OOW 2009 – A serious event

This Oracle Open World (2009), was a much more serious event compared to previous events. Although the crowd size felt the same, the quality of attendees was different. There appeared to be more decision makers, and most attendees had a sense of purpose and were focused on finding out information relevant to their area of interest. Conversations with attendees were more engaged and detailed and you came away with a sense of having had a serious discussion, versus water-cooler talk.

This may have been a direct consequence of the economy, as everyone's expense budgets are limited, and only those who had a quantifiable reason to be at OOW were approved to come. Another incidental observation was that there were no freebies this time around. No stress balls, blinking pens, giveaway toys and the like… definitely a serious event.

The embarrassingly fast Exadata V2

The big announcement in Larry's keynote this year was about Exadata V2. It is fast… and Larry drove the point home by challenging anyone who ran applications on IBM servers to make those applications run half as fast as on the Exadata V2 servers. Brash, in your face and completely Larry-style. The high-level specs are as follows:

1. 400 GB DRAM (Very Nice)
   
2. 5 TB flash cache memory (Awesome)
   
3. 336 TB disk space (Nice)
   
4. 40 GB InfiniBand network links (Good)
   
5. 880 Gbps throughput (Very nice)
   
6. 1,000,000 random I/O's / second / rack (Awesome)
   
7. 64 cores
   
8. 1/6^th power consumption of equivalents (Very Compelling, if true)
   

In layman's terms, with the huge amount of memory most of the database would reside in fast-processing memory. This has significant gains in terms of performance and power consumption. With disk I/O being extremely fast as well, any data that does reside on disk would be rapidly accessible.

Bottom-line – Looks, sounds and smells like an extremely fast machine. Would keep a close eye on which applications and versions within the Oracle Universe start getting certified on it.

Oracle Support – from service ticket to community based support

Oracle has invested heavily in the MySupport service portal. The vision is to have a community based support mechanism, and use data mining techniques to provide proactive support. With over $1Bn dollars invested by Oracle in the support platform and over 50% of revenue coming from maintenance contracts, this is a big area of focus and innovation for Oracle.

At the highest level the MySupport process works as follows:

1. Register servers and Oracle products with Oracle MySupport. This provides instant visibility to Oracle regarding your configurations.
   
2. Use community based model for researching issues and providing feedback. This includes feedback on patches.
   
3. Use the Oracle Enterprise Manager (OEM) to review patches that are applicable to your environment, research dependencies and apply patches.
   
4. Oracle would monitor bugs/defects based on information being fed into the system by all customers, detect trends and proactively advise on patches that are relevant to your environment.
   

The benefit here is that you can leverage the extensive community based framework for issue resolution, and potentially derive benefits from proactive guidance. The downside is that you would need to exclusively embrace this model of support as it would not integrate with a service ticket model that you may already have in place.

It is all about the Edge

It has been evident for a while that the ERP market place is saturated, with a diminishing number of new licenses being sold by the major ERP vendors. However, the focus on "Edge" products at OOW – 2009, indicates just how far down this path the market has moved. Almost all discussions with Oracle representatives were focused on "Edge" products and/or industry alignment. These "Edge" products are by definition intended to augment core ERP applications, by providing niche functionality. These edge products, however have now matured to the point where they can provide stand-alone functionality besides supplementing the primary ERP. The most buzz at OOW was around the following edge products:

• Hyperion
  
• OBIEE and EPM
  
• Oracle Transportation Management
  
• Demantra
  
• Master Data Management
  

The underlying infrastructure and integration with these products was considered implicit to the solution. The focus was primarily on the value proposition or solution that could be achieved using these tools.

Fusion Applications – A very quiet release

Larry Ellison's launch of Fusion Applications was so subtle it went quite unnoticed under the back drop of the Exadata V2 announcement. Fusion Applications has been in the gestation period for so long, that we all expected its release to be trumpeted across all channels and be a marquee event for OOW – 2009. Instead it qualified as the fourth bullet on Larry Ellison's keynote. Oracle must be down playing this release for strategic reasons, as it was obvious that a tremendous amount of work has been put into this product. With a data model consisting of 6534 tables and 18,385 views it has the makings of an enterprise class ERP. Some of the salient features are:

• Fusion application is designed to extend existing "legacy" applications (EBS/PS/JDE) with bolt-on processes
  
• Net-new functionality provided with new apps modules
  
• High focus on quality with 700+ beta customers
  
• Immense focus on usability, with roles based dashboards
  
• Web 2.0 and social networking features embedded within the application
  
• Built for on-premise or SaaS or a hybrid model
  
• Built from the ground up around a MDM based data model, with a standardized model for defining business objects such as customer/item, etc.
  

Since the NDA's have loosened some of the initial screen shots have been released. They look like OBIEE screens, which is not surprising as the UI for Fusion Apps was meant to be BI based. Some of the screens are shown below:

 

AIA 2.5 - From A2A to Cross-Industry Integration

AIA started out being a mechanism for application-to-application (A2A) integration. With the release of AIA 2.5 the the AIA Foundation Pack now has 80 EBO's and over a 1000 pre-built services. With over 30 PIP's AIA has matured to being a cross-industry integration platform by providing pre-built process flows for common cross-industry processes such as Order to Cash (O2C) and Procure to Pay (P2P). NOTE: All of these pre-built processes are based on specific application end-points. However these process flows which are embedded within the existing framkwork and can be (relatively) easily extended to include different application endpoints.


I anticipate future release of AIA would focus on specific industries and provide process flows for business processes specific to an industry domain. This would align well with the gradual release of Fusion Applications.


With the initial release of AIA in April-2007 to the release of AIA 2.5 in Oct 2009, AIA has matured from a great concept with a lose set of code artifacts, to a robust product with a compelling value proposition as an integration platform. Quite a journey in 2.5 years.