Strategies for SaaS, Cloud Computing, Governance and Sustainability

As Open Source software continues to penetrate every facet of software business (vendor and consumer) companies now face a challenge in getting a handle on the various open source software that they might be using. In the course of the last three years of my working with many startups or their leaders, I have [...]

If you are customer having a business application like Oracle E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft or SAP in production I am sure you have constantly run into this need to clone/replicate Production database.
Why would someone need a copy of production instance?
Some of the most common reasons are

to create a test environment with representative production data
to create a [...]

After defining what Configuration Management should be in my last post, let us look at what that means to Oracle E-Business Suite.
Application Configurations include a lot of switches and knobs within the application besides the IT Infrastructure components like Database, Servers, Processes, Networks, Directories. In Oracle E-Business Suite, the switches and knobs are Profiles, Extensible [...]

The main goal of Configuration Management is to provide information on the IT infrastructure to all other processes and IT management. Enabling control of the infrastructure by monitoring and maintaining information on all the resources needed to deliver services.
Key Activities
Here are some of the key activities performed as part of Configuration Management

Planing the configuration management database ( CMDB [...]

Oracle E-Business Suite is  packaged as one large suite of products irrespective of which products a customer has bought or licensed. There is a history behind this.
In the past, up until early releases of 11i, Oracle used to build, test and ship product Family Packs (FP) i.e, Financials, Manufacturing, Projects, CRM, Healthcare, HR to name a few.  Customers had [...]

While IT is focused on getting their arms around the Application Management problem, the Regulatory mandates like Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX), HIPAA, PCI Data Security Standard, FDA 21 CFR Part 11, Gramm Leach Bliley Act, FISMA, BASEL II are pushing the IT and business users to brink with all the myriad of compliance and audit requirements. Having [...]