Microsoft and Oracle Application Platform Comparison Published: March 2008 Applies To: Microsoft Application Platform Summary: The purpose of this whitepaper is to compare Microsoft Application Platform capabilities and benefits with the Oracle Application Platform.
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Microsoft and Oracle Application Platform Comparison
Published: March 2008
Applies To: Microsoft Application Platform
Summary:
The purpose of this whitepaper is to compare Microsoft Application Platform capabilities and benefits
with the Oracle Application Platform.
Copyright
The information contained in this document represents the current view of Microsoft Corporation on the issues
discussed as of the date of publication. Because Microsoft must respond to changing market conditions, it
should not be interpreted to be a commitment on the part of Microsoft, and Microsoft cannot guarantee the
accuracy of any information presented after the date of publication.
This White Paper is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS, IMPLIED
OR STATUTORY, AS TO THE INFORMATION IN THIS DOCUMENT.
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copyright, no part of this document may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or
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any purpose, without the express written permission of Microsoft Corporation.
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copyrights, or other intellectual property.
Unless otherwise noted, the example companies, organizations, products, domain names, e-mail addresses, logos,
people, places and events depicted herein are fictitious, and no association with any real company, organization,
product, domain name, email address, logo, person, place or event is intended or should be inferred.
Microsoft, Active Directory, BizTalk, Excel, Expression, ForeFront, the Microsoft Office logo, PerformancePoint,
SharePoint, Silverlight, Visual Studio, Windows, the Windows logo, Windows Server, and Windows Vista are either
registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries.
The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective
owners.
Table of Contents Introduction ................................................................................................................................................ 1
The Microsoft Advantage ................................................................................................................................................ 2
Business Process and Service Oriented Architecture ........................................................................... 2
The .NET Framework ......................................................................................................................................................... 4
Microsoft BizTalk® Server ................................................................................................................................................ 5
Featured Case Study: Siemens .............................................................................................................................. 5
Data Management ..................................................................................................................................... 5
Performance and Scalability ........................................................................................................................................... 7
Total Cost of Ownership .................................................................................................................................................. 8
Business Intelligence ................................................................................................................................. 9
Microsoft SQL Server™ .................................................................................................................................................. 10
Microsoft Office System ................................................................................................................................................ 11
Microsoft PerformancePoint® Server ...................................................................................................................... 11
Featured Case Study: PREMIER Bankcard LLC ............................................................................................. 11
User Experience ........................................................................................................................................ 11
Microsoft Silverlight™ .................................................................................................................................................... 12
Featured Case Study .............................................................................................................................................. 12
Windows Presentation Foundation .......................................................................................................................... 12
Microsoft Office Business Applications and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server® 2007 ...................... 12
Development ............................................................................................................................................ 13
Featured Case Studies: Dell and Electronic Data Systems (EDS) ........................................................... 14
Companies today are demanding that IT solutions become a corporate asset that delivers business value. Software has
evolved beyond just helping people create documents and read e-mail messages. It can now connect people with the
information and business processes they need to make better decisions. From back-end infrastructure to end-user
tools, software is the key to empowering people to drive business ahead while maintaining standards, compliance and
security.
This new software environment puts the user in control of the information they want, and can offer whole new levels of
richness and interactivity. It will be imperative for companies to understand how to unlock the potential these new
application types will have on their user populations, internal and external.
To fully power these next-generation applications, companies need to:
1. Harness all the information across their company—within databases as well as applications.
2. Connect information—loosely coupled through service orientation and mapped to business processes.
3. Use applications to access exposed information and present it to users in connected and compelling experiences.
To connect the business and drive effective outcomes, companies need to focus on five core capabilities to deliver a
technology platform that supports the development and deployment of line-of-business applications. These five
capabilities are core to enabling a dynamic application platform and form the basis of this white paper.
Figure 1: Basic Application Platform Capabilities
•A scalable, integrated data management platform that is "always on.. Benefits from higher application reliability, improved manageability, and enhanced data protection.
Data Management
•SOA (service-oriented architecture) and adaptive business processes. Gains operational efficiency through automated procesess.
Business Process and Service-Oriented Architecture
•Real-time analysis that drives insights organizations can be used to power business growth. Empowers employees to make better, faster, and more relevant decisions.
Business Intelligence
•Modern team development and management throughout the application lifecycle. Improves both developer productivity and IT project management.
Development
•Proactive collaboration of application design and development. Helps improve the effectiveness, comprehension, and satisfaction of end users.
User Experience
Microsoft and Oracle Application Platform Comparison 2
SQL Server The foundation of the Microsoft Business Intelligence (BI) offering, Microsoft SQL Server 2005 is designed to provide a
complete enterprise-ready and scalable BI/data warehouse platform.
The SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) is designed to perform complex data integration, transformation, and
synthesis at high speeds and in a continuous environment for large data volumes. SSIS provides a scalable and
extensible data integration solution that enables users to easily and quickly integrate data from any source. SQL Server
Analysis Services (SSAS) provides a unified and integrated view of all business data as the foundation for all traditional
reporting, OLAP analysis, Key Performance Indicator (KPI) scorecards, and data mining. The SQL Server Reporting
Services (SSRS) is a comprehensive reporting solution that supports the entire report life cycle. Users can create,
personalize, manage, and deliver reports from different data sources in a variety of formats, including traditional paper
based reports, interactive, web-based, embedded and ad hoc reports.
Office System The 2007 Microsoft Office System helps simplify how users access, analyze, and share data within the organization.
Microsoft Office Excel 2007, part of the Office System, provides a powerful set of tools that helps users easily create
spreadsheets and analyze and share information. Excel is tightly integrated with SSAS to enable users to use the Excel
environment for exploratory data analysis. Powerful data mining features and rich data visualization schemes can help
users discover and illustrate important trends and exceptions. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 helps users
integrate structured and unstructured data, see different levels of detail, and interact with spreadsheets, key
performance indicators, and dashboards. Users also can take full advantage of the built-in native capability such as
enterprise search, content management, communication, and collaboration. The Excel Services feature of SharePoint
Server provides access to real-time, interactive Office Excel spreadsheets in a Web browser, enabling users to easily
protect, share, and reuse spreadsheets.
PerformancePoint Server Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 is an integrated performance management application designed to help
improve operational and financial performance across all departments and all levels of the organization. PerformancePoint
Server enables users to monitor progress, analyze what is driving variances, and plan the business from budgeting to creating
management reports. Companies can have metrics, key performance indicators (KPIs), and reports delivered to every desktop
through intuitive scorecards, dashboards, and the Microsoft Office system environment.
Featured Case Study: Premier Bankcard, LLC PREMIER Bankcard, LLC (PREMIER), one of the largest VISA and MasterCard credit providers in the United States,
needed to enhance scalability and performance for its business intelligence (BI) data warehouse and online transaction
processing (OLTP) databases. The company reported that BI began as an area of research for them, but then become
absolutely mission critical. It enhanced its BI infrastructure by upgrading its 12-terabyte data warehouse to Microsoft
SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Edition (64-bit), hosted on a server computer with 16 Intel Itanium 2 processors. PREMIER
also upgraded its OLTP database to the 64-bit version of SQL Server 2005. The upgraded deployments provide a better
view of the business, enterprise-grade scalability, maintenance without scheduled downtime, and easier database
management.
User Experience While a poor user experience may seem like to be merely an unfortunate inconvenience to the users of the software, it
can also be a large, frequently hidden drain which threatens the return on investment predicted by the organization
building the software.
For many types of software, the use or purchase of that software directly affects the revenue of the organization that
builds it. For example, e-commerce software directly generates revenue as the result of consumers purchasing products
via the software. Packaged consumer software, such as home accounting software or large enterprise class accounting
Microsoft and Oracle Application Platform Comparison 12
systems, generates revenue through product sales. A superior user experience can lower training costs, provide better
productivity, and result in higher customer satisfaction.
Many organizations may prioritize user experience highly at first, but later find they lack the support of processes and
tools that‟s necessary to effectively achieve high quality user experience.
Microsoft has always focused on delivering great user experiences and the tools for companies; for many years it has
sought to empower its customers to build and sustain their own high quality user experiences—for themselves and
their own customers.
Unlike Microsoft, Oracle has traditionally focused on the back-end. Oracle„s key offerings in user experience area are
Oracle Portal and WebCenter, which primarily handle the end-user interactions. Oracle‟s features roughly map to those
that Microsoft SharePoint Server 2007 provides, with some extension to Exchange Server, Communication Server, and
Live Conferencing.
This section discusses a few products Microsoft offers to deliver compelling user experiences, including Silverlight, WPF,
Office Business applications (OBAs), and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server.
Silverlight Microsoft Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of .NET-based media
experiences and rich interactive applications for the We—using video, animation, interactivity, and stunning user
interfaces. It enables richer, more compelling Web experiences that take greater advantage of the client for increased
performance, providing support for vector-based graphics, media, text, animation, and overlays that can be integrated
into any existing Web application. Silverlight provides the “Wow!” factor for customers and compels them to use
products and Web sites again and again. On top of that, Silverlight offers a flexible programming model built on the
.NET Framework, providing a fast and cost-effective delivery of high quality media to all major browsers running on
Mac OS or Windows.
Featured Case Study: CBS Television Stations When the CBS Television Stations Digital Media Group wanted to increase interaction and engagement with viewers,
they chose Silverlight. CBS created a rich, easy-to-use Web application that supports user-generated audio, video, and
image files. The application further serves its audience by allowing affiliates to personalize the experience, focusing on
events and interests within their community.
Windows Presentation Foundation The Microsoft Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) provides a foundation for building applications and high
fidelity experiences in Windows Vista, blending together application UI, documents, and media content while at the
same time leveraging the full power of the PC. This functionality extends to provide support for Tablet PC and other
forms of input, a modern imaging and printing pipeline, accessibility and UI automation infrastructure, data driven UI
and visualization, as well as the integration points for weaving the application experience into the Windows shell.
For consumer products, WPF enables a rich user experience that combines the best of web, desktop, and connected
systems. Designers and developers can aggregate the best of media, web content, and interaction to build a wide
variety of applications that were virtually impossible before. For enterprise organizations, WPF can help leverage
existing IT assets to build new visually immersive applications that combine data, processes, and reporting—even when
extending Microsoft Office.
Office Business Applications and SharePoint Server 2007 Many companies have invested heavily in Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Customer Relationship Management
(CRM), Supply Chain Management (SCM), and other line of business (LOB) applications. Unfortunately, too few of them
enjoy the full potential of their investment due to a failure to adequately connect their people and their processes with
the data and processes of their business applications. This gap can be bridged by a new breed of applications called
Microsoft and Oracle Application Platform Comparison 13