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Let’s all raise a cup of coffee to toast the success of Oracle Mobile and Chatbot!

A few years ago, Oracle unveiled Oracle Mobile Cloud Service (MCS), the first step in our ambitious mobile-first strategy. MCS enjoyed tremendous success, in some cases helping customers garner industry accolades for their mobile apps.  Both Forrester and Gartner recognized MCS as an industry leader. Impressive? You bet. But it was only the beginning.

“Oracle is in the Leaders quadrant this year, which is a move from the Challengers quadrant in 2016. Oracle has achieved a significant increase in MADP sales, primarily from its Oracle Applications installed base. It continues to build on its platform with chatbot support and expanded analytics, and to enhance its high-productivity development tool” (Gartner)

Just a few weeks after launching Oracle Cloud Platform for Mobile and Chatbots Oracle earns a spot in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Mobile App Development Platforms. 

No matter what your favorite hot drink is – whether you’re a flat white person or a short macchiato or a ‘long-black-with-a-dash-of-hot-milk” like me today I’d like to conduct a bit of an experiment with you. Have you ever asked a Conversational Bot driven by AI to order coffee for you? No? Well today you can with the Oracle Coffee Bot! Are you ready?

  1. Hopefully you have a Facebook account. If you don’t I’m sorry at the moment the CoffeeBot is available for the following channels: Facebook Messanger and Amazon Alexa. We’re working to make it accessible from a simple Web Page or within a Mobile App.
  2. Search for @anzcoffeebot in Messenger to find the page easily or open the CoffeeBot Page in a separate tab and click “Send Message”. This Bot was originally built for Telstra Vantage hence the name “TelstraCoffee” 🙂
  3. Well now all you have to do is ask your “BaristaMadeBot” what you’re after and just converse with it!
  4. Has the Bot submitted your order? Awesome! We’ve received your order, you can see it yourself here. If there was a Barista serving coffee now at a Coffee Cart near you you’d enjoy your coffee or tea. Don’t worry the ANZ Digital Experience team wants to meet you, so we’ll try and set up a Coffee Cart powered by the Oracle Coffee Bot in your city. Just let us know!

I hope you had a bit of fun with the Bot. If you want to know what runs in the “backstage” of the Coffee Bot and how Oracle Mobile Cloud enables you to build intelligent chatbots that connect to any backend system please continue reading. You won’t be disappointed!

Continue reading “Let’s all raise a cup of coffee to toast the success of Oracle Mobile and Chatbot!”

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Intelligent Bots improve customer experience

“Your call is important to us. Please continue to hold” Does this sound familiar? Imagine the frustration at the other end of the line your customers have to go through while the query might be as simple as “what is my credit score ”?

In this new digital world if a customer has to wait for 15–30 mins to speak to an agent there is something fundamentally wrong with the way an Enterprise operates. Throwing more agents to respond to queries or moving your call center to a developing country is definitely not the way you want to scale and reduce your call time to few seconds. How do we solve this problem? We need an intelligent virtual assistant or a chatbot that can understand the natural language, process the query, talk to one or more systems in the background, aggregate the information from these systems and provide a response instantly so that the customer can easily digest.

Continue reading “Intelligent Bots improve customer experience”

Exploring GitHub Docker Hub and OCCS Part 4

In my previous post in this series I covered linking GitHub and DockerHub and configuring the environment such that a build of a Docker image was triggered on updates to GitHub. In this final post of the series I will take you through the steps to pull the image from Docker Hub into OCCS in order to run the application. It should be noted that the image built on Docker Hub in my example is only the web tier that contains my Node.js project (APIs and SwaggerUI). The MongoDB component of my OCCS Stack is pulled directly from Docker Hub when my Stack containing the Web Tier and Database Tier services is deployed to OCCS. Continue reading “Exploring GitHub Docker Hub and OCCS Part 4”

Entities and Intents: crawling through Natural Language Processing

“I’m afraid that the following syllogism may be used by some in the future.

Turing believes machines think
Turing lies with men
Therefore machines do not think

Yours in distress,

Alan”
(Alan Turing)

The journey started five months ago when I went to Bangkok to attend the Intelligence Chatbots Masters Training run by Oracle Product Management. Since then, I’ve been lucky enough to dive deeper into the world of Natural Language Processing. While I think it’ll take me a while to transition from crawling into walking through this fascinating world I’m happy to start sharing my findings.

This blog is about Entities and Intents which are the key building blocks for Natural Language Processing.

Continue reading “Entities and Intents: crawling through Natural Language Processing”

Multi Factor Authentication is Critical for Everyone

In today’s environment where systems run in the cloud and so much business and personal activity occurs online, passwords are not strong enough by themselves to protect applications. Scandals about password breaches seem to happen on a regular basis. It’s easy to find many case studies where passwords have been compromised as a result of malware, email scams and other techniques. The key point is that no matter how strong our passwords, no matter how much we educate our users, there will be situations where people are caught off guard and click on the wrong link, look at the wrong email or open the wrong document. Once this happens, our passwords can be compromised.

Continue reading “Multi Factor Authentication is Critical for Everyone”

ACCS Zero Downtime Updates and Re-Deployments

The May 2017 update for ACCS (17.2.3) brought a cool new feature to ACCS, zero-downtime updates. While previously, there was support for performing a rolling restart of an application instance, where each instance would be brought down and updated in turn, this only enabled zero-downtime updates if you had an application running two or more instances, and your application could satisfy performance requirements with one fewer node. While any production system should be able to satisfy these requirements, many of the utility systems I ran were on a single node, and I had to send out an email blast to avoid being disruptive when I wanted to push a quick code fix.

Continue reading “ACCS Zero Downtime Updates and Re-Deployments”

Teaching how to integrate Twitter with Integration Cloud Service

This blog shows you how to use the Twitter ICS Connector that comes out of the box in Oracle Integration Cloud Service.

Obtain your Twitter Connector in ICS

In order to create a Twitter Connector you need to first go to Twitter developers portal and create an access token. For this:

  • Login to the Twitter Developer portal at https://dev.twitter.com/
  • ON the top right, click on My apps and follow the link to log in (sign up if you don’t have an account yet).

Continue reading “Teaching how to integrate Twitter with Integration Cloud Service”

Oracle Developer Days, Partner Technical Forum – Melbourne

Join us at this 2 day Partner Technical Forum (PTF) being held on Tuesday 9th & Wednesday 10th May 2017 in our Melbourne office at Level 5, 417 St Kilda Road.

On the 1st day, hear about the latest updates on Oracle Cloud IAAS and PAAS Strategy & Portfolio.

Oracle Cloud Platform Practitioners sharing latest Cloud Announcements & Roadmaps for areas such as:

  •     Application Container, Oracle Container & Developer Cloud Services
  •     Integration Capabilities, PAAS for SAAS
  •     App Builder, Process & Mobile Cloud Services
  •     APIs, Devops & Microservices
  •     Identity Management

If you choose to attend the 2nd day, join the “Hands-On” experience with a number of the above Cloud Services.

For those attending Day 1 and/or Day 2, you are also invited to the PTF Dinner following Day 1, on Tuesday 9th May at the Royce Hotel.

For further details visit the registration page:   http://bit.ly/PTF-melb

Learning How to Write Cloud Native Apps

Throughout my development experience, I feel that I have had several major bursts-of-learning, due to problems which have made me re-evaluate how I approach architecting and developing a solution. I feel these ultimately make me better as a programmer, or at the very least, more versatile. I am sure some of these bouts of learning and understanding are near universal, experienced by most developers, such as understanding parallelisation, but others are somewhat more specialised, such as when I first started writing games, where having to take 60+ snapshots of a continuously evolving environment every second completely changed how I thought about performance and accuracy. Developing Cloud-Native applications (and indeed micro-service based applications, which share very similar principles) feels as though it is one of these moments in my development experience, and I feel it might be interesting to reflect upon that learning process.

I see the problem statement for Cloud-Native applications as something akin to: ‘you have no idea how many instances of your application will be running, you have no idea where they will be in relation to one another and you have no idea which one will be hit for any particular call’. That is a lot of unknowns to account for in your code, and forces you to think very carefully about how you architect and develop your applications.

Continue reading “Learning How to Write Cloud Native Apps”

Getting Your VMs into the Oracle Cloud with Ravello

We were looking into some of the VM images that we have. Some of them were very useful but we were wanting to host them in the cloud for the upcoming workshops.

Ravello is a cloud service that allow you to import and manage your VMs or stacks of VMs on public cloud. The interesting part of this is that the service can use our cloud infrastructure or a third party cloud. Ravello manages the costs but also adds simple capability to manage your VMs better.

Here’s a quick guide to putting VMs (I did a VirtualBox image but it can be any type) in the Oracle Cloud with Ravello.

Continue reading “Getting Your VMs into the Oracle Cloud with Ravello”

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