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Last week some of the most well-known Oracle Commerce customers and industry experts met at the Oracle offices in Cambridge, MA to hear industry news, share their experiences with the platform and learn best practices. Inspired by ATG Insight, the Oracle Commerce Insight East is one of the series of ATG and Endeca community meet-ups organized by Spark::red every year; the previous event, Insight West, took place earlier this year in San Francisco.

Attendees started the day by learning about new features and functionality that Oracle Product Team is currently working on and will be adding to the on-premise solution in the next releases. The presentation was given by Gary Kirschner, Director of Product Management at Oracle.

The second session of the day was a panel discussion with Vitamix (who just recently launched Oracle Commerce site) as well as Deluxe Checks and Furniture Row (both have been using the platform for nearly a decade). Panel members explored challenges they faced during the initial implementation and those they deal with on a day-to-day basis, how those challenges are being addressed, lessons learned, and much more. The panel covered the following topics:

  • Deployments (how often they have them, how to make deployments faster, possible issues during deployments, and how to minimize risks);
  • Migration from the in-house to the 3rd party hosting (reasons, challenges, risks, and benefits);
  • Site speed improvement tips;
  • Site optimization for increased traffic;
  • Future plans, etc.

During lunch and between sessions, Oracle Commerce customers had a chance to connect with each other and some of the most knowledgeable ATG and Endeca experts in a casual environment. Many attendees found that a narrow focus and smaller size of the event facilitated deeper discussions.

“I found it a useful day. I have to scrutinize any time out of the office very carefully and yet I found this worth it. The small scale was refreshing.”

– Mark Bauer, Manager of eCommerce Projects at TJX.

“I definitely liked it and would like to attend more of this in the future.”

– Hazlitt Noronha, Sr. Director of E-Business & Digital Technology at Ann Inc.

“What I really liked about the Spark::red Insight event was the diverse mix of participants, all sharing their best practices about what had worked well for them.”

– Ace Bhattacharjya, Founder at MedicalRecords.com.

Founding Partner at Spark::red and an ATG architect, Devon Hillard, kicked off the second half of the day and walked the audience through the performance optimization lessons that he learned working on ATG projects for the last 17 years. Devon focused his presentation on ways to increase site performance through caching – all the way from the database and app tier to the Web, CDN and Browser.

Oracle Commerce Performance and ROI Maximization (Caching) from Spark::red

After the presentation, Devon introduced the latest version of the Spark::red ATG PayPal Integration Module, the only PayPal-certified integration for Oracle Commerce that is available to the community for free. If you need help optimizing your ATG application and would like to talk to Devon, email [email protected].

Closing the event, Peter Curran, Co-Founder of Cirrus10 and Endeca expert shared with the audience Endeca performance optimization tips and offered real-world examples of Endeca-related problems and their solutions. If you would like to talk to Peter, you can contact him directly at [email protected].

The event was a great success, and we would like to thank our sponsors, presenters, and everyone who joined us for this year’s Oracle Commerce Insight East!

We’ve already begun planning next year’s events the first of which will be Oracle Commerce Insight West 2016 which will take place in San Francisco next May. If you are an Oracle Commerce customer and would like to attend the next Oracle Commerce Insight event, you can register here. If you are an Oracle partner and interested in sponsoring or attending, please email [email protected] directly.