Everyone knows the importance of real-time access to real-time
information. Organizations that are integrating data from disparate
sources and distributing it in real time have found that they can
cut costs, reduce risk and improve business insight at the same
time.
With more organizations operating around the clock in multiple
locations and time zones, the need for real-time information is
imperative. Data must be continuously available for transactional
processing by mission-critical systems and to support business
intelligence activities. It must also be accessible across the
enterprise, anywhere in the world.
As most business activities today are
transaction-based—whether making purchases, paying bills,
updating account information or managing patient records within
hospital networks—end users are demanding the right to
access, analyze, act on, integrate, store, and verify transactional
data, often in real time and without system interruption or
downtime.
The number one challenge facing organizations that want to provide
real-time access to real-time data is integrating an ever growing
amount of information from heterogeneous enterprise IT
environments. This must be done while ensuring no service
interruptions or performance degradation to critical business
applications. Data integrity must also be assured as information is
moved between systems.
High performance data
integration
Many organizations are wary of data integration projects, believing
they involve data migrations that are complicated, expensive, and
likely to impact day-to-day operations. However, data integration
and replication solutions exist that facilitate the capture,
routing, transformation, and delivery of transactional data between
heterogeneous databases in real time with minimal overhead. Best of
all, the benefits of data integration can be felt almost
immediately.
Take Hyundai Securities as an example. To ensure its systems could
utilize information from a range of sources, the investment bank
implemented a data integration solution that captures and updates
critical information as changes occur without impacting on the
source system or network performance. This provides continuous data
synchronization across heterogeneous environments and enables
real-time updates.
For Hyundai Securities, this means transactions are based on
consistent information even if they take place between different
systems. Transactions are completed faster, more efficiently, and
with minimal wait time for customers. The bank can now process over
5,000 transactions per second, more than five times the number it
could complete previously.
India’s largest department store chain, Shoppers Stop, has
also benefitted from faster data refreshes. The company uses a data
integration tool to load information about customer buying patterns
and store sales performance from multiple enterprise resource
planning systems into its data warehouse. This reduced the time it
took to refresh data in the data warehouse from half a day to one
hour, which ensured managers received timely sales, inventory, and
loyalty program data. As a result, they can better analyze which
products are selling through stores and maintain optimum inventory
levels.
Accurate customer views
The ability to access integrated data to build an accurate customer
profile will help organizations tailor their offerings and increase
sales opportunities. For instance, a better understanding of
customer groups has made it easier for Hyundai Securities to
undertake targeted marketing. This can help improve campaign
response rates and potentially deliver greater revenue to the
securities firm.
Similarly, Shoppers Stop can analyze customer buying behavior,
which helps managers develop marketing campaigns that meet the
requirements of specific customer segments based on their
purchasing history.
Ensuring compliance and data
security
Data integration solutions can help organizations that operate in
multiple locations to capture and distribute information from a
central database. The Bombay Stock Exchange deployed a data
integration and replication tool to synchronize and integrate data
across mixed environments, avoiding the need for expensive data
migration. Transactional data is captured from its core system,
delivered to multiple target databases at several locations, and
made available online for analysis.
This allowed the stock exchange to meet regulations set out by the
Securities and Exchange Board of India that required daily stock
transactions to be monitored online in real time. In addition,
transactional data was replicated at a disaster recovery site to
eliminate downtime caused by planned and unplanned outages and
adhere to regulatory guidelines around data security.
Lower total cost of ownership
Because data integration solutions support the legacy databases of
heterogeneous systems and integrate information from these systems
in real time, organizations can avoid the need for costly data
migration activities, as Hyundai Securities found. Its solution
also reduced the administrative burden on the firm’s staff by
eliminating manual transactions. As a result, it has reduced total
cost of ownership while increasing the availability and timeliness
of information.
Real-time data is a necessity not a luxury for today’s
growing businesses. A data integration solution that use unique
log-based change data capture and replication technology that
enable the capture, routing, transformation and delivery
of transactional data between multiple databases in real time
can be deployed quickly, cost-effectively and with minimal impact
on the business.
- The author is Senior Vice President, Oracle Fusion
Middleware, Oracle Corporation, Asia Pacific Division