My Oracle Open World Postings

It takes me a while to write my blog postings. I am very envious of those who do them in real time. However finally I am ready to close up the postings.

Before the event I talked about what I had planned and was expecting.

Then as the event finished I tweeted my main learning points which I intended to expand on.

The important messages to me at OOW were:

1. The Cloud - much better position than a year ago, but people were excited then. Then in June with a lot of noise there was an update that didn't really tell us anything, this was an opportunity to really launch the Oracle Cloud. Sadly people are still waiting.......

2. Fusion is doing well, I wrote about its first year in General Availability and to me the take up has been steady and successful. Oracle have added some acquisitions to their Fusion portfolio which is good, and their offerings are having some effect against the competition. I also talked about Oracle needing to have Fusion Applications in the cloud as that is where the biggest competition sits. 

My own Oracle Full Stack

Complete with pluggable database

3. So even though 'I am not technical' I understand why it is important to bring innovation into the database and 12c is about making cloud computing easier. I am a bit confused about how much we are allowed to talk about, at the ACE Director briefings I heard all about the 'Pluggable Database' and what it would do for the database but I was under NDA. At OOW it was talked about by many people but now I hear it is back to secret. So my advice, download anything about 12 now while it is still available.

4. Really important to us all is mobile, and I am glad to see the strategy for Fusion Mobile being explained and even more to be part of the demo team.  Fusion Apps are all about the technology so for me the best development in middleware was ADF mobile.

5. In my tweets I mentioned APEX. This no cost database option is amazing and yet only last week someone asked me how much it cost? Sometimes Oracle have no cost products and people don't take them seriously. In my applications world I would suggest products like Desktop Integrator fall into this category. But this year there was lots of APEX content at OOW and I hope now every developer will not only look at it but show their management the value.

6. If Oracle has the right next generation applications, running in the cloud, developed in the best middleware with the greatest database, then you need the right hardware. Oracle believe Engineered Systems are the answer and sales of Exadata continue to impress. Exalogic and Exalytics are becoming more common.

Oracle announced Exadata X3, 20 times faster than X2 and now available with 1/8 rack rather than 1/4 as entry point. 

7. That nicely brings me to Fujitsu's presence, and I look forward to seeing Larry's prophecy about our Sparc adding even more speed to Oracle systems.

8. I did miss out on many things, there were 2,523 Sessions but in all honesty I made about 3 outside of my own presentations. What I regret not being able to see were the enhancements in EBS. I did see a couple at the ACE Briefings arranged by Elke helps who was an ACE Director but now works for Oracle.

EBS ACE Director sessions with Elke

Oracle showcased no downtime patching for Oracle E Business Suite available after 12.2. This is based on Edition Based Redefinition which has been available in the database for almost 2 years.

Endeca another acquisition that allows analysis in real time of data including unstructured as in twitter feed; I am really excited about the many opportunities for this.

Oracle Open World is a great opportunity to meet up with old friends. Concentrating on Fusion meant apart from these two sessions I didn't get to see Cliff Godwin or Nadia Bendjedou. I did go to an EBS reception to try and catch them but they had left. I caught up with Steven Chan and can't wait till UKOUG2012 when all 3 will be over.

One important message from OOW on EBS was another change in their support policy for EBS and changes to lifetime and extended support. Please read his article it answers a lot of questions, but to me this is just adding confusion. Changing the rules makes it very difficult for people to plan. I know upgrades must be about the business benefit but this doesn't help.

I had a great time at OOW, I was able to be truly mobile with my new tablet and my posting about that has made me popular in the office :-)

Oracle Open World is very intense and a lot of hard work, but it is also fun.

Till next time September 22-26, 2013.........