Thursday, December 24, 2009
Fusion Applications - Concerns related to IP
This indicates that parts of Fusion Applications will have a windows look and feel. It also may point to potential future issues with licensing terms with OEM's whose products have been implicitly licensed prior to being acquired by Oracle.
Source Link: Oracle Slapped With Suit Tied to Fusion Applications - PCWorld Business Center by Chris Kanarcus.
Posted using ShareThis
Thursday, December 3, 2009
Cloud Computing vs. SaaS
The analogy of a fully-owned car (On-premise), a leased car (SaaS) and a Taxi (Clod Computing) is helpful, and is explained well in the following video, courtesy of GoGrid.
While the definition of cloud computing continues to evolve, in essence you could use Cloud computing in 3 ways:
- Infrastructure as a Service - Think disk space, similar to Amazon's EC2.
- Platform as a Service - This is the evolving space. Here you have a server+Infrastructure available as a service.
- Application as a Service - Think Salesforce.com, however this is pay-per use, NOT pay-per-user.
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
Media interview at OOW - 2009
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
209 ways to share
Social media and social networking seem to have not only come of age, but appear to be extremely vibrant at this point. A screen shot of all the options that I have come across is shown below:
Microsoft / SAP alliance... Enemy of my enemy is my friend
This sounds like a case of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend".
Details of the press release are here.
Friday, October 23, 2009
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:
- 400 GB DRAM (Very Nice)
- 5 TB flash cache memory (Awesome)
- 336 TB disk space (Nice)
- 40 GB InfiniBand network links (Good)
- 880 Gbps throughput (Very nice)
- 1,000,000 random I/O's / second / rack (Awesome)
- 64 cores
- 1/6th 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.
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
Oracle Support – from service ticket to community based support
At the highest level the MySupport process works as follows:
- Register servers and Oracle products with Oracle MySupport. This provides instant visibility to Oracle regarding your configurations.
- Use community based model for researching issues and providing feedback. This includes feedback on patches.
- Use the Oracle Enterprise Manager (OEM) to review patches that are applicable to your environment, research dependencies and apply patches.
- 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.
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
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
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.