Assignment:
According to Oracle (2009), "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."
Oracle Corporation
You may find some of the terms used in the Maruti Suzuki video are new and refer to specific elements of Oracle's suite. For this reason, the following literature was compiled and included here directly from Oracle (2009) and Laudon and Laudon (2012).
"Oracle Corporation specializes in developing and marketing enterprise software products particularly database management systems. Through organic growth and a number of high-profile acquisitions, Oracle enlarged its share of the software market. By 2007 Oracle ranked third on the list of largest software companies in the world, after Microsoft and IBM. Subsequently it became larger than IBM after its acquisition of Hyperion and BEA.
The corporation has arguably become best-known due to association with its flagship Oracle database. The company also builds tools for database development, middle-tier software, enterprise resource planning software (ERP), customer relationship management software (CRM) and supply chain management (SCM) software.
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. 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."
1. What were the businesses 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?"
3 to 4 pages; structured as a point/counterpoint argument, stating your position on these questions clearly and concisely . 3 outside sources
Required Readings
Gallaugher, J. (2012). Information Systems: A Harnessing Guide to Information Technology. FlatWorld Knowledge.
Gallaugher, J. (2012). Information Systems: A Harnessing Guide to Information Technology.
Oracle. (2009). Maruti Suzuki Business Intelligence and Enterprise. [Video file].
Optional Readings
Tossy, M. (2011). Database design and normalization.
Tossy, M. (2011). The Dbase tables.