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The Oracle Ticket

Oracle provides an extensible platform on which to build Internet- commerce solutions, from back-end databases, to partner application programs, to user interfaces. All of it is built around Oracle's Network Computing Architecture (NCA), an infrastructure that allows software components to communicate in a mission-critical environment with built-in performance, scalability, security, and reliability. Oracle's NCA platform and specific point solutions address the breadth of Internet-commerce needs.

Introducing Oracle Internet Commerce Server

The latest entry in Oracle's electronic-commerce solutions lineup is Oracle Internet Commerce Server (ICS, formerly known by its code name of Project Apollo), a business-to-consumer Internet merchant system. ICS enables businesses to tackle the major technology and business issues specific to Internet commerce, including building storefronts, accepting payment, and handling international logistics such as shipping and taxation.

ICS leverages the performance and scalability of Oracle universal data server and Oracle Web Application Server, creating enterprise-strength Internet-commerce technology. ICS is built with open interfaces to third-party systems such as order management, inventory management, payment processing, tax calculation, shipping, and soft-goods delivery. ICS is easy to set up and administer and allows businesses to customize and configure their Internet-commerce solutions to meet their own specific business needs. The system allows consumers to browse, select products, and drop their choices into a persistent shopping cart as they move through a virtual store. When they are finished shopping, consumers proceed to the "checkout stand" to pay for their orders. If a user logs out of ICS or switches to another Web site without checking out, the items in the cart will still be there when the user returns.

ICS provides merchants with one easy-to-use GUI interface, Store Manager, with which they can build and maintain an electronic store. Store Manager handles everything needed to define such things as store hierarchy, products, prices, associated content, promotions, personalization, and reporting. A few of the most significant capabilities of ICS include:

• Store browsing and searching. ICS allows shoppers to browse product sections and subsections with an easy-to-use browser interface. Customers can also use the powerful linguistic searching capabilities of Oracle ConText, which is fully integrated with ICS, to perform sophisticated searches for particular products. ConText allows consumers to specify searches based on themes--for example, all products with the theme of sports.
• Staging system. The staging system is integrated into Store Manager. Businesses can build and fully test a store before deploying it in a live environment. The staging system is based on Oracle replication technology, which allows for accurate, comprehensive testing of a merchant solution prior to deployment as well as rollback from a live to a test environment with minimal downtime.
• Merchandising and personalization. One of the key aspects of making a commerce site successful is creating a compelling experience for the online consumer. With ICS, merchants can define special prices, coupons, promotional activities, and personalization--for example, presenting a consumer with a view of the store that matches only his or her preferences or only the products in which he or she is interested. ICS allows merchants to create store promotions through electronic coupons and on-sale items. Merchants can also define discounts and trigger promotions based on a particular date range.
• Tax calculation. A crucial component of an Internet-commerce solution is real-time, accurate calculation of taxes. ICS is fully integrated in with software from Taxware, an Oracle partner and leading supplier of tax software, which provides Internet taxation technology that handles U.S. and international tax calculations.
• Payment. Another vital component is the ability to accept online payment. ICS integrates with leading payment vendors VeriFone and CyberCash to provide an end-to-end solution for secure payment and credit card checking, validation, and authorization. This includes the encryption of incoming credit card information so that it can be read only by the credit card processor receiving the Internet transaction, not the merchant. CyberCash also provides a solution for micropayments--selling products for small denominations of money or electronic cash.
     The VeriFone and CyberCash products are built as cartridges, which allows a seamless plug-in to NCA, and have been implemented specifically to interface with ICS. ICS currently uses NCA to tightly integrate with products from other vendors as well, including some from TanData and Portland Software.
• Reporting and tracking. ICS also provides a comprehensive range of predefined reports for gathering information on hits, product sales, user demographics, and so forth. It also includes comprehensive database views that allow merchants to produce custom reports.
• Configurable and extensible. ICS is highly customizable in the following ways:
  1. The user interface. The ICS user interface is based on static HTML templates that businesses can easily edit or even replace with their own look and feel.
  2. Open APIs. ICS provides several open APIs for such things as order entry, inventory, tax, shipping, and payment. Working with these APIs allows a business to interface with, for example, third-party inventory systems instead of using ICS's own inventory capability.
  3. Selected business-rule options. Within Store Manager a merchant can specify specific business rule implementations.
• Dynamic data management and transactional integrity. Oracle universal data server and the ICS dynamic HTML generator provide a robust transactional data store and on-the-fly content generation along with the Oracle database's reliable data-management capabilities. The ICS HTML generator lets merchants pull data from the database and automatically format it as HTML within an HTML template. This notion of dynamic data means that merchants can alter product information, pricing, and other content without hard-coding static HTML pages.

  "Oracle gives us a consistent data store across multiple types of EC applications," confirms Larry Shafer, an electronic-commerce consultant with SparkOnline, a retail promotions network focused on the Internet. "The NCA architecture makes it easy to plug in third-party solutions."

  For example, ICS plugs in to Web Application Server as an application cartridge. Within the cartridge, ICS has an object-oriented architecture built on Sun Microsystems' Java to handle the merchant server application logic. ICS makes persistent connects to the database via PL/SQL; data is pulled from the Oracle database, manipulated with Java, dynamically converted to HTML, and returned to the user. The ICS user interface employs a variety of HTML templates, which are dynamically populated with data from the database.

ICS Tomorrow

Release 1.1 of Internet Commerce Server is due out in early 1998 and will include several important feature enhancements. The Store Manager will include a graphical view of the store hierarchy and an enhanced user interface. ICS will also feature out-of-the-box integration with shipping-and-handling software from TanData. This will simplify the process of working with major shipping carriers, such as Federal Express.

In addition, security improvements will include an alternative to using "cookies" via encrypted URLs.

In the long run, ICS will evolve to support commerce from a number of perspectives, supplemental to the current business-to-consumer level. Most notable will be added support for providing commerce services in a hosted environment and business-to-business commerce.

Oracle Payment Server

Oracle Payment Server is a complete electronic payment solution that developers can use to add payment processing to any Web or client/ server application. For example, a developer might have written a custom application for a commerce Web site and want to add payment functionality. Oracle Payment Server provides an open, consistent API and sample code that the developer can use to easily access many payment systems rather than coding to each individually. Conversely, Payment Server also provides a single open API and sample code to which any payment-system supplier can interface and gives the suppliers access to any payment-enabled front-end Web or client/server electronic-commerce application, including Oracle Applications Financials modules.

The product also supports flexible transaction routing based on business rules. Businesses can instruct Payment Server to change the payment system used, depending on each transaction's characteristics.

Payment Server is ideally suited to vertical or custom applications needing high-performance, configurable electronic payment capabilities. Systems integrators, ISVs, and Oracle Consulting Services can use Oracle Payment Server to build electronic-payment-enabled applications that support multiple payment mechanisms (credit cards, ecoin, ecash, echeck, smart cards, and so on) through multiple payment systems as well as to build applications that interface with any internal or third-party payment system or field-installed payment cartridges.

Oracle Payment Server is now in beta 2 release with several key customers. Payment Server is bundled with many major payment system cartridges and will be available as a standalone product for payment-enabling any Web- or client-based electronic commerce application. Payment Server will also become the default payment processing mechanism for ICS after ICS Release 1.1. Oracle Payment Server Release 1.0 is scheduled for production release in February 1998.

Oracle Security Server

Oracle Security Server gives customers the ability to control and manage the issuance of certificates for their security infrastructures. It provides a Certificate Authority (CA) function, including the generation of public-key/private-key pairs and issuance of industry-standard X.509 certificates, as well as the ability to revoke certificates.

Oracle Security Server provides certificate issuance for multiple Web clients as well as acceptance of client certificates, whether issued by an Oracle or third-party system. It also provides access to open cryptographic APIs for creating digital signatures. Customers benefit from the ability to create applications in an Oracle environment that create and verify digital signatures, thereby enabling the proof of origin, which is critical in an electronic-commerce environment. (For more information on security, see "Problem Solved" also in this issue. The July/August 1996 issue of Oracle Magazine also features a comprehensive overview of security issues.)

Oracle Universal Data Server: Flexible Scalability

The heart of the system, Oracle universal data server delivers integrated support for both relational and multimedia information, opening up opportunities for a new generation of applications that combine many types of data, including video, text, spatial, and analytical.

The key to Oracle universal data server is its flexibility: It eliminates the need for specialized servers to support specific applications or datatypes as well as the prohibitive training and management costs associated with them.

The server, with its inherent transactional logic, scalability, and performance, has proven itself in intensive electronic-commerce settings--as the engine for Amazon.com's transaction-processing environment, for example.

"The exponential growth we're experiencing requires a database system that can reliably handle a huge volume of orders in an around-the-clock electronic-commerce environment," says Amazon.com's Jeff Bezos. "It also implies a system that can easily scale as growth continues. Oracle fills the bill on both counts."

Amazon.com relies on an Oracle database to support its order-entry activities as well as to manage production database requirements and several home-grown software applications. The database is installed on an AlphaServer 8400 system, from Digital Equipment, running the Digital UNIX operating system. "The Oracle database running on the Alpha platform gives us the power and scalability we need to support high-volume transaction workloads," Bezos says.

"Many databases force users to choose between good performance and guaranteed data consistency," says Ivan Vazquez, a senior manager in Amazon.com's Technical Lead Systems Network Operations Center. "Oracle server always provides users with consistent query results, but it doesn't impose a performance penalty on concurrent update activity."

At the Center: Oracle Web Application Server

Oracle Web Application Server 3.0 provides an open, standards-based architecture, which is ideal for developing and deploying real-world business and commerce applications for the Web. Its scalable, distributed architecture and tight database integration are the foundation for supporting business-critical, transaction-based applications.

The industry's first transactional Web server, Oracle Web Application Server 3.0 allows users to maintain persistent Internet sessions between Web browsers, Web servers, and database servers for conducting real-time transactions over the Web. (Persistent sessions are necessary for conducting electronic transactions that are safe and reliable.)

Many electronic-commerce solutions are deployed on Oracle Web Application Server. Oracle's business-to-consumer solution, Internet Commerce Server, is an example. Several Oracle partners in the electronic-commerce market--including CyberCash, IC-Verify, MicroMass Communications, TanData, Taxware, and VeriFone--have also built solutions on Web Application Server (see http://www.oracle.com/nca/cart_catalog.html).

One example of an electronic-commerce site powered by Oracle universal data server and Oracle Web Application Server is the Book-of-the-Month Club's www.bomc.com. Users can search by subject, author, or title from a list of 2,600 books; browse literary information; and order the books online.

The Oracle solution allows BOMC to expand its market and provide new services to members, which marks BOMC's first new distribution channel in 71 years.

The next major release of Web Application Server, Oracle Application Server 3.1, is scheduled to be available in beta at press time. For more information, or to download a beta version, visit www.olab.com.

Oracle Self-Service Web Applications: Business-to-Business & More

Oracle's self-service Web Applications provide a platform for conducting business transactions across the Internet. With Oracle Web Employees, Oracle Web Customers, and Oracle Web Suppliers, a company's employees can use Web browsers to perform standard tasks such as entering orders and tracking shipments. When used over the Internet, Oracle Web Customers allows authorized customers to enter and view sales orders, track shipments, and verify payments. Suppliers can use Oracle Web Suppliers to review purchase orders, track inventories, and verify receipts.

Release 11 of Oracle Applications, due out soon, provides the third generation of self-service Web Applications, which opens the product's business-to-business paradigm to enable business with first-time registrants. Oracle Web Customers now supports credit card payments and includes a completely redesigned storefront. With the new release, salespeople can use the Web to enter quotes or orders on behalf of their customers, and customers can perform powerful catalog searches via Oracle's ConText search engine, automatically calculate freight and tax, and use the new Java-based Web Configurator to place validated orders for complex products that have many features and options.

Oracle's EC Consulting: Practice Makes It Easy

Oracle Consulting Services (OCS) has introduced an Electronic Commerce practice to help customers define, design, and establish solutions for conducting business transactions on the Internet. The new practice builds solutions to help businesses streamline distribution chains, reduce operating costs, and improve customer service by taking advantage of Oracle's electronic-commerce and Internet technologies. OCS also recently announced the National Center for Network Computing (see Product News).