` arjan's blog: August 2011

Monday, August 08, 2011

Oracle Enterprise 2.0 becomes Oracle WebCenter

As the people following Oracle’s steps in the social arena have noticed, Oracle rebranded their offering Oracle Enterprise 2.0 to Oracle WebCenter.

The reasoning behind this rebrand seems obvious: The web has a more prominent role in everybody's life then ever. Social networks to keep up-to-date with your friends, wherever they may be. But also networks to keep track of your business contacts. And what happens in the Enterprise: nothing. So it's time to do something about that. The rebrand to Oracle WebCenter reflects this: Oracle makes the Web experience through all available channels the most important aspect of their User Experience platform.

You could say that the Oracle WebCenter product stack is maturing and is getting more integrated day-by-day. As Oracle says “the different parts fit together like a puzzle”, altogether they form one user experience platform which enables a true single user experience: no matter what the channel is they use, be it mobile website, but even when they call up your contact center the same experience can be provided.

As WebCenter is the user interface of Oracle Fusion Applications, but also the future UI for other standard applications it has become a very important part of the entire Oracle Fusion Middleware product stack. Oracle continuously keeps investing in it either by developing, integrating but also buying new parts that further strengthen the product portfolio in areas were it didn’t meet the required level yet.

A recent example is the acquisition of FatWire a leading provider of web experience management solutions. So what is FatWire adding to the existing product stack? Well at the moment it’s still not completely clear how the integration will be done, but a couple of things are certain! It will be definitely used as the Web Management tool in combination with the existing UI’s. So it’s not only an addition to WebCenter, but also applications like ATG and Siebel. FatWire already succesfully integrates with those products, but will be even more integrated when it’s completely fused with the rest of the Fusion Middleware stack.

A key benefit of FatWire are the capabilities it has in the Social Tools area. FatWire is already integrated with all leading Social media which enables the direct use of these media in Marketing, CRM and Sales! Compared with the current WebCenter Suite that really is a key benefit, since this was not well developed yet.
Another key feature is the ability for so called “Business” users to be highly involved in and even in charge of the changes to the online web branding and experience. You don't need the techie guy from IT to change the header font of your news-items or adjust the layout of your online customer portal. You're in charge, if you like...
The third feature which will definitely be kept intact is Dynamic targeting, which enables real-time, context dependent content: a user will get information based on his profile, the situation he is in or the link he’s just clicked. All to get the best suitable interaction with the person you target in a campaign, on the site or in your mobile app.
Later this week Oracle will be announcing more details about the strategy with FatWire and how it will be integrated. Check back soon to read about this.

What is remarkable is that Oracle is not only talking about the Technology side of this acquisition and the rebrand. They deliberately also mention the integration with applications like ATG, Siebel CRM and Fusion Applications.

And to my opinion that’s spot on! The only way of winning todays customer in a B2C context, but also in B2B and even winning the employee of the future is to have a real social user experience in the workspace of Marketing, Sales and Service. By adding FatWire and further integrating and rebrandin gthe WbeCenter product stack, Oracle sets the future path for the enterprise: the Social Enterprise!
Don’t hesitate, because the number of “social natives” is growing day-by-day and it is not only generation-Y who will soon make up the majority of the worlds population, start becoming social!

And think about the following: What if you would combine all this power in a solution together with applications like ATG eCommerce, Siebel CRM and Identity & Access management, how powerful would that be... I’ll get back to that soon!

Originally posted on the Capgemini Oracle Blog