The assignment for Case 4 is two parts. The materials in the Case will demonstrate why it is important to view databases as a set of technologies to support efficient operations, business collaboration, and decision making. You will be introduced to concepts like data warehouses, data marts, data mining, and business intelligence as the survival strategies in today's competitive environment.

Case Assignment Part I

Maruti Suzuki
According to Oracle (2009), "for the past 25 years, Maruti Suzuki has been the industry leader in India's passenger car market, the fastest growing in world. 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 further enhance financial consolidation and reporting efficiency."

Oracle Corporation
You may find some of the terms used in the Maruti Suzuki video are new and refer to specific elements of Oracle's suite. For this reason, the following literature was compiled and included here directly from Oracle (2009).

Oracle Corporation specializes in developing and marketing enterprise software products particularly database management systems. Through organic growth and a number of high-profile acquisitions, Oracle enlarged its share of the software market. By 2007 Oracle ranked third on the list of largest software companies in the world, after Microsoft and IBM. Subsequently it became larger than IBM after its acquisition of Hyperion and BEA.

The corporation has arguably become best-known due to association with its flagship Oracle database. The company also builds tools for database development, middle-tier software, enterprise resource planning software (ERP), customer relationship management software (CRM) and supply chain management (SCM) software.

Oracle's Real Application Clusters (Oracle RAC), is an option to Oracle Database 11g Enterprise Edition. 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 many large vendors like IBM, HP, Microsoft as well as from thousands of smaller suppliers. 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 a 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."

After reading the course materials and watching the video, please answer the following questions in 3-4 pages.

1. What were the businesses challenges facing Maruti Suzuki management prior to 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 were the important business factors which management used to evaluate Oracle's database offerings?

4. Why was it important that a vendor's products be able to integrate with "legacy systems"?

Case Assignment Part II

For part II, the main readings for the second part of the case are focused on Gallaugher's Chapter 12, A Managers Guide to the Internet and Telecommunications. Chapter 12 describes the various technologies that make up the Internet infrastructure in order to find the information that one looks for and require to access. For the information to travel fast, the Internet needs the speed and capacity of telecommunication systems, which is known as bandwidth. The speed and capacity of data transmission are measured in bits per second (BPS) or commonly referred as baud rate. For transmission purposes, narrow band channels operate low speed transmission rates of 64K BPS whereas medium speed channels transmit at the speed of 100 MBS.

As stated in Laudon and Laudon (2012) learning track 4, broadband channels provide high-speed transmission rates of 256,000 BPS to billion BPS. The various channels for transmission use microwave, fiber optics, or satellite transmissions, for which each have their own transmission speed.

After reading the course materials, please answer the following questions in 3-4 pages.

What advantages could broadband offer to underserved areas of the world? Is Internet access important for economic development? Why or why not?