Reference no: EM133423554
Case: LFor 25 years, Maruti Suzuki has been the industry leader in India's passenger car market, the fastest growing worldwide. Since 1995, Maruti Suzuki has built its IT infrastructure on Oracle database and technologies, including Oracle Real Application Clusters, Oracle Fusion Middleware Application Server and Weblogic. Maruti Suzuki has built its Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system on Oracle E-Business Suite and added Hyperion Enterprise to enhance financial consolidation and reporting efficiency further. Oracle Corporation is a database software company specializing in developing and marketing enterprise
software products. The company was co-founded in 1977 by Larry Ellison, a Chicagoan with little formal training in databases but some practical experience working with the nonrelational databases of the period. Through organic growth and several high-profile acquisitions, Oracle enlarged its software market
share. By 2013 Oracle ranked third on the list of largest software companies in the world, after Microsoft and IBM. It has a market capitalization of $166 billion, placing it in the top 20 IT firms in the United States, just behind Coca-Cola and JPMorgan Chase bank. Its main competitors in enterprise software today are
SAP and IBM. Ellison took inspiration from a 1970 paper written by Edgar F. Codd on relational database systems named "A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks." IBM was developing its own relational database software known as DB2 that operated on IBM mainframes. Ellison and Oracle began developing their relational database software on UNIX and later Windows
operating systems. You may find some of the terms used in the video are new and refer to specific elements of Oracle's suite. Oracle's Real Application Clusters (Oracle RAC) is an Oracle Database 11g Enterprise Edition option. RAC supports the deployment of a single database across a cluster of servers
located throughout the firm providing fault tolerance, performance, and scalability with no application changes necessary. Oracle's Fusion Middleware is a set of software services (applications) that enable multiple applications
in a firm (often from different vendors) to work together by sharing information. So-called "middleware" can be purchased from large vendors like IBM, HP, and Microsoft and thousands of smaller suppliers. The software enables services that allow multiple processes running on one or more machines to interact
across a network. This technology evolved to provide for interoperability in support of the move to coherent distributed architectures, which are often used to support and simplify complex, distributed applications. It includes Web servers, application servers, and similar tools that support application
development and delivery. Middleware is especially integral to modern information technology based on XML, SOAP, Web services, and service-oriented architecture. Most important, middleware enables a firm
to retain older legacy systems and put them to use in a modern, distributed, TCP/IP communications-oriented environment." Hyperion is performance-oriented management software, sometimes also called business intelligence
software. It is an application that works with Oracle databases and Oracle data warehouses to provide real-time data, as well as periodic MIS reports to managers. Hyperion supports near-real-time transaction reporting, graphics and summaries of data, and management dashboards.
Together these tools make up Oracle's "E-business suite."
Questions about the case (use bullet points whenever it's possible and makes sense):
1. What business challenges did Maruti Suzuki management face before adopting the Oracle suite?
2. What advantages does Maruti Suzuki derive from working with a single vendor, Oracle? What are the possible risks of working with a single vendor?
3. What are the business benefits reported by management to using the Oracle suite of products?