Oracle Accelerates Adoption of Enterprise Blockchain Worldwide - Oracle Certifications

Businesses around the world have already reaped the benefits of blockchain applications built on Oracle Blockchain Platform. Companies using Oracle’s business-ready blockchain have been able to move from experimentation to production by creating new blockchain applications from scratch or adding blockchain functionality to an existing solution. To support its customers, Oracle has added new features to the platform that help users speed up the development, integration, and deployment of new blockchain applications.

While blockchain can greatly streamline many existing processes surrounding supply chain, identity, cross-border payments, and fraud detection, businesses have struggled to implement blockchain networks within their existing ecosystems. Oracle Blockchain Platform addresses this challenge by streamlining the process of building and integrating blockchain applications across diverse business networks and connecting them into the relevant business processes within these ecosystems.

“Oracle’s continued leadership and investment in enterprise blockchain technology ensures that the platform has all of the critical capabilities organizations need to build blockchain applications to handle their most important business transactions,” said Frank Xiong, group vice president, Blockchain Product Development, Oracle. “The number of customers already running blockchain applications based on Oracle’s blockchain platform is testament to the strength of the technology and the value it brings to a broad range of industries.”

Worldwide Customers with Blockchain Apps in Use

Using blockchain applications, Oracle customers are establishing new ways to increase trust in diverse ecosystems and increasing the speed, security and efficiency of a wide range of business processes. Oracle’s rapidly growing list of global customers with production deployments on its enterprise-grade blockchain platform include:

• China Distance Education Holdings Limited (CDEL) uses blockchain to share educational records and professional certifications across many educational institutions to help employers and recruiters verify the educational credentials claimed by individuals.
• Circulor uses blockchain to track conflict minerals from their origin at the mines to processing and use in electronic components to ensure ethical sourcing of raw materials.
• SERES uses blockchain to bring greater trust and efficiency to electronic invoicing in franchise networks, which share ordering and fulfillment data between franchisors and franchisees.
• Additionally, Arab Jordan Investment Bank, CargoSmart, Certified Origins, HealthSync, ICS Financial Systems, NeuroSoft, Nigeria Customs, OriginTrail, SDK.Finance, and TradeFin have built or integrated production-ready blockchain applications on Oracle Blockchain Platform.

“Oracle’s blockchain solution delivers enterprise performance, security and scalability right out-of-the-box,” said Doug Johnson-Poensgen, CEO and founder of Circulor. “We started with the Oracle Blockchain Platform four months ago and were able to go from zero to a production system spanning multiple organizations involved in ethical sourcing of minerals within a matter of months. Another key advantage is that we were able to integrate Oracle’s blockchain platform into a hybrid blockchain network spanning multiple clouds and easily integrate with our existing systems and applications.”

“Blockchain improves the trust relationship between franchisor and the franchises by including best practices and decentralized access to the transactions.  Normally, merchandise acceptance processes are manual and require an operator entering the data into the system. But, for example when a franchise has economic problems, it can repudiate that delivery, saying that it never received the merchandise. They can manipulate the database and, on the other hand, also the franchisor can manipulate it,” said José María Mínguez Gutiérrez, Transactional Services Manager of SERES. “With blockchain and its immutability and traceability of information, all these problems disappear and all parties can trust the data and the transactions.”

Enhances Security, Developer Productivity and DevOps Capabilities

With this latest release, Oracle has added unique developer-oriented productivity enhancements and consortium-oriented identity management features, which are critical to diverse organizations conducting business transactions via a blockchain network. New DevOps capabilities make the platform easier to integrate with existing business and IT systems. Additionally, as blockchain becomes an important data store in the enterprise, the platform enables Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse customers to transparently capture blockchain transaction history and current state data for analytics and to integrate it with other data sources. New features include:

• Enhanced world state database to support standard SQL-based ledger queries reducing the complexity of developing chaincode using readily available programming skills, ensure smart contracts can safely rely on the query results, which are verified at transaction commit, and significantly boost performance of rich data queries.
• Rich history database shadows transaction history into a relational database schema in the Autonomous Data Warehouse or other Oracle databases, which transparently enables analytics integration for interactive dashboards and reports.
• Enhanced REST APIs for event subscription, blockchain administration/configuration, and monitoring of network health, transaction rates, and other statistics, which simplify integration with existing enterprise IT tools.
• Identity federation further extends authentication capabilities to work with external identity providers to facilitate consortium blockchains with many diverse participants using their existing identity management systems.
• Third-party certificate support for registering client organizations on the blockchain network to enable them to use existing certificates issued by trusted third parties.
• Hyperledger Fabric 1.3 support, which adds many new features based on the evolving open source version, including chaincode development in Java, further leveraging existing enterprise skills, and support for private transactions among a subset of members, preserving privacy and business confidentiality. This demonstrates Oracle’s commitment to stay current with the Hyperledger community by leveraging new releases and contributing to the open source community.

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The Top Way to Keep Your Best Employees - Oracle Certifications

Want to keep your best talent? Invest in their learning and development.

I read an article recently about recession proofing your organization with digital badging. The article made some great points about how the record low unemployment rate (3.9% in December 2018) may not last, with some analysts predicting a slow down in growth as early as 2020.

The article went on to point out that during the 'Great Recession of 2008,' employers who focused on training and developing their workforce over cutting jobs and focusing solely on the bottom line actually made financial gains. "On average, those top 10% of engaged employers posted profit gains of 26% through the last recession, compared with a 14% decline at comparable employers, says Jim Harter, Chief Workplace Scientist at Gallup."

The author wrapped up the article with a compelling finding supporting training and digital credentialing. "When employees are trained on the job, an organization can save an average of $70,000 annually and receive a 10% increase in productivity, according to Forbes."

This got me thinking. . .

Certification is a sound investment in any economy!

Oracle Certification has a well-established digital credentialing program. Surveys consistently show that having certified individuals in your organization increases productivity, customer satisfaction, and job satisfaction. It would stand to reason that if a focus on training and development could help to recession-proof your business by keeping your best talent and making them more productive, the same training and development could help keep your best talent during a time of economic growth.  

According to the Bureau of Labor and Statistics' Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, published January 9, 2019, the ratio of unemployed persons per job opening was 0.9 in November 2018. This means that there is more than one job opening for every unemployed person, which shows a dramatic decrease from Great Recession numbers, when there were more than six unemployed people for every job opening.

Employment experts say that this is an excellent time to look for a new job. So, how do you keep your talent? Invest in them! Certification increases job satisfaction by giving employees more knowledge and skills to help them perform better. 

63.1 percent of respondents to Certification Magazine's 2019 Salary Survey either agree or strongly agree that getting certified has improved their workplace productivity. A whopping 67.4 percent either agree or strongly agree that getting certified has increased their ability to solve problems.

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Oracle Retail Omnichannel Suite Innovations Power New Consumer Experiences

Oracle Retail continues its momentum in enabling digital transformation in the retail community with the launch of Oracle Retail Xstore Office Cloud Service. The service centralizes all back-office elements of store operations, eliminating the need for data center investment, providing a faster implementation timeline and creating a more responsive business model attuned to shifts in consumer preferences. With Oracle Retail Xstore Office Cloud Service, retailers can continue to take advantage of cloud solutions while maintaining critical point-of-service functions on- premises.

“Historically retailers have been slow to upgrade their POS solutions, often waiting 5-7 years before considering an upgrade, which has thwarted their ability to keep pace and provide dynamic, engaging experience to their customers,” said Jeff Warren, Vice President, Oracle Retail. “By moving Xstore back office to the cloud, customers can benefit from a continuous cadence of innovation that enables lower their total cost of ownership through centralized services and store operations.”

New Omnichannel Suite Updates

Xstore Point-of-Service, which is operating today in more than 83 countries, is the cornerstone of the Oracle Retail Omnichannel Suite. The solution delivers a comprehensive set of customer and associate experiences that meet the expectations of today’s modern retailers.

“During the 2018 Holiday season, successful retailers relied on accurate inventory as the foundation for fulfilling omnichannel journeys and meeting customer demand,” said Chris Sarne, senior director of omnichannel strategy, Oracle Retail. “This new generation of cloud services provides a real-time view into critical enterprise data that is the foundation for great brand experiences for consumers.”

Today, the Oracle Retail Omnichannel Suite of solutions enables 64 different shopper journey combinations. As part of Oracle’s Omnichannel product portfolio, Oracle Retail Xstore Point of Service is pre-integrated with several cloud services, including Oracle Retail Customer Engagement, Oracle Retail Order Management, Oracle Retail XBRi Loss Prevention and Oracle Commerce Cloud offerings, enabling end-to-end omnichannel retailing. Additional updates to the Oracle Retail Omnichannel Portfolio of Solutions and Cloud Services include:

• Mobility Enhancements: Retailers look to enable their associates to engage consumers sooner to drive interactions with the brand and deliver a higher level of service. Oracle Retail Xstore Point-of-Service can be deployed on thin client and mobile offerings to allow an associate to capture the sale at the point of intent. Additionally, the store associates and managers are equipped with reporting that enables faster and more efficient decision making.
• RFID Integration: Many retailers have invested in RFID-based supply chain processes to help ensure the accuracy of supply right through to store inventory counting. To enable maintenance of the accuracy of stock position in the store, Oracle Retail Xstore Point-of-Service can extend the sales and returns processes to include RFID data and pass this upstream through services to supporting RFID enabled inventory systems.
• Supporting Customer Experiences: As the retailers reinvent their brick and mortar footprints they are recognizing the value of the physical store as a vehicle to provide customers with unique experiences. With investment increasing in destination-based activities such as in-store coffee shops, candy and wine bars, the POS needs to address the requirements of these additional services without alternate software. Oracle Retail Xstore has extended functionality to address these evolving experiences, all within the same Xstore Point-of-Service code base.
• Easier Workflow: Oracle enhanced the workflow of Oracle Retail Order Management Cloud Service to provide customer service with a more intuitive interface with coordinated and transparent outcomes to fulfillment consumer demand.
• Customer Context: Oracle Retail Customer Engagement Cloud Service has adopted a role-based, modern user experience for better usability in supporting marketing operations and execution. The cloud service integrates to Oracle Retail Offer Optimization and taps into the productivity of artificial intelligence with integration to digital assistants.
• Exploiting Science for Speed and Scale: Oracle Retail XBRi Loss Prevention can go directly from identifying exceptions, for example, excessive gift cards, refunds, and exchanges, to identifying either the account or the cashiers that are at risk, or leveraging machine learning to flag business anomalies. This means that loss prevention officers no longer have to chase down the data behind the risk report in order to determine who or what to investigate. Now more than ever, the ability to deliver best-in-class functionality to the field can happen in a fraction of the time required for an enterprise, on-premises solutions. Retailers can implement Oracle Retail Cloud Services in as little as seven weeks from provisioning.
• Hardware Innovation: The Oracle Retail Xstore Suite has always offered a highly flexible deployment model that includes thick, thin, tablet, handheld options at the store. We are pleased to unveil a new self-service experience on an Oracle point-of-sale kiosk at NRF 2019.

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Guide to Getting Started With Java Certification - Oracle Certifications

Working a career plan is hard enough without having to dig around to find everything you need.

The Java Foundations 1Z0-811 exam is priced lower but don’t let that fool you.  It is still a valid certification credential.  If you've taken Java Foundations training or the Java Coding and Concepts MOOC this is a great place to start.

If you've attended the Java Fundamentals training and had some hands on experience then the Java SE 8 Programmer I 1Z0-808 exam is a good choice. 

And, if you create web-based user interfaces using JavaScript along with JSPs, JSFs, servlets and handle business logic or have taken the Developing Applications for the Java EE 7 Platform course then the Java EE 7 Application Developer 1Z0-900 exam is for you.

The difference between the Junior Associate and the Associate certification credential is experience.  Take the Junior Associate if you haven’t gotten that needed experience yet.

Now that you know where to start its time to get ready for the exam.

First thing to do is to review Exam Topics.  This gives you a detailed list on what you will be tested on.  After reviewing the list you can determine what kind and how much additional help you need to prepare.   

Here's what's available to help prepare for the Java SE 8 Programmer I 1Z0-808 and the Java EE 7 Application Developer 1Z0-900 exams.

Exam prep 4-6 hour recorded guide. Note that an Exam Prep Seminar Package will include your exam voucher and a free retake voucher if you need it.

Hope you found this helpful!

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Oracle Arms Developers with the Most Comprehensive Cloud Native Framework

Oracle Cloud Native Framework provides deployment models for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, hybrid cloud and on-premises users

Oracle today announced the Oracle Cloud Native Framework, providing developers a cloud native solution that spans public cloud, on premises and hybrid cloud deployments. Capitalizing on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and the recently announced Oracle Linux Cloud Native Environment, the Oracle Cloud Native Framework introduces a rich set of cloud native managed services and on-premises software. The Oracle Cloud Native Framework also introduces Oracle Functions, a new breakthrough serverless cloud service based on the open source Fn Project.

As organizations move to the cloud, they are facing new and difficult challenges addressing cultural change and increased complexity. DevOps and cloud native tooling have left many developers and projects behind the curve. Moreover, organizations eager to use standard open source components and leverage cloud capabilities, but are impeded by the number of complex choices, lack of training and fear of cloud vendor lock-in. By providing cloud native capabilities and offerings regardless of the deployment scenario and leveraging open standards established by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), Oracle, a platinum member of CNCF, is uniquely providing its customers with choice while meeting the broad deployment needs of developers.

“With the growing popularity of the CNCF as a unifying and organizing force in the cloud native ecosystem and organizations increasingly embracing multi cloud and hybrid cloud models, developers should have the flexibility to build and deploy their applications anywhere they choose without the threat of cloud vendor lock-in. Oracle is making this a reality,” said Don Johnson, executive vice president, product development, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

To further enable developers to build and deploy modern applications, Oracle is introducing a rich set of first class Oracle Cloud Infrastructure services built on Oracle’s Gen 2 Cloud IaaS and existing foundational Kubernetes orchestration and management layer, the Oracle Container Engine for Kubernetes (OKE). These new offerings are focused on three critical Oracle Cloud Infrastructure cloud native layers:

Application Definition & Development

• Oracle Functions: Scalable, multi-tenant serverless functions that let users focus on writing code to meet business needs without having to know about any infrastructure concepts. Users only pay when a function is invoked, but pay nothing when the code is not running.
• Streaming: A highly available, scalable and multi-tenant streaming platform that makes it easy to collect and manage streaming data. Streaming enables applications such as IoT, security and supply chain, where large amounts of data are collected from many sources and need to be processed in real time.

Provisioning

• Resource Manager: A managed service that can provision all Oracle Cloud Infrastructure resources and services. Resource Manager reduces configuration errors and increases productivity by managing infrastructure declaratively (i.e. “infrastructure as code”) using industry standard Terraform.

Observability & Analysis

• Monitoring: An integrated service that reports metrics from all resources and services in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Use predefined metrics and dashboards, or use the service API to obtain a wholistic view of the health, performance, and capacity of the system. The monitoring service includes alarms to track these metrics and take action when they vary or exceed defined thresholds. Alarms provide a critical service to help users meet service level objectives and avoid interruptions.
• Notification Service: A scalable service that broadcasts messages to distributed components, such as email and PagerDuty. With the notification service, users can easily deliver messages about Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to large numbers of subscribers through a publish-subscribe pattern.
• Events: An offering that enables users to react to changes in the state of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure resources, both when initiated by the system or by user action. Events can store information to Object Storage, or they can trigger Functions to take actions, Notifications to inform users, or Streaming to update external services.

With the announcement of Oracle Functions, a new breakthrough serverless solution based on the open source Fn Project, developers can easily deploy and execute function-based applications without the need to manage compute infrastructure. Oracle Functions is Docker container-based and completely pay-per-use, so charges are incurred only when functions are run. The underlying Fn Project, which Oracle Functions offers as a fully-managed service, can run on-premises, in a data center, or on any cloud. The Oracle Cloud Native Framework supports both modern (cloud native) and traditional (WebLogic, Java, and database) applications. The enterprise grade platform can be leveraged for sustainable strategy, managed services, and curated OSS.

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Telecom Leader Uses Oracle to Secure Communications Services

UNIFI Communications, a leading international voice carrier, has selected Oracle Communications to improve long-term efficiency and communication reliability for its growing customer base. UNIFI will replace its existing session border controller platform with Oracle’s Enterprise Session Border Controllers (E-SBC), optimizing Internet Protocol (IP) voice, video, and data services for the carrier.

UNIFI is a leading Managed Service Provider (MSP) delivering enhanced telecommunication services for more than 100 million active subscribers. As one of the largest carriers of international voice traffic, UNIFI developed a footprint in more than 130 countries over the last decade to support the demands of global service providers accessing local markets.

UNIFI will deploy the Oracle Acme Packet E-SBC 4600 to increase its network capacity utilization and operating efficiency, in addition to improving the voice quality of its telecommunication services. The E-SBC 4600 solution is a key component of Oracle’s leading network session delivery and control infrastructure platform portfolio.

“The seamless integration of Oracle's enterprise session border controller into our platform will greatly expand our network capacity, enhance our technical performance capabilities, boost efficiency in a shrinking margin environment, and further positioning UNIFI as a leading competitor in the tier-one carrier market worldwide,” said Brian Shatku, CFO of UNIFI Communications. “By deploying this advanced communication solution, our company is empowered to be more flexible and efficient in the rapidly shifting wholesale marketplace.”

“With Oracle Communications, UNIFI has the robust network infrastructure to provide its customers with highly reliable, interactive and real-time unified communications services,” said Doug Suriano, senior vice president and general manager, Oracle Communications. “Our technology will allow UNIFI to modernize voice interconnection between Mobile Network Operators and access the latest, most innovative tools available for a session border controller.”

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Western Digital Transforms Business Processes with Oracle Cloud

Western Digital has been able to combine numerous applications, reduce approval times by 70 percent, rationalize suppliers by 50 percent and improve acquisition agility on a global scale.

After acquiring SanDisk and HGST, Western Digital faced the challenge of rationalizing three Fortune 500-size on-premises ERP systems. Western Digital decided it needed a modern suite of best-in-class ERP applications that would enable it to enhance the customer experience and achieve a competitive advantage while improving employee productivity. After careful evaluation, Western Digital selected Oracle ERP Cloud, which has allowed it to seamlessly extend its on-premises applications to the cloud and establish a modern business platform that can seamlessly scale to support its future expansion plans and new technology innovations.

“The process of rationalizing three large legacy systems and associated applications gave us a unique opportunity to drive change, as more than two thirds of our organization would have to undergo change no matter what application we selected. We needed a simple, yet scalable cloud platform that could power our rapidly growing business,” said Steve Phillpott, CIO at Western Digital. “With Oracle Cloud we have been able to consolidate applications, automate key financial workflows and radically improve productivity. Oracle has been the catalyst for change and is pivotal in our digital transformation journey.”

“The technology industry is an incredibly fast-paced and competitive market, where the quickest, most agile players win. Western Digital has done an incredible job bringing three large enterprise organizations onto a single Fortune 100-scale platform to significantly improve efficiency and business agility,” said Rondy Ng, senior vice president, Oracle Applications Development. “With Oracle ERP Cloud, Western Digital will be able to continually take advantage of the latest innovations to gain a competitive advantage and successfully position itself for future growth.”

Western Digital’s adoption of Oracle ERP Cloud builds upon its use of both Oracle on-premises and Oracle Analytics Cloud. With Oracle, Western Digital is able to avoid massive file download times and manual analysis to provide its employees with access to the information they need to make better, faster decisions

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