An Introduction To Oracle Real-Time Decisions

James Knight

Apr 27, 2012 • 2 min read

Firstly hello, I’m James Knight. Having recently joined Rittman Mead I was pleasantly surprised to find that we are encouraged to share our knowledge and experiences via this blog. So hence, here I am.

You may have heard of Oracle Real-Time Decisions (RTD), but aren’t fully aware of what it's about. Why you are reading my waffle is that I’ve led a number of RTD implementations. Additionally, I’ve been fortune enough to spend time with other RTD customers and with the RTD product team, so in theory I should have some knowledge to share.

I thought you might be interested in finding out more as the product is going down a storm with customers that have implemented it. For example, a global financial services organisation with 10 million customers visiting its website in one month generated 100% conversion uplift, and one of the largest US retailers with over 70,000 products achieved a 25% lift in sales rates compared to control.

So, what is this RTD? Oracle say... “The RTD platform combines both rules and predictive analytics to power solutions that provide real-time automated decisions”. I think of RTD as a Q&A box, which can answer any question. In order to do this, I need to provide the system with all the possible answers or choices and input data (for example, customer data). Each time the system is asked for a decision it will provide the most relevant choice by scoring all of the available choices based on the input data. I can automate the upload of the inputs and the choices (for example, by integrating with CMS solution for the available banners and associated metadata). Sounds simple, but under the covers there is a ton of clever stuff going on and lots of clever solutions you can provide through its use.

Having the inside track on this product, I’ll be taking a few articles to share with you how RTD works and why I think it’s so interesting. Here’s a glimpse of some of the topics we will be covering:

Potential uses for RTD
Why Oracle RTD
When not to use
Hardware requirements and technical integration
Project timescale and resource example

We’ll also be getting under the covers of Oracle RTD and showing that you can get inside the magic black box to understand how and why it’s making particular decisions and how you can learn from the data and correlations that RTD makes and use this information within a wider business context.

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