Collaborate 2010 Roundup

The UKOUG Partner Forum had an Oracle Open World Highlights webcast for those who did not make it to OOW, and we planned to have another for after Collaborate 2010. We are still novices at this technology and after several successful webcasts recently, got a little ahead of ourselves. We tried to run two at the same time and the service we were using failed to allow this. Luckily my employer has a webcast service and we were able to quickly switch. Apologies to the few who had registered but did not get the alternative details in time.

It wasn't my first update for Collaborate, I had had the honour of taking part in an ACE Director Webcast the evening before arranged by Floyd Teter of OAUG.

The first thing I would say is twitter is a great way to take notes in real time. FMTSystems who hosted the OAUG webcast tweeted as we went along, these tweets as well as those that happened during the event can we found by searching twitter for '#C10', not just updates of the content from Collaborate but also the thoughts and buzz of the conference.

Back to UKOUG and our webcast, Suzanne our Marketing Manager went first and talked about the Keynotes. Charles Philips gave his via videolink and talked about the new Oracle post Sun and what that would give customers. I think this was predictable and in a way disappointing. For the past 3 / 4 years Oracle have used Collaborate as a second place after Open World to give big announcements and there was little of that this year.

Thomas Kurian was there in person and talked in a lot more detail. His entire presentation is available as a video, worth a listen if you haven't heard the current Oracle Presentation.

IBM had a keynote and Suzanne had attended and thought their topic of Governance and Compliance and how too much data can compromise that was a very good compliment to the event.

The Product keynotes were very good, with the executives giving up to the minute information on their product development.

But what did we learn from Collaborate? Numbers were up, both delegates and exhibitors, and the value of delegates was still good. We saw last year that people have to justify their attendance and this is still going on.

What are customers doing? In the EBS world, they are a lot upgrading or starting to and it was good to see so many upgrade sessions, but a lot are staying still. Economic or business reasons are forcing this and they need to know they won't be left out in the cold. Steven Chan gave an excellent presentation on the technology stack roadmap. Floyd is writing a book on the reasons for upgrading and hopes to have this ready by OOW.

The same is true of the database, a lot of people are just looking now at 11g. IOUG held an excellent debate on 'to upgrade or not' with people putting both sides of the argument across.

The conference co-incided with a live webcast of 11g Grid Control OEM which was streamed into the conference.

On the Sunday there was a Fusion 'Soup to Nuts' day similar to what we held in the UKOUG conference series TEBS event, but without the applications demos. This was very well received with a lot of questions and debate. Again it showed how many people are not yet using the new technology, e.g. BI publisher which has now been around for several years.

Some presenters were affected by the volcano but not too many delegates. IOUG managed to stream some of the missing presenters like our own Carl Dudley, and many were able to have friends present their papers for them. A few like me went for the low tech approach and used skype.

Floyd mentioned in his roundup the debate around the CFO replacing the CIO. I haven't read the article but have seen this myself recently, the roles are being combined especially in organisations who want out of running IT themselves, especially the hardware. So plenty of opportunity for outsourcing or cloud services.

Finally I want to mention support, there are a lot of things that Oracle Support have done to make running your systems easier but getting the message ac cross is not easy, their reputation has been badly damaged over the My Oracle Support issues. However as I said in a previous post I am saying nothing bad about Support at the moment, they came to my rescue after the volcano.