From Essbase-driven speed in multi-dimensional analysis to SmartView’s seamless MS Office integration, this guide shows how Oracle is transforming data into actionable intelligence.

At Quest’s BLUEPRINT 4D, Marcel Esqueu, VP of Financial System Transformation and Financial Close for The Guardian Life Insurance Company of America, shared his team’s experience transitioning from PeopleSoft to Oracle Cloud.

Guardian has provided mutual life insurance to customers for over 150 years and currently serves 39 million customers throughout the U.S. With a rich history of success and millions of customers relying on its services, company leaders are committed to evolving the tech stack as better technology comes available.

Enterprises can no longer slow down or stop―for even a minute. The costs are simply too high. Industry estimates put the average cost of IT downtime at $5,600 a minute, with the range of losses between $140,000 and $540,000 per hour. As part of their efforts to keep this expensive downtime at bay―and to ensure the continued viability and availability of data flowing through enterprises, data managers are increasingly turning to strategies such as automation and cloud services. Still, they continue to have difficulties and acknowledge that keeping their data environments up-to-date is holding them back from delivering more capabilities to their organizations.

Happy August to all our Quest members! Here is some key information about your membership this month.

During Quest Forum Digital Event: Emerging Technology Day, Carlos Chang, Oracle Product Marketing, presented how Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse, Oracle Analytics Cloud, and Oracle Digital Assistant offer seamless conversational access to make ad-hoc queries like never before. Data is the fuel for AI – the 21st century equivalent to what electricity did for the 20th century. AI will change everything, and companies that aggregate data from multiple sources, enriched with AI, will have a distinct advantage.

Dhvani Sheth, Solution Engineer at Oracle, showed how Oracle Analytics Cloud and Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse can provide useful data analysis and visualization to HR departments. Hiring the right people requires a lot of time, money, and effort. However, hiring the wrong people can be just as costly, if not more so. Without using data analytics to make data-driven decisions, HR departments may be prone to hire based on a cognitive bias that they aren’t aware of. Instead of using traditional techniques, HR can use data analytics and visualization to find patterns within large volumes of data to make insightful hiring decisions for the company.