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In the shift from surviving tough economic times to thriving in the future, CIOs face three common goals: maintaining a healthy infrastructure to preserve current revenue, making solid decisions about business and budget needs and planning for new opportunities to help outpace competition. The common key to success for each goal is high performance — a state of maximum productivity that can be reached and sustained through achieving operational excellence.

Despite increasing pressure, the mandate for operational excellence doesn’t lessen. The need to mitigate risks while keeping costs in check and complexity down continues. CIOs report the need to continually improve and optimize infrastructure, spending smartly to assure the best business value, fast return on investment and lower total cost of ownership (TCO). Finally, they must deliver new projects and systems that allow their businesses to win market share through innovation.

The need for CIOs to broaden influence across the business is more urgent

than ever, as businesses search for clarity and reassurance that their compa-nies can respond quickly and effectively to market challenges and opportuni-ties. Those CIOs who succeed — who execute the right strategies, make the right investment calls, and deploy the right technologies — have the oppor-tunity of a lifetime to broaden their influence over the business and become vital members of senior management.

CIO Solutions: Meeting Business and Budget Goals

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Oracle Advanced Customer Services specialize in the continual operational improvement of the entire Oracle stack—database, middleware and applications. Each customer’s solution is custom-ized to meet exact requirements and experts are made available throughout the customer’s Oracle lifecycle.

“With database management from Oracle Advanced Customer Services, Bharat Petroleum Corp. Ltd. (BPCL), an oil refinery and marketing company in Mumbai, India, assures that its criti-cal PetroCard customer loyalty program application, which runs on Oracle Database, Oracle Application Server and Oracle Real Application Clusters, is always available. With the loyalty busi-ness representing 25% of BPCL’s total sales, continuous availabil-ity is critical for this application—and Oracle Advanced Customer Services has not failed in that mission,” reports Ajay Nigam, a senior manager at BPCL.

“In the Europe, Middle East and Africa region, businesses are engaging Oracle Advanced Customer Services for best practices advice on how to consolidate and standardize their IT infrastruc-tures, for help in adopting software-as-a-service models for Oracle CRM, and to handle skills-based tasks such as database administra-tion” says Chris Hill, vice president of EMEA ACS Sales & Delivery. “As Oracle products become an increasing part of a customer’s infrastructure, companies start looking at Oracle Advanced Customer Services as a serious alternative to the IT department. We bring such a broad portfolio for dealing with the complexities of how IT works,” he adds.

“Organizations in the Asia Pacific and Japan regions are also turn-ing to Oracle Advanced Customer Services as they seek to standard-ize, simplify and consolidate their IT infrastructure and software environments and lower TCO,” says Chon-Phung Lim, senior vice president, Oracle Customer Services – Asia Pacific and Japan.

“Oracle Advanced Customer Services provided the expertise that we required during this project, and trained our internal staff so they could overcome issues quickly and easily. This ensured that there was no interruption to the business.”

– Warren Ma, Deputy General Manager, OOCL

In North America too, IT organizations are focused on streamlin-ing labor efficiencies with cross training, consolidating application environments, data center consolidation and generally scrutinizing projects.

For example, Oracle Advanced Customer Services recently helped Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, Inc., (GMCR), a $500 million specialty coffee supplier headquartered in Waitsville, Vt., slash

Maintaining and improving operational service levels remains at the core of a CIO’s commit-ment to the business. Being confident about delivering on that commitment enables the CIO to make choices and prioritizations that will deliver increasing value, including: q

q The right level of change that the organiza-tion can absorb and manage while staying within operational risk thresholds.

q Achieving the appropriate balance between meeting immediate priorities (e.g. a new product launch) and infrastructure invest-ment with measurable long-term benefit.

q Proposing innovative or reprioritized busi-ness changes aligned with improvements in processes, systems, and service levels.

Contracting for Operational Excellence

Many CIOs enhance current resources and budgets by working with specialized part-ners or other third party associates to provide skills and programs to supplement their own resources. The key is working with a specialized services organization that has a documented history of maximizing IT value for customers. A services organization can fill in the gaps in expertise and manpower left by budget cuts and keep a company on top of technology issues that, left unchecked, could have nega-tive consequences.

A key strategic services partner also helps companies manage their infrastructure and processes on a global scale and has a host of experts who understand how to optimize mission-critical solutions to deliver services at a greater speed, with increased reliability and low-er costs. An example of a strong IT partnership to support the continual operational improvement of customer systems can be found at Oracle, with its Advanced Customer Services team. For compa-nies running mission-critical infrastructures on Oracle solutions, Oracle Advanced Customer Services work directly with many CIOs to under-stand and execute short and long term goals, by providing annualized high performance services.

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“Oracle Advanced Customer Services are different and personal-ized, and tools-based. We utilize our intellectual property in a way that allows our customers to get lot of value very quickly,” says Larry Abramson, senior vice president of Oracle Advanced Customer Services.

The four service levels are as follows:

q�Advanced Support Assistance: aimed at providing maximum sys-tem availability over the long term. An Oracle service delivery manager who knows the customer environment, business and timelines provides guidance to ensure timely and accurate esca-lation of production-critical service requests.

q� Priority Service: helps accelerate IT productivity, manage risks, lower operational costs and focus on business objectives. With this package, a designated service delivery manager proactively manages problem resolution and escalations. As its name sug-gests, this service offers automated prioritization of service requests.

q�Business Critical Assistance: combines problem resolution and proactive problem-avoidance services from a dedicated service delivery manager.

q�Solution Support Center: the most comprehensive offering, good for protecting mission-critical operations. It provides con-tinual operational improvement along with onsite or remote experts to support the complete Oracle environment.

The Benefits of the Services Approach to Operational Excellence

Abramson attributes the ease of customizing services to a project’s requirements to the professional intimacy developed between

the implementation time for a new trade pro-motion planning and execution solution by roughly 75%. The experts provided advice and guidance in the product evaluation phase – pointing GMCR to Oracle’s Demantra applica-tions – then helped with the implementation. Oracle Advanced Customer Services has been guiding GMCR on problem resolution and next best steps for the company’s IT environment for roughly 10 years. Over that time, GMCR has realized a 50% reduction in TCO, reports Rod Ely, director of enterprise applications at GMCR.

A Portfolio of Services for Operational Excellence

Oracle Advanced Customer Services offers four unique levels of annualized services. Each level is a tiered set of solutions and expert services designed for differing objectives, budgets and business requirements so CIOs can select the precise service that meets their companies’ needs.

The services are highly customizable as well. With Oracle Enterprise Solution Management (part of Oracle Advanced Customer Services), CIOs can engage individual experts, assessments and modules as needed from a portfolio of more than 60 additional offerings This person-alized service affords CIOs the opportunity to choose the level of service the company needs, as well as when and where to deploy Oracle pro-fessionals. Services are added only when – and if – needed. Oracle Advanced Customer Services strives to help CIOs maximize performance and provide guidance at strategic periods through-out the lifecycles of their Oracle products.

Advanced Support Assistance

Escalation Management

Service Delivery Manager

Personalized Support

Priority Service

Prioritized Service Requests

Personalized Portal

Escalation Management

Service Delivery Manager

Faster Problem Resolution

Business Critical Assistance

Proactive Support

Access to team of service engineers

Personalized Portal

Escalation Management

Service Delivery Manager

Proactive Problem Avoidance

Support Solution Center

Performance Optimization Services

Virtual Center of Excellence with designated experts

Dedicated Hotline

Proactive Onsite Support

Prioritized Service Requests

Personalized Portal

Escalation Management

Service Delivery Manager

Continual Operational Improvement

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MassMutual Financial Group, a financial management company headquartered in Springfield, Mass., credits Oracle Advanced Customer Services for encouraging innovation, achieving seamless integration with legacy systems, reducing costs and risks associated with deployment.

“We’ve been able to run more campaigns and have better client satisfaction for a smaller amount of money than we were before our implementation. The targeting also gives us two to three times the success rate of prior enrollment campaigns,” says Scott Reed, corporate vice president of MassMutual Retirement Services.

Customer satisfaction surveys unequivocally show that CIOs who use Oracle Advanced Customer Services are more satisfied with Oracle solutions than those who don’t. One reason why: with Oracle expertise on hand, IT organizations realize the value of their Oracle software faster than when working on their own. They get to the latest versions more quickly, and can leverage new fea-tures and improved performance, which in turn leads to reduced costs and lower risks.

“Customer satisfaction with Oracle Advanced Customer Services is a function of the tools and the people we have in this business and our ability to generate greater value for our clients,” Abramson says.

“CIOs can take the information we deliver, which is very detailed, and make educated, enlightened decisions about what to do next in their environments,” Abramson adds. Enlightened decision-making, in turn, leads to better risk mitigation and keeps spending in check.

“The fact that we’re non-transactional, that we improve system operations and we help make enlightened decisions translates into CIOs being able to use investment dollars much more effectively. Rather than spending on a general concept, the CIO can be surgical – ‘I want to solve these five issues identified by Advanced Customer Services.’ The CIO knows the decisions he makes are germane to performance and business goals,” Abramson says.

qqqqOracle Advanced Customer Services comprises a global team of more than 2,500 Oracle Support professionals, who already are helping 94% of the S&P Global 100 to optimize and get more value out of their Oracle environments. With the help of Oracle Advance Customer Services, these and other organizations are providing better experiences for their customers through faster problem res-olution, ongoing performance optimization and faster upgrades.

For more information on how Oracle Advanced Customer Services can help you achieve operational excellence across your Oracle environment, go to www.oracle.com/support/advanced-customer-services.

Oracle Advanced Customer Services and the customer. “This intimacy allows us insight into a CIO’s priorities, whether they’re around a new product offering or the end of a quarter, and to tailor our services in those moments to ensure the CIO can deal with those events suc-cessfully,” he says.

With its breadth of experience in customer environments, Oracle Advanced Customer Services can predict what configurations might be problematic in what type of situations, for example, and can issue alerts proactively. With such knowledge, an IT organization can priori-tize which infrastructure issues need immedi-ate attention – thus heading off system out-ages or performance degradations that would introduce risk, increase TCO or otherwise impact operational excellence.

Grant Gullery, financial management IS man-ager at Victoria University, in Wellington, New Zealand, describes the relationship with Oracle Advanced Customer Services as such: “Combined with their understanding of our systems and objectives, what we have is a true partnership built on a common goal of opti-mizing our IT infrastructure.”

The university, which serves 19,000 students, has relied on Oracle experts to provide around-the-clock database and application manage-ment services for the last six years. The result has been continuous system availability, mini-mal downtime and in-depth strategic planning for IT investments, Gullery says.

For Radovan Matajs, COO at Social Insurance Agency, a governmental insurance institution serving the citizens of the Slovak Republic, relying on the expertise of a specialized Oracle Service Delivery Manager (SDM) assures the agency gets the best and optimal IT solution without putting operational stability, per-formance or security at risk. “Our SDM has become our trusted advisor,” he says.

“We use Oracle’s expert knowledge from the early stages of new system builds and the result is better homogeneity. In this way, we assure seamless systems integration in our heteroge-neous environment,” Matajs says.