracle.com blog site, expert technology author and Oracle guru in-general, cited on his blog this month in the introduction to his book “Effective Oracle by Design,” most people and books approach database and code tuning using the mindset of three types of doctors: the ER (emergency room), the OR (operating room) or PT (physical therapist) doctor.  ER doctors perform immediate triage and stabilize the system. Operating room doctors strive for long term fixes to keep the system not only alive but as fully functioning as possible by opening SR’s, applying patch and bugfixes, and setting up system alerts. Our physical therapists or production DBA’s are the unlucky souls that get the system after the triage ER or OR doctor has patched it back into working condition.  They are the ones responsible for keeping the systems going.

Because pre-emptive good design and implementation is mostly a thankless exercise in most organizations, “Hero” developers emerge saving the system time and time again by doing something miraculous.  They get called in at the last moment; work horribly hard for an extended period of time trying to keep the system alive, and then hand over this work to the other doctors for execution and promotion.

Then there’s the preventative medicine doctor.  They strive to avoid the above three doctors at all costs.  They counsel a patient to quit smoking, eat a healthy diet, and to exercise regularly  – developing a phased plan to get them back into shape.  If they do their job right – with the exception of unfortunate accidents (like a car accident), the patient will never have to see the ER, OR or PT doctors. These PM developers and DBAs are highly-trained at both what will work and is best practices, as well as being aware of what is inefficient and ineffective in solutions design and delivery.  They are our advocates of code standardization and proactive tuning, reusable and reliable packaging, and pro-active patching and forecasting.

Tom points out that what is missing in our human technology capital management is the comprehensive approach that includes the preventative medicine doctoral training.  Becoming aware and educated on these non-ER subjects including reviewing technical best practice books such as his own “Expert One on One Oracle” will remove the need for the hero and promote healthy sustainable systems that reliably deliver solutions.  Remember – firefighters are heroes when they do their job, we all just hope we never need them personally!  And while we will always encounter an occasional emergency situation, it’s best to avoid the unplanned downtime disasters in the first place through proactive education and training.

IOUG’s Free Online Technology Training

This month, IOUG’s free Webinar Series includes a number of great topics throughout the month including:

• Cloud-Best Practices
• Deploying E-Business Suite on Exadata
• Securing Oracle Databases
• Managing Private Clouds with OEM 12c

Visit IOUG’s website for the exact times and dates and to register for these free online training sessions.

IOUG’s forthcoming educational focus for the months ahead and our commitment to providing the best technology networking framework will continue to ensure that you as an IOUG member will have direct and cost-effective access to all of the technology education and knowledge you’ll need to navigate these increasingly turgid waters.  Visit IOUG’s website for all the details about personal and corporate memberships and build your alliance today with your source for Independent technology education, the IOUG.