CASE 3 Maruti Suzuki Business Intelligence and Enterprise Databases

 

SUMMARY CHAPTER 6 FOUNDATIONS OF BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE: DATABASES AND INFORMATION MANAGEMENT 

CASE 3 Maruti Suzuki Business Intelligence and Enterprise Databases
"For the past 25 years, Maruti Suzuki has been the industry leader in India's passenger car market, the fastest growing in world. Since 1995, Maruti Suzuki has built its IT infrastructure on Oracle database and technologies including Oracle Real Application Clusters, Oracle Fusion Middleware Application Server and Weblogic. Maruti Suzuki has built its Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system on Oracle E-Business Suite and added Hyperion Enterprise to further enhance financial consolidation and reporting efficiency."
 

Maruti Suzuki Drives Business Growth on a Full Oracle Stack URL--> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZWAzbRm-ms; L=5:29 

 

CASE Oracle Corporation is a database software company that specializes in developing and marketing enterprise software products. The company was co-founded in 1977 by Larry Ellison, a Chicagoan with little formal training in databases but some practical experience working with the nonrelational databases of the period. Through organic growth and a number of high-profile acquisitions, Oracle enlarged its share of the software market. In 2018 Oracle generated $40 billion in revenue, about $2 billion of that from SaaS and PaaS (Platform as a service), and $29 billion from
cloud and software sales. Oracle ranks second on the list of largest software companies in the world, after Microsoft. It has a market capitalization of over $200 billion in 2019. Its main competitors in enterprise software today are SAP and IBM. 

 

Ellison took inspiration from a 1970 paper written by Edgar F. Codd on relational database systems named "A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks." IBM was developing its own relational database software known as DB2 that operated on IBM mainframes. Ellison and Oracle began developing their relational database software on UNIX and later Windows operating systems. You may find some of the terms used in the video are new and refer to specific elements of Oracle's suite. Oracle's Real Application Clusters (Oracle RAC), is an option to Oracle Database 11g Enterprise Edition. RAC supports the deployment of a single database across a cluster of servers located throughout the firm providing fault
tolerance, performance and scalability with no application changes necessary. Oracle's Fusion Middleware is a set of software services (applications) that enable multiple applications in a firm (often from different vendors) to work together by sharing information. So-called "middleware" can be purchased from many large vendors like IBM, HP, Microsoft as well as from thousands of smaller suppliers. The software consists of a set of enabling services that allow multiple processes running on one or more machines to interact across a network. This technology evolved to provide for interoperability in support of the move to coherent distributed architectures, which are used most often to support and simplify complex, distributed applications. It includes Web servers, application servers, and similar tools that support application development and delivery. Middleware is especially integral to modern information technology based on XML, SOAP, Web services, and service-oriented architecture. Most important, middleware enables a firm to retain older legacy systems and put them to use in a modern, distributed, TCP/IP communications oriented environment." Hyperion is a performance-oriented management software, sometimes also called business intelligence software. It is an application that works with Oracle databases and Oracle data warehouses to provide real-time data, as well as periodic MIS reports to managers. Hyperion supports near real-time transaction reporting, graphics and summaries of data, and management dashboards. Together these tools make up Oracle's "E-business suite." 

 

Case questions --> 1. What were the business challenges facing Maruti Suzuki management prior to adopting the Oracle suite? 

2. What advantages does Maruti Suzuki derive from working with a single vendor, Oracle? What are the possible risks of working with a single vendor? 3. What were the important business factors which management used to evaluate Oracle's database offerings? 

4. Why was it important that a vendor's products be able to integrate with legacy systems? 

5. What are the business benefits reported by management to using the Oracle suite of products?