Monday, October 26, 2009

Paper, paper, paper.....

Take a look around you - how much paper can you see on your desk? Does your desk look like this?



You might laugh at this or may have seen the picture before somewhere on the web. What the picture does is illustrate how a lot of companies still operate - event in today's highly-digitally focused world. Interestingly enough, there are ECM vendors out there who will tell you that you need a repository to store your unstructured information digitally - scan in the paper, get rid of the clutter on your desk you will hear them say. Unfortunately, they're wrong - simply implementing a repository will not solve the issue and you will end up with a rapid build-up of paper on desks soon after the system goes live. Not a good way to demonstrate your ROI from the million-dollar investment you just made!

So, what is the solution?

Simply put, a content repository is not the answer on its own. This really only moves the problem to the 'right', it does help store and manage the information digitally but without addressing the core business reasons why paper is used in the first place - the solution will only work in the short term. The user community will find a way of reintroducing paper processes back into the workplace and the status-quo will be returned quite quickly.

At the core of the problem is a requirement to process information physically and a level of distrust in digital management and processes. If a user holds a sheet of paper that has been wet-signed by a user then that is a tangible piece of evidence in the process. The document may be a plan or diagram relating to a piece of plant in a manufacturing organisation or may be related to the sign-off of a maintenance step in keeping an aircraft in the air safely. If and when things go wrong - the user will point back to the document and the signature it contains. Digitally, of course, the same process and outcome can be achieved but because there is no physical item in a user's hand it just doesn't seem as tangible as evidence.

So, focusing on the process is equally, if not more important that providing the initial solution of paper-management.The other key driver to permanently reducing the paper overload within an organisation is to address the question of end-user change-management early in the implementation project. By early, I mean during the project initiation meetings if possible. If users feel that they are not part of the process of designing a system for them - they are probably not going to adopt it with open arms when it comes to 'go-live'. Also, if a user feels that the project team has a detailed understanding and empathy with their process and daily-lives - they will be more open to engaging with you during the project and supporting the solution when it enters the production environment. In many project's I've worked on - the best and most proactive salespeople I've worked with have been within a customer-office selling a solution we've jointly conceived and delivered. This is a powerful message to take to market - especially when your customers are employees within an organistion.

The last option that exists for the project is to simply take away the physical ability to manage paper - make desks and cubicles smaller, remove printers from the office-floor and introduce secure paper-recycling schemes. If all else fails - this might work, mightn't it? If you're faced with a paper-challenge, some vendors may simply tell you to implement their repository and remove the ability for people to print. This might work in the short term - but eventually you'll have piles of paper back on people's desks. When this happens, give Oracle a call!

Paul

...and, by the way, aside from the box of tissues my desk has a grand total of 8 sheets of paper on it!

Tuesday, October 20, 2009

Let us do all the hard work!

Its worth watching this video chat between Oracle ANZ's Managing Director, Ian White, and ZDnet Australia's Chris Duckett (@dobes) at Openworld last week to understand how Oracle is innovating the software business. Ian makes the point that after a decade of implementing vanilla ERP and heavily customising it to match the orgnaisation's processes (with all the upgrade path hell that involves); customers are increasingly looking to vendors to wear the burden of customisation and adapt processes to fit the software so that upgrades etc are as painless and cost-free as possible.



Mr White also makes some very valuable comments about the health of the business here in ANZ, about Exadata V2 and the partnership with Sun; not to mention about how customers are increasingly augmenting their ERP with the help of Oracle's acquired IP such as in demand planning (Demantra) and Policy Automation (Haley) and with the integration benefits of Fusion Middleware.

Thursday, October 15, 2009

Keynote Reaction - Journalist/Analysts comment on Larry's Openworld Keynote

Lounghaus Analyst Sam Higgins (@shigginski) and ZDnet Journalist (@dobes) give their immediate reaction to Larry Ellison's Keynote speech to Chi Hea Cho (@chiheacho). Hear their thoughts on Exadata, Fusion and *That* US$10 million bet:

Turning the Tables for Once

Great to see the tables turned on our own Gareth Llewellyn at Openworld today. Alex Gorbachev, friend of the Red Room and newly appointed CTO of the Pythian Group, took his turn to interview Gareth on his involvement with Openworld this year.

Gareth talked about his role at Openworld and made a nice plug for this blog. You can catch the interview here

Paul

Openworld Day Four - Larry Day

Live-blogging: Mid-Afternoon, Oracle's CEO and founder Larry Ellison took the stage again after a keynote by Infosys and a brief appearance by Who lead-singer Roger Daltrey who plays tonite at the Appreciation event on treasure Island.

LJE began by giving a briefing on the process of Linux and Exadata. After a host of proof points proving the superiority of Oracle Exadata over IBM Power; LJE laid down a remarkable challenge to the delegates in the room: "if you can find an application that runs on your IBM P-Series that we can't run twice as fast on Exadata, then we will give you US$ 10 million!" Larry also said that of course IBM were welcome to enter!

Then, The Governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger eulogised the importance of technology in modern life in a most entertaining manner, holding the audience of Hall D Moscone Centre in the palm of his hand. He particularly celebrated the role his own state of California has played in the development of life-saving AND planet-saving technology.

Arnold Schwarzenegger left the stage, saying "I'll be back" and imploring delegates to stay in California and "spend as much money as possible"; and with a BMW/Oracle Sailing jacket as a gift from Larry.

Then Larry launched a new proactive problem detectection system that not only detects software and hardware problems and patches them automatically in a merging of MyOracle Support and Oracle Enterprise Manager.

LJE then began his last deck of slides talking about how critical guaranteed service levels is to SaaS and Cloud, as a result Oracle has built a "business service level monitor" into Oracle Enterprise Manager & MySupport. He then eulogised the importance of SOA to Fusion Applications to ensure that these new applications work well with existing applications.

Broadly speaking Larry described what Fusion Applications will look like. Here are some key points:

- Fusion Applications is "code-complete" and in-test
- Built entirely on Fusion Middleware and therefore the first and only standards-based suite of apps - nothing custom-built
- SaaS-ready and modular
- BI is embedded in the UI of Fusion Apps "we let you know when there is something to do"
- A suite of applications complete enough to run Oracle's own business

Other important announcements of the day were:

- Oracle VM 2.2 Now Available
- Oracle Announces New Mobile CRM and Social CRM Enhancements for Oracle CRM On Demand
- Customers Select Oracle Exadata for Extreme Performance of Data Warehouse and OLTP Applications

Openworld Day Four - The Technology Fringe

As well as the high profile keynotes and the general sessions where customers help delegates understand best practice in the use of Oracle Technology, Oracle Openworld also hosts a wealth of deep-dive technology sessions for developers, ISVs, DBAs and others. We have looked at Oracle Develop briefly, but today The Red Room found time to visit the OTN (Oracle Technology Network) Lounge in Moscone West.

Yesterday, Thomas Kurian mentioned in his keynote that ..."every second of every working day someone downloads a product from OTN" and OTN is an important Oracle community. Throughout Openworld the OTN team has been running work shops and "Unconferences" to help the community learn more about Oracle Technology. We spoke to two of the Aussies taking in part in that:

Marcel Kratovchil of Piction is a regular to Openworld, see his video with last year. His focus is using Oracle Database 11g for multimedia and here is what he had to say:



Alex Gorbachev of Pythian is also a regular to Openworld and an active member of the Oracle community in Australia (sadly about to return to Canada as the new CTO of Pythian):



Finally, see The OJAM Red Room focussed on at ZDnet Australia

UPDATED: Openworld - Striving for a single source of truth

The buzz around the conference is increasingly about the expectation of a major keynote from CEO Larry Ellison on the news around the company's latest Application developments. The theme of the conference has been about integration - integrating an organisation's various IT assets to gain a better view of information and data critical to better planning and decision making.

There are 1900 individual sessions around the conference this week, and among those were three Australian customers who are doing just that. We caught up with them after their presentations:

Cadbury is a confectionary food leader in Australia, New Zealand and Japan and we spoke to IT Director Ashley Peck about how he has been able to integrate his Demantra Demand Planning and Siebel CRM using Oracle Business Intelligence to gain a single source of truth on his company's information:



We also spoke to James Madigan, CIO at The Crane Group, about how he is doing something very similar with JD Edwards and Hyperion - integrating his Oracle assets to better understand his company's health and augment the bottom line:



Stay tuned to hear from other ANZ companies presenting at Openworld about how they are integrating their various IT assets using Oracle solutions. UPDATE : Listen to Bruce Moy, G James Glass IT Director, talk about his Oracle Apps footprint, global best-practice implementation and using Oracle SOA (from within Oracle Fusion Middleware) to integrate his Oracle Apps with legacy apps). A good example again of what Thomas Kurian's Keynote was about.

Wednesday, October 14, 2009

Openworld Day Three - Momentum builds

Delegates braved stormy and wet conditions for Day Three of Oracle Openworld as the theme of the conference began to emerge: integration - something Charles and Safra focussed on yesterday, primarily the fact that organisations have huge pain points around integrating their various applications and technology software. Oracle is easing that pain by pre-integrating those assets. This was a theme continued in earnest by Oracle's Middleware lead, Thomas Kurian in his Keynote which kicked off Day Three of Openworld.

Among the most important announcements around middleware were Oracle Showcases Industry’s Leading Middleware Product Family and Leading Organizations Worldwide Choose Oracle® Fusion Middleware 11g R1.
THomas also talked about Oracle's GRC solutions, BPM and Business Intelligence as Oracle announced a number one position in Business Analytics.

Next up after Thomas was Michael Dell's Keynote who was joined briefly by Larry Ellison again to thank him for the hardware support Dell has given Oracle over the years. (Oracle's datacentres are all hosted on Dell hardware.) "Its great," said Larry, "you buy stuff from us, we buy stuff from you!"

You can watch both the keynotes here.

Later, we spoke to Brisbane-based Longhaus Analyst Sam Higgins (@shigginski on Twitter) after the keynotes to get his reactions, and to talk more generally about Oracle's success in the middleware market and about that integration pain that customers struggle with:


Then we spoke to Perth-based Oracle Ace Director, blogger and ADF developer with SAGE, Chris Muir (@chriscmuir on Twitter), about his thoughts on Oracle Fusion Middleware and how it helps him solve his customers' problems.



Stay tuned for interviews with two of the customers who have been presenting their experiences with Oracle solutions to delegates in some of the sessions away from the Keynote Hall, namely The Crane Group and Cadbury.

Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Oracle Boardroom Briefing Series - Portals

Are You A Portal User? Do You Use Oracle Portal?

Modernise and Optimise Your Portal Environment
Technology solutions present a wide variety of opportunities for your online web presence. From simple, static content management web sites to full collaborative web sites running the latest Web 2.0 technologies, various methods are available to execute your online presence. But the availability of information about what can be done on the web today causes even more pressure on your organisation to be agile and up with the latest trends. Have you ever heard an executive state “We want a Facebook like capability for the enterprise” or “we need to be more interactive and collaborative with our employees and customers”. But what does this all really mean to you and your organisation? Many organisations, maybe your organisation, already embrace Portal & Content capabilities from Oracle or other organisations, maybe even Oracle Portal while others are considering what to do to harness the power of Web 2.0 technologies and the latest and greatest functionality for the web.

Our session is dedicated to providing a clear picture on how to embrace Web2.0, Content Management, and Collaborative tools whether you are running a current Portal environment that you want to enable with Web2.0, considering what to do next with your Portal or considering a new online web initiative. Rather than spend hours and days reviewing information in isolation, join Oracle subject matter experts and your peers here for an interactive session on what organisations are doing to optimise and modernise their current environment. Focused on the concerns of busy executives this event offers discussions, ideas, and examples of Oracle’s modernisation strategy that will support your business now and for years to come.

Oracle is running a series of Boardroom Briefings around Australia and New Zealand covering our portal strategy and how it meets our customers requirements in this area.

Oracle strategies for online web presence and how Oracle WebCenter Suite 11g can help your organisation to modernise your online web presence. Oracle Webcenter Suite has created a significant buzz in the marketplace and this session will explore how you can leverage it and what opportunities it presents for your current environment. If you are interested in the challenges organisations like yours face harnessing the power of Web2.0, if you are interested in learning how to extend your current portal environment to be more agile and adaptable to today’s business needs and / or if you are considering a new online web presence (Portal, Content or both) project this session is for you.

Oracle WebCenter Suite 11g is a unified, standards based enterprise portal platform that provides a full range of functionality to develop your web presence with extensive capabilities that bring Oracle applications functionality, custom functionality, content and web 2.0 capabilities together to develop the web based applications you need in order to maintain a productive, efficient organisation.

Please note that space is limited to a maximum of 10 customers per session so register now to avoid
disappointment.

To attend one of these sessions, register now online:

ADELAIDE Oracle, L19 – 25 Grenfell Street 6 November 2pm – 3pm
AUCKLAND Oracle, L16 – 56 Wakefield Oracle Tower 13 November 10am – 11am
BRISBANE Oracle, L14 –300 Ann Street 5 November 2pm – 3pm
CANBERRA Oracle Offices, Room 2, 21 Barry Drive 4 November 2pm – 3pm
MELBOURNE Oracle, L5 – 417 St Kilda Road 28 October 10am – 11am and 3pm – 4pm
PERTH Oracle, L2 – 66 Kings Park Rd, West Perth 18 November 10am – 11am
SYDNEY Oracle, 4 Julius Ave, North Ryde 29 October 10am – 11am and 3pm – 4pm
WELLINGTON Oracle Office, Level 10 – Todd Building, 93-97 Customhouse Quay, Wellington 12 November 10am – 11am

Hope to see you there

Paul

Openworld Day Two - Down to Business

Co-Presidents Charles Phillips and Safra Catz had the honour of kicking off Day Two of Oracle Openworld, and were joined on stage by CMO Judy Sim, Retail chief Duncan Angrove and CRM lead Anthony Lye to give an update on Oracle Applications, Industry solutions and acquisition strategy. They were followed up by Ann Livermore, Executive Vice President, HP Enterprise Business. Their keynotes can we watched here.

The key stats of the morning were that 40,000+ attendees have traveled to San Francisco for an update on all things Oracle, and that there are 1900 sessions to deliver that update to them. Furthermore, they can look forward to Aerosmith, Roger Daltrey and The Wailers at the Appreciation event on Treasure Island in the Bay on Wednesday!

Key announcements of the day included:

- Oracle Announces Oracle® Application Integration Architecture Release 2.5
- Oracle Introduces New Release of Oracle® Business Intelligence Applications
- Oracle Announces First Comprehensive Approach to Enterprise Application Documents

As well as this there were a number of announcements around Oracle's continued commitment to Java: Oracle Extends Commitment to Java and Open Source Developer Communities, Oracle Delivers New Releases of Java, SOA and Web 2.0 Development Tools and Oracle Previews Oracle® Fusion Middleware Java Development Tool for Mobile Applications

Andy Mendlesohn took the stage mid-morning to give an update on Oracle's flagship product and bread-and-butter earner - Oracle Database 11gR2 as well as the second version of Exadata -which Mendlesohn described as "the very first database appliance to handle Data warehousing AND OLTP" - seen here outside the Keynote Hall in Moscone North.

Watch this space for video interviews coming up with more Oracle ACE Directors, the two Aussie analysts at Openworld this year - Longhaus' Sam Higgins (@shigginski on Twitter) and IBRS' Kevin McIsaac and also - most importantly video interviews with ANZ customers inclulding Westfield, Cadbury, AFG and G. James.

In the meantime, check out Openworld blog reports from ACE bloggers Marcel Kratovchil, Richard Foote and Chris Muir (@chriscmuir on Twitter); as well as this 1st day report from ZDnet Australia Chris Duckett (@dobes on Twitter) who travelled to San Francisco as Oracle's Guest.

Monday, October 12, 2009

SUNday at Oracle OPenworld - Part II

There was no doubt what the highlight of day one would be: Larry Ellison and Scott McNealy in a joint Keynote. And it didn't disapoint...

Thousands thronged into the Moscone North Keynote Hall to see what everyone sensed would be IT Industry history in the making. Scott McNealy took the stage first of all to run through all of Sun's innovations which was quite the journey through the last 25 years of IT history: Solaris, Sparc, Java, etc etc. You can watch a good deal of his presentation here.

Then Scott was joined by Software legend and the "Father of Java" James Gosling who described his feelings about working for the world's largest business software company. Asked if he was excited he replied "absolutely" and joked that he'd never worked for a software company! Mr McNealy then joked that Oracle "won't be a software company by the time we've finished with them!"

After Sun EVP John Fowler came on stage to describe some of the innovations Oracle and Sun are working on together, the man Mr McNealy introduced as "The Oracle of Redwood City" came on stage. First he repeated previous affirmations about Oracle's commitment to MySQL (citing previous commitment to SleepyCat and InnoDB) and to Solaris and Sparc, which he described as the leading chip and operating system in the industry respectively.

He then announced new TPC benchmark results vs IBM Power OLTP configurations. Then he went on to further compare the Sun/Oracle configuration and IBM Power, making the following statements: "Per transaction basis, the OBM OLTP config consumes 6x electricity power than Oracle/Sun; and isn't even fault tolerant" and "Oracle/Sun 9 RAC OLTP config boasts 25% more throughput; 16x better response time than IBM Power".

Finally, after a vintage performance by Mr Ellison, Scott McNealy rounded up the memorable keynote saying: "I believe our board and shareholders made a very wise decision [to go into] partnership with Oracle".

SUNday at Oracle Openworld - Part 1

Oracle Openworld 2009 kicked off this morning at the San Francisco Hilton bright and early at 9 o'clock with SQL Developer Guru Tom Kyte of Asktom.com fame who presented to a packed 750+ audience about "What are we still doing wrong?" He began by saying that after the 15 releases of the Oracle database he has seen in his career, DBAs the world over are still getting things wrong - and he should know, because they come to "Asktom" when it all goes wrong. He had a few points of advice, saying that "DBAs often find it difficult to ask for help":

  • When asking question's, be very specific and clear...like you were asking your mom
  • To be a good SQL developer you need to understand sets AND algorithms AT THE SAME TIME
  • You have to think about security from the get-go
  • Virtualisation security is an oxymoron - even in the distant future
You can see my colleague Chi Hea Cho (@chiheacho on Twitter) interview Tom after his Keynote on You Tube here at the Oracle JAPAC Channel.



Over at the Oracle ANZ Channel, you can watch Aussie Oracle ACE and Blogger, Richard Foote talk to Ms Cho about his thoughts following Tom's Keynote. Later that day, Aussie Oracle ACE and blogger, Alex Gorbachev, himself interviewed fellow ACE Richard for his own blog.

Stay tuned for more on Larry and Scott's Keynote...

Walk this way, Talk this way....!

Interesting article from the San Francisco Examiner yesterday talking about the impact that a large event like Oracle Openworld has on the city. You can find the article here.

Oracle literally paints the city red during Openworld, we take over the SOMA district around the Moscone centre - the majority of hotels in the area are fully booked, airlines run at capacity catering for the 43000 delegates that are expected this year.

And to top it all off, a number of worldwide names are performing at various functions during the week including Three dog Night, Roger Daltrey, The Wailers, Shooter Jennings and Aerosmith.

If you're there, enjoy the week - have fun and learn about the exciting products and solutions that our partners and ourselves are launching this week. If you cannot be there, you can follow the event by twitter, facebook or by watching live transmissions from the conference floor. Check out the links on the main blog page.

Paul

Friday, October 9, 2009

The Desktop of the Future

Let's start with a simple question. Imagine you are single and looking for a new car. Would you choose a sporty 2-seater convertible or a 7-seater MPV? Of course, unless you had a hobby that required you to have a large vehicle with 7 seats - you'd choose the convertible!

So, when it comes to software - why is the world focused on buying capability and functionality that are probably not going to be used?

My focus is around Enterprise 2.0 - Oracle's vision is to provide a toolset and capability for managing and collaborating around unstructured information, the type of data that each and every one of us interacts with on a daily basis. It can cover music, video, photographs, documents, spreadsheets, presentations, blog-articles or any other type of information that doesn't traditionally fit into a database - this we call structured information.

There are, of course, a large number of vendors who provide solutions for managing unstructured information - some focus on a specific type of information (e.g. web content) and others provide complete enterprise-wide capability, or at least their marketing material would have you believe. Some vendors in the enterprise space go even further by providing capabilities to very specific markets, for example Pharmaceuticals or Aeronautics and if your organisations doesn't produce drugs or aeroplanes - this is capability that you won't be needing anytime soon! The same is true on your workstation - you'll probably be sitting there at your desk or on your sofa at home reading this article using an Intel-powered PC, running Windows, with Office installed and surfing the web with one of the popular web-browser programs. Some of you, like myself, will be running a MAC a similar software footprint (office, browser etc.).

In either case, you'll most probably be affected by what is known in the industry as Bloatware - software or capability that provides you with no benefit and actually slows down your system or uses disk-space or memory that you could put to better use. In the enterprise world - Bloatware costs you money - you pay a premium for a software solution's development and testing cycle around capability and functionality that you actually do not need. Even worse than this is functionality that is delivered as a compromise - the vendor didn't want to invest in the development of a complete solution to a problem - but went half-way there anyway just to say that they had something available.

OpenSource is an option that many organisations are investigating to help create and manage unstructured information - Sun has a product called StarOffice which provides everything that most users would want at a fraction of the cost of the MicroSoft solution. Putting 2 and 2 together and making 5 (as many other people will have done) - taking a commodity hardware platform (Intel-based), deploying an open-source OS like Linux, a browser such as FireFox and an office solution like StarOffice is a real-world and cost-effective alternative to a traditional desktop that you might be running today.

Now for the back-office environment, users today are familiar with web-based tools and environments for information sharing and collaboration - there is a focus around function value and capability mapped with ease-of-use that some traditional ECM solutions simply don't provide. From an IT perspective, managing unstructured information through a database (for metadata management), an index and a collection of file-stores results in a management overhead and complexity that isn't necessary. 20 years ago, when ECM solutions first came to market, there was an issue with the ability to store unstructured information within the database. With Oracle 11g, this issue is resolved and organisations are able to manage unstructured information alongside structured data using a common and consistent toolset.

This approach provides massive benefits to the organisation - at a very basic level around operational costs and reduced IT complexity. Combining this new database capability (with world-class management and deployment ability) with an ECM platform that allows any unstructured information to be stored, managed, leveraged and protected, enables true real-world knowledge management and drives collaboration internally and externally leading to increased customer and partner loyalty. This results in lower costs for the organisation and significantly reduced risk.

Watch this space for more on this topic

Paul

Benioff @ Open World

Here's one Open World session I would dearly love to see.

"Join salesforce.com Chairman and CEO Marc Benioff and special guest Dell Chairman and CEO Michael Dell to hear how salesforce.com is helping to make Oracle customers even more successful today in the Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, and Custom Cloud"
Three whole clouds to talk about! Awesome. I was talking to a customer last week who introduced me to an acronym for cloud that I hadn't heard before - Complete Load Of Utter Drivel. As much as I disagree, we certainly had a good chuckle about it.

It seems to me that Benioff gives great presentation. Here's an example from a Churchill Club session last year where he shared the stage with Hasso Plattner of SAP on The Future of Enterprise Software. You can find excellent coverage of that talk on Dave Kellog's blog here - thanks Dave.

Of course, our very own Larry Ellison was at the Churchill Club recently in terrific form - you can find a youtube highlight of his talk here.

So, Gareth, if you are not live tweeting from the Novellus Theater at YBCA between 13:00 and 14:00 next Tuesday, I for one, will want to know why!

-sean

Thursday, October 8, 2009

Is cloud just outsourcing 2.0?

Marc Caltabiano (@marccaltabiano on Twitter) is our Director of Enterprise Architecture and has been keeping a very interesting blog called The Light Bulb Effect for more than a year now. It is proving a very useful resource for Enterprise Architects in ANZ and his content has seen a lot of discussion on Twitter and in various LinkedIn Groups. Here's how Marc describes his blog:

"The light bulb is most often thought of as Thomas Edison's greatest invention, however the bulb was little more than a parlor trick without a system of electric power generation and transmission to make it truly useful. (source HBR June 2008) Like Edison, the role of Enterprise Architecture is to create the ecosystem required to meet broader business and technology outcomes and objectives."

Marc's latest post features a slide deck from a recent presentation to the Australian Architecture Forum on Cloud Computing. Its worth checking out, along with a second presentation on "Pragmatic Enterprise Architecture." Pick up his RSS feed if EA is your thing...

Your Guide to getting the Best from Openworld '09 #OOW09

(Thanks for kind intro @paul_ricketts!)

The Keynotes were announced in a press release this morning and the main surprise was that the show kicks off on SUNday (and thats not a typo) with a joint Keynote from CEO and founder Larry Ellison and Sun Chariman Scott McNealy which should certainly cause a stir.

Throughout the week we'll be reporting live through various social media channels - including this blog, Twitter and YouTube (see below) - bringing you the news, expert analysis and a sense of the atmosphere to ensure that if you couldn't make it, you get the best of it.

The regular Red Room Bloggers like Sean Boiling, Paul Ricketts, David Centellas and others will also interpret the announcements we'll be making and giving them a local flavour and setting them in the context of our overall technology development.

Below are some of the Highlight keynotes that we think may be of interest to you. We have converted the times to Sydney so you can watch them live (or archived) via webcast:

Monday

Sydney – 11.45 a.m. to 1.00 p.m.

Keynote: Extreme Innovation

Larry Ellison | CEO, Oracle |

AND

Scott McNealy | Chairman and Cofounder, Sun Microsystems, Inc. | Chairman of Sun Federal, Inc.

Tuesday

Sydney – 2.30 a.m. to 4.30 a.m.

Keynote: The Art of the Possible

Charles Phillips | President, Oracle |

Safra Catz | President, Oracle |

Wednesday

Sydney – 2.30 a.m. to 4.30 a.m.

Keynote: Innovation Across the Stack

Thomas Kurian | Executive Vice President, Product Development, Oracle |

AND

Michael Dell | Dell Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer |

Thursday

Sydney – 8.45 a.m. to 10.30 a.m.

Keynote: The State of Technology

Larry Ellison | CEO, Oracle |


For webcasts of the speeches and further details on the keynotes please visit: http://www.oracle.com/us/openworld/018079.htm

Hope you enjoy the show and chat to you soon!

Gareth:)

How do you keep up with Oracle Information

Well, there are a few ways of keeping up - we've published a list of interesting links on this blog already (look at the right hand side---->)

Here are the links for you again

Oracle ANZ on You Tube - http://www.youtube.com/user/OracleANZ

Oracle APAC on You Tube - http://www.youtube.com/user/OracleJAPAC

Openworld Blog - http://blogs.oracle.com/oracleopenworld/

Openworld on Facebook - http://www.facebook.com/OracleOpenWorld

Openworld on LinkedIn - http://www.linkedin.com/groups?about=&gid=114605

Oracle (ANZ) Red Room on LinkedIn - http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=1983966&trk=hb_side_g

Openworld on Oracle Mix - https://mix.oracle.com/groups/10562

Openworld on Twitter - http://twitter.com/oracleopenworld

Oracle (ANZ) Red Room on Twitter - http://twitter.com/OracleRedRoom

#oow09 on Twitter - http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23oow09

We'll be posting lots of information from OpenWorld next week, remember to follow the #00w09 tag on twitter too.

Paul

Who will be reporting from OpenWorld?

The answer....

Gareth Llewellyn, our Sydney based W2.0 PR Evangelist will be at OpenWorld bringing you the latest information from the event.

If you wonder what he looks like...







...here's the right-hand side of his face.

You can follow Gareth on twitter, @MRGARETH

Paul

Oracle Openworld 2009













Oracle is running its annual OpenWorld event in San Francisco from the 11th to the 15th October 2009.

Join us there or follow this blog for updates on announcements and other important information from this event.

Paul