Enhance Customer Loyalty through Higher Responsiveness · Oracle White Paper—Enhance Customer Loyalty through Higher Responsiveness 3 • Ability to respond to a unforeseen competitive

An Oracle Business White Paper

April 2009

Enhance Customer Loyalty through Higher Responsiveness

Executive Overview............................................................................................. 1

Introduction: Data Management Challenges for e-Commerce ............................. 2

The Solution: In-Memory Data Grid ..................................................................... 4

Four Case Studies............................................................................................... 5

Case Study #1: Predictable Website Response Performance and Uptime ...... 5

Case Study #2: Integrated, Continuous Customer Experience ........................ 6

Case Study #3: Improved Performance and Transaction Processing

Throughput for Internal Applications ................................................................ 8

Case Study #4: Managing Growth ................................................................. 10

Mission-Critical Applications: Cost is Not Irrelevant ........................................... 11

Oracle Coherence: Product and Technology Overview ..................................... 12

Conclusion ........................................................................................................ 14

1

Executive Overview The current economic downturn is driving all businesses to scrutinize every investment

and ongoing spending. With the credit markets tightening, cashflow is a critical issue. The

private sector and government alike are looking into cutting costs and becoming more

efficient. Doing business online is proving to be more attractive, since it requires low

initial investment relative to comparable physical channels and the ongoing costs are

lower as well.

However, there are many challenges to setting up and succeeding as an online business

or an online channel – barriers to entry are low, competition is fierce, and customer

switching cost is extremely low. Just because a website is up and running does not mean

it is appealing and effective. Once a website is in place and the user base starts growing

rapidly, the technical infrastructure backing it becomes even more important – site

uptime, responsiveness, and reliability are critical to success. An integrated customer

experience as well as having the agility to quickly introduce new features, offers and

services, to experiment and take risks, to be able to track success or failure, and course-

correct, are required. To be able to support business growth and the unpredictability of

demand is vital to success. Technology plays a key role in supporting mission-critical web

applications. When used as a competitive weapon, technology can drive market

leadership, and when neglected can lead to failure.

Oracle’s Fusion Middleware portfolio brings a robust set of offerings to ensure

guanranteed reliability and leading performance to the application as well as the data tier.

As the leading in-memory data grid offering, Oracle Coherence provides a unique

solution to these issues and does so in a cost effective and predictable manner, while

keeping your data center green.

Oracle White Paper—Enhance Customer Loyalty through Higher Responsiveness

2

Introduction: Data Management Challenges for e-Commerce The economic downturn is forcing businesses to tighten their belts and look for more

efficient channels. Using the internet as a business channel, and sometimes even the

only channel, is becoming more prevalent. However, there are significant challenges to

be successful at e-comerce. Many of these challenges are business issues, such as

identifying the correct target market segment, building the website to provide the right

customer experience, website usability, anonymous website visitors, low conversion

rates, shopping cart abandonment and more.

Technology plays a critical role in a business’ online success. Technology itself cannot

make an online business successful. However, lack of robust technology can create a

make-or-break experience for customers. In other words, the backend technology is a

necessary condition for success for mission-critical web applications. The technologies

involved in enabling web applications typically include a web portal or some other UI tool

for the presentation of the web content, a web application server on which the actual

application logic resides, and a database server for data persistence and data (CRUD --

create, read, update, delete) operations.

Data availability and management is crticial for web applications. The user experience

associated with web applications relies in large part on the availability and management

of their session data, its persistance, and its management. This paper focuses on the

topic of data availability and management for mission-critical web applications.

State-of the art data management technologies can result in the following:

• Significantly improved performance for the website which include website uptime,

responsiveness, and reliability

• Integrated customer experience – Customer experience offered by the business appear

consistent and cohesive to the customers

• Ability to quickly introduce new offers and services, to experiment and take risks, to be

able to track success or failure, and course-correct.


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• Ability to respond to a unforeseen competitive maneuver at great speed

• Support business unpredictability – Ability to support business growth, fluctuating

customer demands, and unpredictable supply chain

For many web applications, the application data resides on the database, mainframe or

backend operational data store. The problems with delegating the data management

solely to these backend systems are manifold.

• Unpredictable database response performance – since it is not a dedicated resource to

the web application, the backend system may not be able to respond to the application

soon enough to meet customer expectations. Its cycles maybe consumed by other

applications or the system maybe down or the connection to the system maybe lost.

• Strain on backend system by the amount of data created – In some cases the amount

of data created through the web application is very large and grows exponentially,

especially with business success. For example, an insurance company’s customer’s

profile data may be over 1MB. Therefore, tens of thousands of customers updating

their profile continuously puts a significant strain on the backend system which was

never intended to be used for this use case, but rather was retro-fitted to it. It also puts

other applications depending on these systems at risk.

• Backend systems may not be able to scale as the business grows easily and cost

effectively – In the current climate of economic uncertainty, business and consumer

buying patterns are changing. Every business needs to be able to experiment with

product offering and grow successful product lines and eliminate unsuccessful ones.

This means the infrastructure supporting a business’ application needs to be dynamic –

support unpredictable growth quickly and easily, without putting business continuity at

risk, and retrench from supporting unsuccessful product lines, which means re-deploy

and reuse infrastructure for successful projects – again, quickly and easily. The

backend systems, presumably developed on more mature technologies, are not

architected to grow in an unlimited manner, supporting data growth and continue to

provide response and/or throughput performance that is the same for 100 GB versus

100 terra-byte of data

4

The Solution: In-Memory Data Grid

Enter a sophisticated data management solution for mission-critical web applications – the in-

memory data grid that provides caching of data, in memory, in a distributed manner. Very simply

put, the in-memory data grid provides the ability to store data reliably in the application tier, in

the form ready to be consumed by the application. One can think of it as the data residing side-

by-side with the web application. As a result data can be accessed much faster, the load, risk, and

reliance on backend systems are diminished, and data can be written to the backend systems

synchronously or asynchronously. In the asynchronous case the data is written only when the

changes to it are long lasting, while transient data stays in memory.

The in-memory data grid is a relatively new technological innovation and there are a few vendors

in the marketplace that offer this solution, although not all in-memory data grids are created

equal. The Oracle Coherence in-memory data grid offers the above described performance

advantages as do its peers. However, due to its highly fault tolerant architecture, it offers high

reliability, predictable and linear scalability, and very tight out of the box integration with Oracle’s

Fusion Middleware portfolio of products, namely WebLogic Server, the app server of choice for

many web applications, and WebLogic Portal, the predominant portal product used for the

presentation layer of many web applications. A component of Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle

Coherence enables users to bring data closer to the application for faster access. By

transparently, automatically and dynamically partitioning data in-memory across multiple servers,

Oracle Coherence helps provide continuous data availability and transactional integrity, even in

the event of a server failure. As a shared infrastructure, the offering combines data locality with

local processing power to perform real-time data analysis, in memory grid computations, and

parallel transaction processing.


5

Four Case Studies

This white paper discusses four case studies, each showcasing a mission-critical web application.

In each case the customer’s business requirement is different. These case studies include the

business challenge, the corresponding IT challenge, how Oracle Coherence solved the specific

problem at hand and how the business benefited from it.

Case Study #1: Predictable Website Response Performance and Uptime

According to Visa e-commerce tracking survey results reported in November 2008, Internet

users surveyed in the Asia-Pacific region said they have spent an average of over $ 3,000 each in

the past 12-months on online spending. Techcrunchies.com predicts average online spending per

online buyer in the UK in 2009 to be $3350. Since customer switching cost is so low – literally a

mouse click – customer loss in the online world is a recurring phenomenon with a significant

negative impact on revenue.

“Site response and uptime are our two most important business metrics,” says the director of

engineering for a leading online social network. Poor site response performance means that the

page takes too long to render and visitors run out of patience. Visitors then lose interest in the

site and typically go to sites with comparable or competing offers. Poor uptime means that the

website fails to be continuously available, i.e. when a visitor goes to visit the website, the site is

down. These result in negative customer experiences, leading to a declining number of visits,

declining number of transactions per visit, lost revenue and ultimately customer loss.

There are various reasons for these challenges from an IT perspective:

• One or more technical components supporting the application infrastructure are down. Often

times this is the application server or the database server.

• Some component of the application infrastructure is overloaded – the website is experiencing

more traffic or more transactions than the infrastructure can handle.

• The operational data created by transactions has become a bottleneck – the system is unable to

handle the amount of data that is created by transactions, possibly because customers are

creating bigger profiles than expected, transaction audit trail data is bigger than expected, etc.

Overstock.com is an online “closeout” retailer offering discount, brand-name merchandise for

sale over the internet. Overstock.com, ranked among the top 10 most trafficked retail websites

on Cyber Monday 2007, foresaw potential bottlenecks in its infrastructure, given the massive and

unpredictable loads experienced particularly during the busiest online shopping day of the year.


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According to comScore, in 2007, Cyber Monday saw a record $733 million in sales. “Cyber

Monday, November 26, 2007 had its unbelievable snafus”, reported Vizion Interactive.

Overstock correctly predicted that the infrastructure supporting their web application would not

be able to support the tremendous volume of transactions that they foresaw on Cyber Monday.

Specifically, they identified that the availability of data and data operations would be a potential

source of bottleneck and contention. The business was at risk of poor responsiveness, leading to

customer dissatisfaction, lost transactions, and lost customers.

Overstock.com chose Oracle Coherence to provide distributed caching for web applications.

Start-to-finish, the Oracle Coherence implementation took just two months, leveraging the

skilled Java development team at Overstock.com. Oracle Database and Oracle Real Application

Clusters provided the data foundation for Overstock.com's application architecture. Oracle

Coherence provided predictable performance, scalability, resilience and availability.

With Oracle Coherence, Overstock.com delivers fast and reliable access to frequently searched

data, improving customer search response times by nearly 100 percent and guided navigation

response times by over 200 percent. These improvements correlate to increased conversion rates

and revenue.

According to Sam Peterson, SVP, Technology, Overstock.com “We put Oracle Coherence to the

test on the busiest shopping day of the year, Cyber Monday, and we were very pleased with the

consistently high performance the site delivered on customer searches, despite the additional

workload.”

“Oracle Coherence provides Overstock.com a very scalable caching solution, serving as a buffer

between our presentation layer and our back end search layer, thus improving response times for

frequently searched items,” added Allen Bettilyon, Senior Architect at Overstock.com. “Now

that we have a strong processing layer with Oracle Coherence, we anticipate many other

interesting use cases for this technology.”

Case Study #2: Integrated, Continuous Customer Experience

Providing an integrated customer experience is critical to customer satisfaction and having

‘sticky’ customers. “We still see customers looking for a way to integrate, aggregate and/or

bundle their services,” says Kieran Nolan, vice president, broadband, for AT&T. “They are

looking at what utility they get out of products and services they buy from any carrier, so it’s not

just one product or two anymore, it’s now becoming the whole thing.”

The challenge that many enterprises face is that their web presence consists of different brands

or offerings backed by different business units, which have not been integrated because

“Online shoppers expect they will be able to search for products and get an immediate and relevant response. If the search

process takes more than a second, the customer moves on to another site and we lose credibility and a potential sale.”

-- Sam Peterson, SVP Technology, Overstock.com


7

integration is too time consuming, costly and/or risky. Trying to transact on these websites is

akin to purchasing a ‘candle-light dinner and movie’ package from one’s telecom service

provider, which after step one – the movie purchase – directs the customer to the website with a

preferred list of restaurants, where the customer has to purchase yet again the ‘candle-light

dinner’ package – not an optimal customer experience!

A key capability in offering an integrated experience is the ability to combine backend data –

both meta-data as well as operational data. Integrating customer data, purchase data, behavior

and pattern data is non-trivial – these often reside in different systems that have been developed

at different times with different architecture, data definition and persistence standards. At

runtime there are multiple applications that are supporting distinctive offerings and are unable to

persist operational data in a single unified data layer that is required to offer the integrated

customer experience.

Customer – A Global Clothing Retailer

A global clothing retailer with over $15B in revenue, operating more than 3000 stores worldwide,

built its iconic casual brand on basics for men, women, and children, but over the years has

expanded through acquisitions and now owns multiple brands. The operation and management

of these brands resided on different systems, on different domains and on different application

servers, which work fine for their physical stores.

Online channel customers were required to treat different brands as different stores. Customers

would have to check out and pay for one brand and then shop for the next brand and so on.

This un-integrated customer experience resulted in low customer satisfaction and diminished

revenue.

This retailer turned to Oracle Coherence to provide the unified data tier for their four brands –

their four applications. With Oracle Coherence the four applications were able to share user

session data – the data that is generated as a customer is interacting with the various applications

– through a single data repository in memory. Hence the operational data is available to all four

applications to read and update. Now, when the customer fills their shopping cart with items

from brand one and moves on to brand two, the shopping cart moves with them. This results in

an integrated customer experience.

Data residing in-memory is replicated once across the shared memory grid to ensure the user

session is preserved in case of individual failures. Therefore, users will not encounter the issues

of ‘session loss’ – which is when they move from brand one to brand two without committing to

their purchase of brand one, and find when they come back to brand one their session state was

lost. With Oracle Coherence the session data is never lost - the user’s shopping cart stays full.

Since user session data now resides closer to the application, the user will also experience

improved performance.


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With WebLogic Server providing the runtime infrastructure for this retailer’s web application,

and with Oracle Coherence providing out of the box integration with WebLogic Server, the

customer did not have to make any code changes to accommodate Coherence in their

infrastructure. This resulted in cutting down development time and risk associated with code

change. .

All of these result in significantly improved customer experience. Customers are now able to

search for items across brands. Customers also benefit now from reduced shipping costs, since

they interact with one instead of the four shopping carts. Their orders are shipped together and

arrive together – resulting in a better user experience and higher eco-friendliness. Additionally,

customers experience better website performance as well as reliability for their sessions.

This integrated customer experience drove this customer’s online channel sales to almost double

between 2005 and 2007.

Case Study #3: Improved Performance and Transaction Processing Throughput for Internal Applications

Customer experience is not only dependent on the direct interaction channels that an enterprise

has with its customers, but is also significantly impacted by the internal operational efficiencies of

the firm. Such operations are supported by systems or applications that fall in the following

categories.

• Applications used while interacting with customers in real time. Examples of these are online

retailers’ customer service management application, telecom service providers’ order entry

application, or an insurance company’s loan processing application.

• Applications that provide customer service or customer fulfillment related functions. Examples

of these are trouble ticketing systems (systems used to log and drive the workflow for trouble

tickets) and order fulfillment systems (systems that are used to drive the process of fulfilling

customer orders once those have been received).

The challenges for these applications in terms of performance and growth are similar to the

situation described in case study number one. Many times, these applications are not able to keep

up with the demands of business growth. The hardware components and the compute resources

that support these applications -- the application server, the database, and the portal server – are

not able to support a transaction volume that is heavier than that for which the system was

originally designed. As a result, the system is often overloaded and takes a performance hit. This

has a direct impact on the customer as shown by the following examples:

• A customer’s order with an online book retailer is not fulfilled on time. This is because the

order processing system could not support the increased volume of orders entered during this

particular customer’s order.


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• It takes too long for customer service representative to take down an order, displeasing the

prospect or worse, losing them.

• A loan processing application takes too long, having negative impacts on revenue (the sooner

the loan is processed, the sooner the revenue stream gets started) as well as customer

satisfaction.

Customer – Portal Application for a Leading Financial Services Firm

A leading global financial services firm, with assets over $2 trillion, operating in more than 60

countries had a portal application that hosted and displayed its customers account information.

Account managers would interact with this portal application in real time while the customer was

physically present in a bank branch or over the phone. The firm was facing significant challenges

related to the response performance of this application. This application was a dashboard that

displayed account information. The dashboard would access the backend data that resulted in

intermittent slow response, especially under high traffic scenario. This would result in long wait

times for customers, leading to customer dissatisfaction. The rate of transactions going through

the system was lower than expected, since it took longer to receive the account information and

then transact on the account.

The technical driver for these issues was the usage of backend database and mainframe systems

for persisting and retrieving user account data. The dashboard application resided on WebLogic

Portal that had to access the backend mainframe system and database for each and every data

access. User session data was managed by WebLogic Server and WebLogic Portal. If the user

sessions became very large, WebLogic Portal cache was not able to manage these sessions.

Oracle Coherence was brought in to provide caching for the portal application residing on

WebLogic Portal. In other words, now WebLogic Portal uses Coherence as its caching

mechanism, as well as for providing session management – session data sharing and session

preservation. As a result all the application literally has an unlimited amount of memory on which

to persist user sessions. Large sessions now reside in the Coherence cache. There is no need to

access the backend database for online transactions or account access. The user, transaction, and

session data is uploaded to the backend system only as batch updates. The solution was put in

place without the need to make any code changes to existing applications – so business risk was

mitigated and the process for change was fast.

The implementation with Coherence also brought the added benefit of unlimited scalability to

the application. Again, as the number of users and transactions grow for this application,

Coherence will be able to support the need for more data, simply by adding servers to increase

the size of the data grid on which the data resides.

Using Coherence, the customer saw their transaction rate double and a 60% reduction in latency.

In addition to improved performance, the customer was also looking for a disaster recovery

capability for this mission-critical application. Oracle Coherence provides the ‘at-least once’ data


10

duplication capability. Additionally, with Oracle Coherence there is no single point of failure in

the entire data persistence layer. Oracle Coherence nodes are able to interact with each other

across local area networks – so, for example, within a departments’ data center that is located in

one office – as well as across wide area networks – for examples, for multiple data centers across

disparate locations. As a result, if disaster strikes a particular data center, the coherence nodes in

other geographic locations can take over and the operational data for the business continues to

be available in-spite of the disaster. When the affected data center comes back up, coherence

nodes can be synced up with other locations and brought in for business.

Case Study #4: Managing Growth

Many online businesses find themselves growing faster than the technology supporting them.

Although it’s a welcome sign, the challenges of growth are numerous.

• Growth is unpredictable – businesses predict that they will experience a certain amount of

growth within a certain amount of time in certain business areas. Nobody really knows if it will

happen exactly as planned. This leads to uncertainty in terms of investments that the business

is willing to make to support that growth – too much will lead to high cost and excess capacity.

Too little would lead to risk of underperforming.

• The enterprise cannot ignore business continuity. It is critical that they stay focused on the

success of the current business, current customers and ensuring that current technology and

infrastructure is in place and fully operational to support it.

Businesses are looking for infrastructure technology that will scale and grow with the business

easily and cost effectively. They are looking for architecture and supporting infrastructure that

will support their business requirements like website performance, uptime, reliability, etc. as the

business grows.

Hotwire.com® is a leading discount travel website. As its customer base and search volumes

increased, the Hotwire.com application infrastructure needed a more scalable solution to support

its continued growth.

After evaluating multiple alternatives and performing extensive testing, Hotwire.com chose to

implement Oracle Coherence and other Oracle Fusion Middleware components including Oracle

WebLogic Server and Oracle TopLink to provide a more efficient, scalable and responsive

"As our business continues to grow, it is imperative that we have the infrastructure in place to support the growing volume of

traffic as more and more customers come to our site to find low prices on travel”

-- Eric Grosse, President of the Hotwire Group


11

application infrastructure -- to support the 24x7, Extreme Transaction Processing (XTP)

demands of its website.

In less than a month, Hotwire.com upgraded its application infrastructure. They are now able to

support millions of customers performing several hundred thousand searches a day while

maintaining optimum performance during peak traffic periods.

Hotwire.com relies on Oracle Coherence to provide the in memory performance and distributed

caching capabilities that help alleviate bottlenecks, reduce data contention and improve Java

application responsiveness. Oracle Coherence also allows Hotwire.com to scale linearly and

dynamically for more predictable performance and improved resource utilization. For example,

Oracle Coherence allows Hotwire.com to keep frequently accessed data—such as specific deals

customers are investigating that were advertised in the site’s weekly newsletter—in memory and

closer to applications, reducing network traffic and database loads, resulting in better overall

performance across the entire stack.

Additionally, Oracle Coherence helps ensure Hotwire.com remains at peak performance around

the clock by automatically and transparently failing over and redistributing cached data across the

grid when a server becomes inoperable or is disconnected from the network.

“With Oracle Coherence and Oracle WebLogic Server as the backbone of our infrastructure, we

can now efficiently manage the transaction processing requirements of our business, while

enhancing the user experience and results for our customers.” says Eric Grosse, President of the

Hotwire Group.

Online travel is a classic example of an industry that grew faster than the technology supporting

it. By deploying an in-memory data grid and an industrial-strength application server on

commodity hardware, companies like Hotwire.com are addressing their XTP requirements while

supporting business and customer loyalty goals.

Mission-Critical Applications: Cost is Not Irrelevant

Enterprises tend to invest heavily in mission-critical applications because the cost of failure is too

high – it may result in customer dissatisfaction, customer loss, bad PR, non-compliance and in

the worst-case serious legal issues. However, in today’s economic climate, each and every penny

invested is scrutinized and the chief mandate is cutting costs while maintaining business

continuity and supporting business growth. Investing in less hardware and reducing the

consumption of excessive space and power also supports ‘going green’ -- another primary

mandate.

Imagine having a scalable architecture that allows the business to support growth without having

to predict the amount of growth and without having to ‘pre-invest’. Imagine having architecture

and product capability that grows with the business. It grows as quickly and easily if the business

was growing from supporting 1 million to 10 million users or 10 million to 100 million users.


12

With its capacity to scale in an unlimited manner, Oracle Coherence is able to support growth of

this nature.

Since Oracle Coherence itself has a small footprint and supports the application running on

commodity hardware, that drives cost savings as well.

In addition, in these tough economic times, businesses are experimenting more and are quick to

retrench bets they have made that are not paying off. It is easy to redeploy Coherence nodes to

support new applications under these scenarios.

Oracle Coherence: Product and Technology Overview

Oracle Coherence is an in-memory data grid solution that enables organizations to predictably

scale mission-critical applications by providing fast access to frequently used data. Data grid

software is middleware that reliably manages data objects in memory across many servers. By

automatically and dynamically partitioning data, Oracle Coherence ensures continuous data

availability and transactional integrity, even in the event of a server failure. It provides

organizations with a robust scale-out data abstraction layer that brokers the supply and demand

of data between applications and data sources.

The Oracle Coherence Advantage

Performance – Oracle Coherence solves latency problems and drives dramatic increases in

performance by moving data closer to applications for efficient access. In memory performance

alleviates bottlenecks and reduces data contention, improving application responsiveness. Parallel

query and computation also improves response performance for data-based calculations.

Reliability – Oracle Coherence is built on a fault-tolerant mesh that provides data reliability,

accuracy and consistency. Organizations can meet data availability demands in mission-critical

environments with Oracle Coherence support for data tolerance and continuous operation. The

reliability of the data grid minimizes the need for applications to compensate for server and

network failures, streamlining the development and deployment process.

Scalability – Oracle Coherence enables applications to scale linearly and dynamically for

predictable cost and improved resource utilization. For many applications, it offers a

straightforward approach to increasing the effective capacity of shared data sources. Oracle

Coherence handles continually growing application loads without risking data loss or interruption

of service.

Transactional Integrity -- Applications manage transactional data in memory inside the data

grid. Coherence is able to manage transactions in memory until they are persisted to an external

data source for archiving and reporting.


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Multi-language support – Oracle Coherence can support applications developed on Java,

C/C++ and .NET. This reflects the true state of customer applications that have been developed

on different systems at different points in time by different organizations and now may have to

‘come together’ to support a web applications that depends on all of these.

Disaster recovery – With its capability to duplicate data at least once in memory and its ability

to maintain transactional integrity, Coherence can serve as a great tool for disaster recovery.

Coherence clusters maintained through the LAN and the WAN of the enterprise and with data

replicated across geographies is an automatic ‘backup store’ for the organization data.

Integration with Oracle Fusion Middleware Products – Oracle Coherence comes pre-

integrated with Oracle WebLogic Server and Oracle WebLogic Portal. Coherence’s management

functionality is supported by Oracle Enterprise Manager, which supports all Oracle Fusion

Middleware management. This way, users don’t have to learn new management tools and

efficiency is improved by looking at a ‘single pane of glass’.

Oracle Coherence data grid provides an operational data persistence capability in the application tier. It front-ends

traditional data management technologies like databases and mainframes. Coherence is able to interact with different

types of applications like real time clients, web clients, web services, and SOA clients.


14

Conclusion

Data management is a critical issue for e-commerce businesses. Traditional solutions of

persisting and managing data in mainframe or legacy backend systems can prove prohibitive

from a cost, risk, growth, and business continuity perspective. A relatively new innovation – the

in-memory data grid -- is a smart, cost effective, and non-disruptive technology that provides a

viable data management solution for e-commerce.

Oracle Coherence is the leading in-memory data grid solution in the marketplace, with ability to

scale linearly with the business while keeping costs under control and improving performance,

and relieving the load and risk posed to backend data repositories.

Through the four case studies, the white paper describes how with Oracle Coherence e-

commerce customers can improve website response performance, uptime, manage growth

without risking existing business, offer integrated customer experience, take risks and play with

innovative concepts. And businesses can do this without large cash outlays. All of this results in

improved customer experience, customer loyalty, higher revenues and lower costs leading to

higher profitability, and ultimately market leadership.

As part of the Oracle Fusion Middleware offering, Oracle Coherence has strong out-of-the-box

integration with many Oracle products. With Oracle Coherence, customers can focus on

business issues, application logic, and critical success factors rather than be burdened with the

limitations of their technology.

Enhance Customer Loyalty through Higher

Responsiveness

March 2009

Author: Ruma Sanyal

Oracle Corporation

World Headquarters

500 Oracle Parkway

Redwood Shores, CA 94065

U.S.A.

Worldwide Inquiries:

Phone: +1.650.506.7000

Fax: +1.650.506.7200

oracle.com

Copyright © 2009, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is provided for information purposes only and

the contents hereof are subject to change without notice. This document is not warranted to be error-free, nor subject to any other

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Enhance Customer Loyalty through Higher Responsiveness · Oracle White Paper—Enhance Customer Loyalty through Higher Responsiveness 3 • Ability to respond to a unforeseen competitive