Oracle Magazine - March/April 2012

“With the engineering behind Oracle Database Appliance, the
grunt work has already been done for you.”

—Jason Scinocca, Chief Technology Officer, CallSource

Oracle Database Appliance is perfect for a company with a database in the 1- to 2-terabyte range, says CallSource Chief Technology Officer Jason Scinotta (center), pictured here with CallSource CEO Jerry Feldman (left) and President Elliott Lieboff.

WELL-TAILORED

CallSource, the world’s largest call-tracking company, recently faced the decision about how to best upgrade its I T infrastructure. With more than 200 employees and US$50 million in annual revenue, CallSource is the epitome of a thriving midsize company. On any given day, the Westlake Village, California, firm tracks up to 2 million ads for 300,000 clients in the United States and Canada. The company developed the first patented call-tracking technology 20 years ago and has since expanded its product portfolio to call recording, call analysis, marketing analysis, performance measurement, training, and other services.

Last fall CallSource realized that the company’s IT infrastructure,
which supports the company’s core mission-critical Oracle Database
11 g applications, needed an upgrade. “It was time,” says CallSource
Chief Technology Officer Jason Scinocca. “The servers were two-plus
years old and couldn’t handle the current load or future growth.”
In the past, Scinocca says, such an overhaul would have been
costly, complex, and time-consuming. Each component of the new
system—servers, database, operating system, storage, networking,
and so on—would have to be researched,
tested for compatibility, purchased, and
stitched together, and then tested and
retested before being put into production.
Most daunting of all was the cost: according
to Scinocca’s own research, a system with all
the features that CallSource needed—high
performance, high availability, redundancy,
large main memory, terabytes of storage,
expansion capability, and more—would cost
hundreds of thousands of dollars.

IDEAL SERVER

Oracle Database Appliance is a new member of Oracle’s growing family of engineered systems, which includes Oracle Exadata, Oracle Exalogic, and Oracle Exalytics. Introduced in September 2011, Oracle Database Appliance was designed from the ground up for midsize firms such as CallSource, says Judson Althoff, senior vice president of Worldwide Alliances and Channels at Oracle. “We built Oracle Database Appliance to be the ideal server for customers who are just under the threshold of considering the smallest form factor of our Oracle Exadata line,” Althoff adds.

“Oracle Database Appliance targets a broad customer base in which simplicity, ease of use, and little or lights-out management are of critical concern,” Althoff explains. “It provides customers with a complete stack, including the operating environment, the manage-