Openworld day four: Its a wrap!

Mark Hurd returned to the stage on wednesday to introduce regular Openworld keynote attraction, Michael dell, who the final day of the conference and talked about

As well as partners there were of ourselves several customers and attending and some presenting. We were able to speak to one or two:

- Damian Walsh, Chief Operating Officer of Melbourne IT talks about the company's IT transformation project



- John Olzewski, Operations Infrastructure & Architecture Manager, Information Technology Services, Bunnings Group Limited talks about his upcoming presentation about his company's use of Oracle

The final day is of course traditionally the day of Larry's final keynote and he devoted half of this to reprising the announcement both he and Mark Hurd had discussed earlier in the week: Exalogic. IBRS Analyst Kevin McIsaac was luckily able to take out of his day before the keynote to put some context around the new platform when he spoke to us outside the keynote hall.

Larry also introduced keenly awaited Fusion Applications demonstrations following his announcement on Sunday that they would GA early in the new year.

Exalogic - Not just an appliance

Unfortunately I could not make Open World this year, but was able to view the live streamed keynote address by Larry Ellison.

What piqued my interest was his announcement of Exalogic. You might think to yourself, what is so special about Exalogic, isn’t just Weblogic Server in a box?

Exalogic goes way further than that. It essentially provides an elastic computing platform that can support from departmental applications, right through to the most demanding ERP and mainframe applications, including the many 3rd party apps that can run on Linux or Solaris.

So what makes Exalogic special? For me, Larry’s keynote left me with two points:

• Exalogic provides extreme Java performance and is designed to cater for the most demanding applications in a scale out approach,
• It is integrated, managed, tested and patched as a functioning unit. This means a reduction in operational cost, improved performance and reduced time to deploy,

While there are so many technical advances made in Exalogic, incorporating both hardware and software, I always like to know what the bottom line is and what it might mean to businesses in Australia and APAC.

If I look at the current market place, renewed interest is being placed on the role the data center plays in an organisation. On the one hand organisations are looking for agility from their data center to respond to changing market conditions, while on the other there are still continual pressures to optimise data centers and reduce cost. I believe that Exalogic caters for both these requirements at the same time. Exalogic provides the platform that can facilitate transforming IT to an as-a-service model, while at the same time directly attacking operating cost / maintenance by providing a platform that will facilitate consolidation from disk to application.

If you want to scratch beneath the surface, check out the new site on Exalogic.

Openworld Day Three: In full flow...

Day Two saw the conference in full flight, beginning with Thomas Kurian's Keynote at 8am where a number of announcements were made including an outline for the future of Java. More generally Mr Kurian talk about cloud, which he broadly defined as software as a service on modern Datacentre architecture. He later went on to describe what that modern architecture looked like, naturally focussing a great deal on the twin plat forms of Exadata and the new Exalogic. The day also saw the announcement of the Oracle Health Management Platform, the Oracle Contract Lifecycle Management for Public Sector and Oracle CRM On Demand Release 18.

Later in the day, Brett Winterford of iTnews - during a Q&A with APAC SVP Steve Au Yeaung and a later interview with Frontline MD Steve Murphy - learned about plans for a new Oracle On Demand Datacentre in Sydney.

There are more than 400 delegates attending from Australia and New Zealand, and during the day we spoke to a number of partners about their businesses. Unfortunately technical glitches have spoiled the recordings of many of them, but this video puts some useful perspective on how Oracle works with its partners, on Oracle's cloud heritage and the value partners get from Openworld:

Openworld Day Two: Getting down to Business...

As delegates returned to Moscone North, South and West for the first full day of proceedings at Oracle Openworld, the dust was still settling from the announcements from the night before. An Australian journalist attending the show, Brett Winterford, has already filed his perspective of the announcements with these storties:
Oracle releases its own Linux kernel and Oracle releases monster "private cloud" box

And an Australian Blogger and Oracle ACE, Richard Foote brought his perspective to the show also:

Mark Hurd made his debut as an Oracle Executive up on stage first thing in the morning with his Keynote bringing more detail to the Exadata announcement Larry began the previous evening and was joined by Oracle's Systems lead John Fowler who talked about the latest release of Solaris as well as updates on SPARC and ZFS. (Our resident reporter was able to write this up also for the folks back home.)

Mark Hurd was not the only first appearance of the day either with The America's Cup taking up residence in Moscone North also.

Later that day we got the chance to speak to Oracle ANZ MD Ian White to get another Aussie perspective on the show:



The day drew to a close with Thomas Kurian presenting a keynote to the JavaOne conference focussing on the Java platform and developer tools acquired through Sun such as Netbeans, JavaFX and Glassfish and introduced guests who demonstrated the application of these tools in various game development including Star Wars: The Old Republic; proving that Mr Ellison's company really had become Ora...cool!

Oracle Openworld Day One: Iron Men, The America's Cup and Exalogic

The first announcement of the day was an interesting one, and is sure to build confidence for the open source community - Oracle Announces MySQL 5.5 Release Candidate: - and is bound to be the topic of discussion as the two developer conferences that run parallel to Openworld open up, Java One and Oracle Develop.

With JavaOne Oracle has now closed a second street in San Francisco – as well as Howard between Moscone North and Moscone South , JavaOne has now meant also the closing of Mason Street next to the Hilton . The sheer scale of the conference was detailed by Oracle’s CMO Judy Sim during her keynote – and with 41,000 delegates to all three conferences, this is Oracle’s largest show and the in fact the largest show of its kind in the industry.

As the day grew older the excitement built and the queues to register stretched out the doors: Those getting in early to queue for Larry’s Keynote could enjoy the fun the marketing team have had with the Iron Man 2 collaboration: including Larry’s brief cameo in the movie. Then when the doors opened the crowds flooded in:

Larry’s Keynote was preceded by a short video celebrating the winning of the America’s Cup by his BMW/Oracle Team earlier this year, before he finally came onto the stage to discuss cloud computing – “another kind of extreme performance” he said making an allusion to his sailing triumph. Admitting that he’s been quite outspoken about Cloud Computing, Larry defined cloud as needing to be both elastic AND virtualised before announcing the Exalogic Elastic Cloud – 30 compute servers and 360 cores with an Infiniband 40GB/sec link. Like its Exadata cousin, the Exalogic machine represents software and hardware engineered perfectly together. Exalogic is – said Larry – completely fault tolerant with no single point of failure and is entirely secure – and is “by far the fastest computer for running Java”.

In tests, Larry said Exalogic has demonstrated 12x performance increase running Internet apps: 1m HTTP requests per second; and a 4.5x performance improvement running messaging apps: 1.8m a second!

Mr Ellison then moved on to address Linux, saying that a big problem for Oracle has been that the Red Hat Kernel of Linux on which Oracle Linux is based is “four years” behind the rest of the community, which is why Oracle is releasing the Oracle Enterprise Kernel for mission critical, large scale environments such as those which Exadata supports. He also previed the new Exadata OLTP Exadata machine that Mark Hurd and John Fowler will together announce tomorrow.

Finally Larry previewed his Wednesday keynote announcing Fusion Applications GA in early 2011 after a massive five year software engineering program to fuse the best of JD Edwards, Peoplesoft, Siebel and eBusiness Suite together. Key principles of Fusion Larry stated clearly was that it could be deployed on the public cloud or the private cloud and is based entirely on SOA, SaaS, Business Intelligence and open standards. “If you know Java, you know Fusion” he said before some brief demonstrations:





His final comment summed up the week ahead: "A whole host of cool things being announced this week at Openworld". Plenty to look forward to now the curtains have fully lifted. Stay tuned to this blog for summaries, and register for the APAC blog at Oracle MIX:

Openworld: Open for Business!

Here’s the space to watch for ANZ-based watchers of Openworld:

In the days around the largest IT conference in the world, we’ll be keeping you up to date with how the show’s content has relevance to Australian and New Zealand-based Oracle stakeholders: customers, partners, developers and employees alike – to save you the trip!

We’ll be picking out some of the more important announcements and trying to give them some local perspective.

Keep an eye on the corporate Newsroom for all the announcements coming out of the show: http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/index.html

There’s more than 100 customers, partners and employees attending Openworld from Australia and New Zealand and we’ll be talking to some of the ANZ delegates at the show and getting their view of the show. You can look out for these at the Oracle ANZ You Tube Channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/OracleANZ

You can follow our Twitter Feeds for up-to-the-minute thoughts, quotes and links from the show: @oracleredroom, @mrgareth and @pennywolf

We’ll also be sharing news and features in the Oracle Red Room LinkedIn Group, so please take the time to join up: http://www.linkedin.com/groups?mostPopular=&gid=1983966

But checking in here at the Red Room at the start of each day will give you a quick digest on the proceedings overnight.

It should be an exciting show – the first after the acquisition of Sun so lots of news about what that integration is bring to customers and partners; not to mention of course Mark Hurd’s first outing as our new President and the visit of a very special guest – The America’s Cup!

Max your Apps at Insync

Are you going to Insync?

If you’ve somehow missed the marketing, its the largest ever Oracle User Group Conference in Australia and sees the various User groups like Quest , AUSOUG and OAUG all combine under one roof to help users of products like Oracle Database 11g, Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle E-Business Suite, JD Edwards and PeopleSoft to name but a few understand how to get more value from their investments.

The key value prop for our participation in Insync hinges on the fact that the Fusion Platform can allow existing Application customers maximise the value and ownership experience of their existing investments while laying a software foundation in preparation for Fusion Applications. So the discussion hinges on the reduction of the cost of ownership of applications, the increase in agility that a business requires, and the reduction of risk when a customer wishes to upgrade to a new version of our applications.

Business applications have dominated the IT landscape for many years. Organisations have embraced these applications due to the functional, process-centric value they deliver to the bottom line. Every business though is unique in how they function. As a result, organisations customise, extend and integrate their business applications as their business models evolve. These customisations, extensions and integrations are often proprietary in nature, heavily scripted and very often undocumented. The more the business the business evolves, the more the application architecture becomes a tightly wound ball of string.

By utilising the Fusion Platform, many Oracle customers have realised more value from their existing Oracle Application investments by decoupling the traditionally coupled customisations, extensions and integrations. The Fusion Platform not only delivers immediate value to Applications customers in areas such as customised self-service experiences, ad-hoc exception handling, process visibility across applications and application data integration, but through its decoupled approach provides an underlying platform that enables the business application to be upgrade resilient; in other words the Fusion Platform will reduce the cost and risk of upgrade of Oracle Business Applications and reduce the traditional barriers to a customer receiving the functional benefits of a new version of their new business application. The Fusion Platform is not only certified for use with our Oracle Applications Unlimited today, but will be used as the core foundation for Fusion Applications, thereby reducing the risk of retraining staff and ensuring that the stable foundation you put in place today continues forward with your application journey.

Insync poses a great opportunity for customers to investigate how to get the maximum value from extending their applications today, how the role of applications is changing in architectures, the importance of a core platform to deliver business agility and flexibility, and the role that the Fusion Platform will play in Oracle’s application strategy moving forward. Speakers include thought leaders from Oracle, Oracle Ace’s and customers.
See the brochure here.

See you there if you’re attending!

Rich

"Web services != SOA" @ NZOUG's smelliest conference yet

Before your intrigue into the title of this post gets the better of you, I am pleased to announce that we have a guest blogger, Chris Muir, writing for The Red Room.

Chris is an Oracle ACE Director. To become an Oracle ACE, Chris has qualified according the following criteria:

• Track record of major contributions to the community, technical and/or community-oriented


• Good communication skills


• Ability to commit to participation in an honorary (non compensated) capacity

To all these points, Chris' Blog - One Size Doesn't fit all , is one of the most widely-read blogs on JDeveloper and ADF in the international Oracle Technology Network Community and he is one of the foremost Oracle bloggers in Australia. In fact in 2009 he was voted ACE Director of the Year . He is also a prolific contributor to the AUSOUG community.

Chris recently presented to a series of User Group Meetings in New Zealand, Canberra and South Australia and kindly agreed to summarise his presentations in the following guest Blog for The Red Room.


"Web services != SOA" @ NZOUG's smelliest conference yet

Oracle's RedRoom invited me to write a guest post on their blog about my recent travels and presentations. As an Oracle ACE Director I have the chance to attend and present at conferences and events around the world. I specialize in the Fusion Middleware space, with a strong interest and background in the database.

NZOUG's 2010 conference
This March I was privileged to attend and present on Web Services to the New Zealand's Oracle User Group near-yearly conference, as well as present to both the ACTOUG and AUSOUG-SA members on the way home to Perth.

How would I sum up the NZOUG conference?:

"Smelly"

Not the usual assessment of an Oracle User Group conference, but this conference on Lake Rotorua, a still active caldera, did take some getting used to thanks to the rotten eggs smell that hands over the small surrounding town.

Yet, this year's NZOUG conference, besides its smell, again proved the NZ event is one well worth attending, for the Oracle content and the friendly delegates and committee members. Of note to anyone interested in presenting or sponsoring the NZOUG event, NZ equalled the number of delegates and sponsors at the reportedly much larger 2009 Australian Oracle User Group conference in Melbourne. Being an ex-AUSOUG committee member I'm well impressed that a country with a fifth of the Australian population punched so much above its weight.

Web service extravaganza
SOAP web services and its newer complimentary cousin REST based web services have a number of significant advantages that organisations and their systems can make use of:

• The ability to share data in a near real time fashion, with the resulting business benefits of information "now", not tomorrow, next week, or next year


• To specify clear interfaces and data payloads between systems that can be validated at both design and runtime, to avoid sending or receiving invalid, unstructured data messes


• Utilise existing, prevalent Internet infrastructure, requiring no dedicated peer-to-peer network infrastructure, avoiding costly network setups


• Ignoring the other system's underlying technology implementation, who cares if one system is an Oracle system, the other .Net, Java, SAP or similar

Yet given these exciting benefits, the challenge of learning and applying web services can be a hard one for organisations and developers not familiar with its implementation.
At the NZOUG conference, and ACTOUG and AUSOUG-SA events, in order to address this challenge, I had the chance to give delegates a web service introduction, with two entirely different approaches.

The first presentation "Back to Basics: Simple database web services without the SOA headache", a somewhat glib title was designed to draw the predominately SQL and PLSQL proficient delegates at the conference to learn about web services. It's always easier to learn something if you already have skills required to solve a problem. The presentation harnessed the attendees' skills and showed them through the Oracle database how they consume and publish their own web services using the Oracle database's own features.

My second presentation, "JDeveloper 11g Web Services – as easy as 1-2-3" took the more traditional approach to web service development, introducing the contemporary JEE solution using Oracle's own JDeveloper IDE. For some JDeveloper has been a dirty word in the Oracle development circles, with extremely complicated development resulting in steep learning curve and failed system development. But since 10.1.3, and especially the 11g version, JDeveloper like much of the Java arena has tidied up its act and made contemporary Java development easier, a product Oracle is very excited about. My second presentation looked at the simple acts of creating a web service in the IDE through the generation of an XML Schema using a diagrammer, a web service WSDL also using a diagrammer, then finally the Java code via wizards & editors. The funny thing about the presentation is it takes me more time to explain than it actually does to implement the web service – surely a statement that should sell web services itself.

But does SOA have a place?
The nice thing about both these presentations is once delegates have obtained a knowledge of SOAP- based web services, be it through the database's features or JDeveloper, it then allows us to use that new found knowledge as a stepping stone to learn and understand SOA's approach to the broader issues of system integration and a service-based focus. Without the knowledge around the pros and cons of web service development, the leap to appreciating the challenges SOA attempts to address is a hard one. Instead if we provide a learning path between their traditional skills and the new technology, this will address a large segment of people who are essential in getting on board the SOA approach.

The question, will SOA work for you and your organisation is really up to you to decide. Yet, I think it a valid approach to learn, experiment and try out web services first, in order to see if SOA maybe a larger solution that may work for you. And even if it doesn't, web services alone may provide value to your organisation beyond your current implementations.

Thanks
With thanks to Oracle's Red Room to inviting me to post this guest post, and also with thanks to the NZOUG, ACTOUG and AUSOUG-SA committees for inviting me to present, and the members for attending.

Bio
Chris is an Oracle Consultant and Technical Lead and Trainer based in Perth with SAGE Computing Services .

You can follow Chris on Twitter here: http://twitter.com/chriscmuir

Consolidating Oracle Databases on Private Grids

I've enjoyed the Oracle Red Room blog for some time now so I'm pleased to be finally making a contribution of my own. I'm Roland Slee and after 17 years in sales at Oracle I've recently become the senior representative for Oracle's Database Development organisation in Asia Pacific & Japan. You can learn more about what I do by listening to the podcast below.

I've spent the past two days at the Gartner Infrastructure, Operations and Data Centre Conference in Sydney. The conference themes were "Cloudy, Green and Virtualised". It was an excellent event and I thoroughly enjoyed my discussions there with Gartner analysts including John Roberts, Phil Sargeant and Errol Rasit. I gave a presentation on consolidating Oracle Databases onto shared grids and participated in a vendor panel with Phil Davis from Dell and Gordon Makryllos from APC.

Much of the talk at the conference was focused on virtualisation and cloud computing, topics that remain somewhat theoretical for many customers, so I was keen to offer some very practical ways that customers can adopt an agile, virtualised infrastructure to run their Oracle Databases.

I described in my presentation the way an Australian customer has consolidated more than 300 Oracle Databases onto three database grids, significantly lifting the quality of service for their Oracle systems while also improving DBA productivity and saving money. Oracle Database workloads are found in nearly every enterprise data centre. The Oracle Database is a workload that lends itself to consolidation and virtualisation because Oracle Real Application Clusters allows Oracle Databases workloads to be migrated from scale-up environments to scale-out ones, usually without change to business applications.

The Sun Oracle Database Machine makes this style of consolidation even more attractive because it offers a pre-built, pre-optimised "private cloud" configuration that is ideal for database consolidation as it offers extraordinary performance, availability and agility through its ability to leverage industry standard servers and storage in a transparent, scale-out architecture.

Here's the presentation:

Implementing Private Database Clouds

Here's a podcast that summarises the key messages.

So if you're running multiple Oracle Databases on dedicated, scale-up infrastructure then there are great savings to be had by consolidating your database workloads onto a low-cost, agile grid. The Sun Oracle Database Machine is an ideal platform for such a consolidation.

Getting down to business with SOA

This week, I stumbled onto an article in CIO, written by Randy Heffner, VP at Forrester Research. In his article, Randy covers two points that really piqued my interest. The first was with regards the adoption rate of SOA, and the second point was aimed at what CIO’s really need to know about SOA.

While the hype around technologies such as Cloud computing is at a high according to Gartner, SOA has been quietly maturing, resulting in a sound adoption rate (68% adoption by end 2010 according to Forrester), and delivering sufficient business value to warrant 52% of organisations using SOA to expand its use. While my views are not empirical like Forrester’s, the conversations I am having with organisations has shifted from “what is SOA?” and “is it voodoo?” discussions; to “what are the actual steps we need to follow to facilitate the IT transformation we need to go through” and “how do we govern our architecture to ensure maximum service reusability”. I believe that a contributing factor behind this shift in discussion, and an increase in maturity, is that many COTS applications today are service enabled. These pools of available services have allowed IT practitioners to change the way they do application integration, and now they are at the point of asking how to expand and control their SOA initiative. As this is traditionally an IT driven initiative, the drive is towards new development approaches and potentially service reuse. I agree with Randy in that service reuse is only part of the picture and the true power of adopting a SOA approach is not being realised.

So what is the other half of the coin that is missing? I would call it strategic business thinking. Randy eloquently stated that CIO’s need to understand that SOA is about having the capability of designing software (business services) around the business capabilities required by their business. These business services utilise the value of existing applications yet hide the complexity of the underlying architectures. The end result is a business that has the capability of rapidly assembling business capabilities to address their transforming business. Hence the mantra of SOA bringing agility and flexibility to a business. If I played “bingo” on the word “business” in this paragraph I would be a rich person! But that is what it is about. CIO’s need to understand the business strategy, the business transformation strategy and the business capabilities that will be required in the future. By combining a business and reuse approach, the value of a business service will be determined not only by its technical level of reuse, but the value it delivers to the business capability requirements.

So, we IT practitioners should not be asking ourselves the question “how do we make SOA successful?” SOA will deliver value to your business when it is utilised as an architectural approach to develop business capability. If that message gets diluted in any way, you will end up with a costly, moving part in your architecture that does not live up to its full potential.

Leading Edge or Bleeding Wedge?

Quite often in the software industry we come across the question of whether to use the latest version of a product or technology.

There are pro's and con's for being the first with a new product, using either the latest version, or the tried and trusted version that everyone else is using.

In my capacity as being an IT Manager, and now a consultant for a software vendor, this issue has cropped up many times. So what exactly do you need to know in order to make that decision, that ultimately could be the difference between a successful implementation, or an expensive failure?

Being first cab off the rank has its advantages... someone has to be first! What can that mean for you? On the other hand, knowing that someone else has already gone through the pain is an easier pill to swallow for your Senior Management, those we have to justify our decisions to, or get the funding from.

There are a few areas of consideration which I've touched on below. It's not an exhaustive list by any means, and I would encourage any comments/suggestions.

Risk

Risk would be the most compelling reason not to use a new piece of software. Risk is probably the first thing on the mind of those with the cheque book.

Obviously, no-one releases software that hasn't been tested (!) But testing for the infinite combinations of computer systems is impossible. Testing for human behaviour would cover for only small percentage of users. Data models and quality of data is also something you couldn't expect to have been tested to exhaustion. That leaves your own testing. Only you can test a product on your infrastructure, with your data. How critical is the software to your business? What is the impact of a failure, in terms of cost, reputation or time if you go with an immature product?

Let's not forget that most new versions of software are there to address bugs or deficiencies. The latest version may fix a critical item on your requirements list. Improvements in workflow or compatibility may directly be pertinent to your situation.

Knowing that the software is in production somewhere is a comforting thing. Knowing that someone in your industry is using the same technology successfully offers further reassurance. Even if someone else has taken the bold step to be first, is no guarantee for your business.

Being (one of) the first may enable you to be first to market with your offering. Competitive advantage can often come from your systems. You may be competing in a busy market place. Having leading edge technology could be the differentiator you've been striving for.

Functionality

Functionality is a major factor in choosing software. The latest version may contain that one piece of functionality you really need. In some cases, a newer version may omit critical functions (perhaps to be included in later releases).

Using an older version may mean you'll have to add customisations or work-arounds. They'll have to be costed into your implementation, and then of course future consideration of upgrades (see below)

Certainly integrations tend to get better with newer versions. Product suites such as Oracle SOA Suite have moved toward a common (application server) platform. In the past you might have had to implement different server technologies to realise business functionality.

Upgrade

If you do decide to go down the tried and trusted path, you're almost certainly going to want/need to upgrade at some point. That then throws up present and future considerations.

Depending on the version you go with, there may not be a smooth migration path to a newer version. One click migrations are few and far between. If you've made customisations then there's a good chance you might have to do them again! Data migration and the subsequent testing can be a costly exercise, particularly if you have to do it multiple times.

Support

Here's the clincher.. maybe! Risk mitigation may come in the form of support. You can almost guarantee that if you're considering implementing leading edge technology before anyone else, then you've probably already caught the eye of your vendor. Leveraging that attention can be an opportunity for you. In a previous life, I was in the position where I took the first Australian license for one of the Oracle SOA Suite products. In return for getting on the Early Adopter Program, and being a reference site, I received direct access to the product developers, and a substantial amount of local support. Of course we had teething problems, but Oracle made the process somewhat painless. We got involved in the Client Advisory Board, and had many of our suggestions and feedback on our experience incorporated in subsequent versions.

When negotiating with your vendor to take on a new release, you'll probably want to get some commitment from them that they'll have the cavalry standing by. Just how much that might positively influence your stakeholders will be for you to find out!

In terms of support, older versions of products are sometimes given a shelf life i.e. they're not going to be supported forever. The different levels of support offered by your vendor may mean that if you do experience problems in the future, you could be on your own. You may not want to be running business critical systems on software that is on End of Life.

Skills

When looking at any technology, you'll want to ensure that your internal team has the skills to implement and manage your systems. You might want to supplement your team with partners, contractors or vendor personnel. Upskilling your team or hiring contractors might prove costly, especially for the rarer skills. Vendors will most likely have a good supply of experts and backup support to be able to provide services for you and present an opportunity for your internal staff to pick up the skills on the job.

Time

The luxury of time is something most of us don't have. Looming deadlines and compelling events are always against us.

Implementation time. How long might it take to implement either a previous version, or the latest version? For new software or technology, your vendor might not be able to give you an accurate expectation of implementation time. If they do, you can bet they will err on the cautious side! A mature product will have many veterans to call on to share their experience.

Getting onto a beta program is a great way to "play" with latest technology before anyone else. Oracle has a Beta Program for its technology products, that was used by LogicalTech to give some comfort to their customers. "Some database owners were renowned for being reticent to upgrade" ... "in case it introduced instability issues".

With unlimited time, we could test everything and mitigate most risk. Just how much effort do you want to put into product suitability and system testing, when your stakeholders and users are keen to get into UAT?

All in all there are many reasons to go with either option. Each implementation will have its own requirements, justifications, and objections. Hopefully I've given a few things to think about when starting out on this journey!


 

Agreon wins Oracle’s 2009 Zenith Award for Identity Management Partner of the Year

Congratulations to Agreon for winning the Zenith Award for Identity Management Partner of the Year. This is a well deserving award to a partner who has been committed to the use of Oracle’s technology and successful in delivering implementations of Oracle’s Identity Management technology to our customers.

If I recall back to 2006, when the Oracle Identity Management practice was initially established in Australia/New Zealand, things were very different back then. We were seen by others already in the game as being late-to-market. We had no committed partners in this space and even though we had the best-of-breed technology in our portfolio – we had no proven deployments locally in any vertical. Many had doubted our technology, commitment, focus and ability to execute.

Agreon was already an established and respected Identity Management Systems Integrator back then. They saw the strategic nature of a close partnership with Oracle and stepped up to be a valuable Oracle partner, which was followed by many successful deployments of Oracle’s Identity Management technology.

Three-and-a-half years on, and we are now getting comments from external parties that we have the most focused team in Identity Management, the strongest momentum in the market and the best suite of products and technology in this space. We have now proven strength in all the major verticals including Financial Services, Government, Manufacturing and Retail. How things have turned around in such a short time. What made the difference? Three things in my mind…

Firstly, I think being “late-to-market” played to our advantage.

For the early adopters who already have an existing solution on Identity Management, a lot of them were looking at ways to revamp their Identity Management strategy on how they can take it to the next level. We were able to help them by offering our advice based on our technologies and experience on what other successful customer deployments have been able to achieve. For example, in addition to Identity Management for internal users (e.g. HR-driven provisioning for employees to reduce cost and improve productivity), we are also seeing a huge interest in "Extranet Identity Management”, especially for business partners, retail and corporate customers for the best return on investment in the technology.

For customers who are now starting to look at Identity Management, we were able to leverage our knowledge and experience, together with partners like Agreon, to better guide our customers so they could avoid making the same mistakes as some of the early adopters in the past. For example, Identity Management deployment best practices in terms of how to phase a project deployment, prioritisation, integration approach, communication, etc.

Secondly - Our Focus. I think the focus that Oracle has in this space has significantly contributed to the growth and momentum that we have seen in Oracle Identity Management in this market.

Last, but not least – Our Partners. Having skilled and experienced partners like Agreon to help deliver the technology to our customers, means that we have a much higher ability to execute on IDM deployments and most importantly, making our customers happy and successful.

I think we are only beginning to see the adoption and acceleration of Identity Management, which is becoming an increasingly topical and important topic for organisations especially those who are subject to strict compliance or regulatory requirements, or are looking at strategic computing approaches such as adopting Cloud Computing services – where Identity, Access and Security Management is critical.

And now the future of Oracle Identity Management has just got a lot sunnier :)

Exadata in Australia

In October 2008, Oracle unveiled the Oracle Exadata family of products.  The Exadata family of appliances are geared towards providing high-performance, ready to scale database processing capabilities specifically mixed applications workload (DSS or OLTP) and simplifies the first step in the Design Pattern, by providing a pre-configured standardised platform.

Traditionally the type of application workload for the database was a key consideration in designing and configuring the environment as allocations for, and use of, resources can be very different depending on whether the workload type is Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) or Decision Support System (DSS).  Oracle Exadata overcomes this and is suited to either OLTP, DSS or a mixed workload.

As tweeted by @OracleRedRoom over the last couple of days and reported by ZDNet yesterday, it is great news to see the First Exadata V2 machine arrive in Australia for Commonwealth Bank. 

SOA Manifesto heralds declaration of truce

The end of the year is upon us, or says the retailers! It is a time for giving and goodwill, and all that feel-good stuff. But recently reading the announcement that a number of thought leaders came together in the name of bringing a smidgen of sanity to the SOA debate was surely an early gift. (I am now prepared for my annual receiving of socks and paisley ties!)

It has been a busy year for the SOA community. 2009 commenced with a ferocious SOA debate when Anne Thomas Manes stated that SOA was Dead. We provided our commentary to the debate throughout the year by penning a 10-part series on why SOA can fail within organisations.

In October 2009, some big SOA names (no offence to those who were not there!), got together to pen the SOA Manifesto. The document summarises their agreed opinions on the values and principles that should embody service orientation and SOA. While their U-tube video fell slightly short of the FIFA hosting-country announcements in terms of entertainment value, I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall to observe the “heated debates”, Thomas Earl so eloquently stated during the compilation of the document!

All, I have to say is kudos to the group of people who put the document together. It takes guts to find consensus on a topic that is so badly misunderstood, and it takes even more courage to present it to the world for comment. Apart from the usual buffoonery and sarcastic blog chatter, there have been a couple of constructive points made by folks like Jordan Braunstein.

I agree in principal to the concept of the manifesto and what it is trying to achieve. Consensus needs to happen in this industry so that a bit of clarity can prevail, and IT practitioners can learn from collective thought instead of individual agendas. Some have criticised the manifesto as being blatantly obvious. While I agree somewhat with the writer’s views; the purpose of the document is to represent and reaffirm a shared and common understanding. I would love to see a survey conducted on businesses to determine who have embraced values such as those have mentioned in the manifesto, if all of this is so obvious. Other commentary has focused on each value statement and dissected each line as an either or statement. The manifesto clearly states that while values on the right such as project-specific benefits are important to the business, strategic goals are valued more. In the real world, you will need a handle on both dimensions of each value statement and determine why and when you would favour behaviour such as being project centric.

Folks you have my vote, but I would love to see the detail behind some of the points in Manifesto 2.0! David, Stefan and the others, I look forward to reading your group’s consolidated explanations of the manifesto soon.

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!

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.

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