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