CEPs embrace digital customer engagement as a defining capability, and this year’s evaluation put additional emphasis on experience orchestration, AI, and automation, and customer data management. This data-centric focus on digital automation and engagement reflects the needs to do more with less in 2020 and beyond as Omdia cites, “75% of enterprises consider customer experience more important since the COVID-19 lockdown.” As it turns out, this CEP category and vision is a reflection of Oracle’s own strategy. 

Oracle CX’s vision and technology strengths 

Omdia recognizes that one of the significant reasons for our leading position is our unification strategy. As mentioned in the report, “While individual applications are continually evolving, Oracle invests heavily in cross-application, cross-platform development to create and harness a unified adaptive CEP. This is a significant reason why Oracle is ranked equal first in this Omdia Universe.”

Oracle’s unification cuts ‘longitudinally’ according to Omdia, which we view in four layers: 

1. Connected, cloud native infrastructure and services

2. Connected engagement and extensibility tools

3. Connected data and insights

4. Connected experiences and applications

One, secure cloud 

Oracle invested billions in building its second-generation Cloud infrastructure. Because all of Oracle’s SaaS applications run on common cloud infrastructure, applications inherit performance and security in a consistent manner—and it’s all built-in so CX customers don’t have to make trade-off decisions: 

• Global Scale. Our cloud investments rapidly scaled over the past four years. We have 28 regions live as of November 2020 and more than a dozen planned. In addition, we offer in-region disaster recovery—which is especially important for compliance with privacy regulations.

• Autonomous operations. OCI gen.2 is the only provider of autonomous database—the database behind most of our applications—which alleviates the need for patching, tuning, upgrades, and other forms of maintenance due to the use of AI/ML. Machine-learning-based security can neutralize malicious sources before they become a threat. Collectively, autonomous cloud services reduce human error risk, making our cloud more secure and more resilient. 

• Security-by-design. OCI is built for the world’s most security-intense data. With end-to-end encryption—data at rest and data in transit—using Oracle’s Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) and Database Vault. You control the TDE master encryption key and manage its lifecycle. For identity and access, we use the principles of least-privilege access and default-deny when granting access to production systems with Oracle Identity Cloud Service (IDCS), or the identity and access management solution of your choice. 

No walled gardens—extensible engagement services

Oracle CX applications enjoy full PaaS support and native extensibility. The tools and skills are not locked into a specific ecosystem either, but rather embrace open standards to allow any developer or systems integrator (SI) partner to ramp up quickly. This ultimately drives down cost and speeds time-to-value. Oracle provides the full-breadth of extensibility tooling and resources: 

● API-first. All Oracle CX applications are API-first. As a result, developers will always get well-documented REST API support and code samples. But we don’t stop there, as we also provide API design and development tooling, along with a full-fledge API Gateway service to drive monitoring and scaling of your API services. 

● Low-code. Whether it’s visual or conversational UI, extending Oracle CX into new experiences is made easy with Visual Builder and Digital Assistant—which are native to our next-generation UX and ship with our CX applications. Similarly, plugging front-office solutions into third-party, legacy, or on-premise systems is supported through AI-based field mapping, process design, and low-code integration that can accelerate implementation and integration maintenance by a factor of 6!

● Content everywhere. Oracle Content Managment handles everything from digital documents, like MS Word and PDF, to digital assets like marketing images, product descriptions, and how-to videos. These files are supported with a streamlined, intuitive, AI-assisted creation workflow. As a centralized content hub, Oracle CX Content can ingest data from many sources, and using ML, can tag and organize them to make them more findable. Content is API-enabled and CDN-delivered into any application or experience.  

Scaling relevant experiences—unified data & intelligence 

Oracle CX applications share a core set of experience services. These services scale independently, surface inside of applications with role-relevant UI, and work together natively. Oracle’s broad approach includes a full set of core records, real-time behaviors, and unified business objects:

● Pervasive customer profile. Oracle Unity Customer Data Platform provides a built-in segmentation and can be activated via the rich Profiles API. The solution can ingest many types of data and can merge data, remove duplicates, and promote to create a master profile. Omdia highlights, “The ability to connect and synthesize customer data ingested from across the entire enterprise through Oracle Unity, which, to differentiate it from CDPs that typically have a narrower scope as part of a marketing stack, Oracle calls an enterprise customer intelligence platform.”

● Real-time behavioral data. CX Infinity Tag is in place to listen for events and Infinity Streams provides access to view a continuous flow of real-time online activity enriched with visitor information. It is not a database. Rather, it is a stream of data that you can access as each event happens and then further process as needed. You can segment and filter streaming data on any collected attribute. Event data is captured and an advanced processing engine rapidly analyzes and enriches the event data. The data is then made available via the Streams API.

● Front-to-back-office business objects. Business objects allow you to master data in one place, including contacts, accounts, products, service requests and more, are the foundation for true customer engagement across online and offline channels, and over the lifetime of the customer’s journey. Oracle’s broad footprint means business objects work across front and back office systems. That means integration and data synchronization work between systems is simply eliminated—for implementation and going forward. 

Prescriptive UX across all applications drives productivity

Omdia calls out Oracle’s “Redwood intelligent user experience (UX), which provides an intuitive user experience and offers contextual insights depending on the tasks being performed.” Enabling CX professionals with highly-tailored, prescriptive user experiences scales productivity and best practices. Behind the scenes, AI surfaces the right experience for the customer at the right time, reducing guesswork and optimizing for business results. Omdia also highlights how this approach ties embeds Oracle’s deep industry expertise into new industry data models and net-new industry applications.

To learn more, download a free excerpt copy of the Omdia Universe: Selecting a Customer Engagement Platform, 2020-21 report. Or, if you would like to dive a little deeper, feel free to visit our webpage where you can learn more about our CX solution and engage with our specialists to learn more. 

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