Oracle OpenWorld from Afar

The Bloggers at Openworld announcement promised to make this years conference a very different experience than ever before. Especially for people like myself who weren't able to attend. I'd like to add my big vote of thanks to the OTN, AppsLab and Oracle bloggers, whose combined efforts really did make this a great (first?) "virtual" OpenWorld.

Blogging In Action
By my last count we had 59 "openworld07" articles tagged at del.icio.us (37 in the official OTN del.icio.us tag cloud, 43 in Eddie Awad's Oracle OpenWorld News Aggregator and 26 tagged via Technorati). And so far 452 photos at Flickr.

I especially enjoyed the detailed conference diaries by Dimitri Gielis, Nathalie Roman and Doug Burns. Eddie Awad did a great job of community reporting outside the conference halls. They are just a few I enjoyed - too many other bloggers to mention, but on behalf of all the "virtual attendees" I thank you all!

Best Post has however got to be Oracle World and the invasion of the sports jacket on what is now one of my favourite blogs by the Sartorially Orientated Architects!

Suggestion #1 for the Community - Get our Common Tagging act together Eddie Awad posted some great tips for publishing and following OpenWorld. To be honest though, the adoption has been mixed. I suspect partially because there wasn't enough publicity or official sanction given to the ideas. I only noticed Eddie's post today - after the conference is over!

The most "wired" conference I've attended was ix2007 in Singapore, where instructions for twitter and tagging posts via Technorati were prominently included in the registration materials. It would be great to see this getting more official attention at OOW08.

If you blogged about OpenWorld, it's not too late to tag your posts "openworld07" and register with Technorati. And if you are reading Openworld articles, keep tagging them on deli.cio.us!

Podcasts and Streaming
Justin did a bang-up job with the OTN TechCasts from OpenWorld (can't pick a highlight since they all had great people with really relevant stuff to say). And it truely is OpenWorld when you can catch the keynotes without even attending the conference.

Suggestion #2 - Publish a Podcast Feed for the Keynotes and it's not too late for Oracle to post some feeds for the video, highlights and full audio feeds - with properly tagged audo files! I'm happy to download them all individually, but it would have been even more convenient to be able to subscribe to the keynotes feed and have them pop up in my iPod as they are published.

And now .. the analysis
I guess the one thing we haven't seen a great deal of so far is analysis of what went down at OpenWorld. I'm sure that will surface over the next weeks and months. My attention was drawn to two key themes..

• Virtualization The announcement of Oracle VM may prove to be a blockbuster if it is widely adopted in practice, I think once it is fully integrated with Enterprise Manager. It promises to completely change the game for how we build and maintain applications and technology infrastructure - from the bare-metal up, from one vendor.


• Fusion Scorecard the years are ticking by since Oracle played the Fusion card. Vinnie Mirchandani is just one who is asking "Where are the Fusion Applications?" For the cynics, the organisational changes in development are just another indicator that Fusion is devolving into a Technology/BI story i.e. just futzing around the edges. The optimists however will point out that getting the technology platform right is essential, and is not even news (see for example Cliff Godwin's Fusion AppCast on the Fusion Strategy Office from Jul-07).
  The true test for Oracle will not only be the delivery of appropriately componentized Applications, but the business insight it can encapsulate in the platform (hence why it is more important than ever that Oracle Development usefully engage the community through events like OpenWorld and the customer advisory boards).
  It is one thing to enthuse about how bringing Web2.0 and social networking features to CRM will have sales people the world over swooning, and quite another to have a head-on collision with the "Real World"!

That's all for now. Again, thanks especially to Justin (OTN), Jake and Paul (AppsLab) and the many Oracle bloggers who turned Oracle OpenWorld 2007 into a global, networked event. Kudos!

A blog about nothing (was: a can of worms)

Jake is right .. this is getting a little too much like Seinfeld.

So many posts about bloggers at OpenWorld.

Seems to me a storm in a teacup (admittedly, roughly the same size as a can of worms, but probably shouldn't be confused - print picture on right for easy reference). Most of it driven by a comparison to what "other" companies do.

As an avid blog reader, I'm actually more interested in an intelligent post from someone who has taken some time to reflect and write about their usage of the software (be it from a project, production or just playing with an OTN download).

Don't get me wrong, I definitely see value in blogging from OpenWorld - as much for the community buzz as discussion of the latest and greatest OpenWorld news. But to put too much emphasis on this I think actually plays into the hands of the supposed PR and Marketing heavies (everything focused around a single, well orchestrated event).

Since I also represent a "global audience" (living in Singapore), there's also the geographic factor. Notwithstanding whether travel costs are reimbursed, I never expect an event centred around a single location in the US to fully represent the diversity of the blogging community I'm so comfortable with.

As such, I'd be even more impressed if we saw OTN podcasts evolve into a more interactive channel (e.g. using talkshoe a la net@nite) to give true, open access for the community to key execs (and then blog about it).

Then there is the question of disclosure. Mary Ann Davidson just posted a poignant discussion of disclosure. Although arrowed at a security audience, the timing is perfect for the opening of Jake's can of worms;-)

I just can't seem to get myself worked up over this either. Perhaps something I drank last night? Or perhaps I've just got a bit more faith in the sophistication of the audience that is now growing up with blogging et al. Two factors: influence (declared or not) stands out like a sore thumb (or else why is it so easy to recognise the executive blogs that are straight out of the marketing playbook). Second, thanks to the magic of RSS I'm not just listening to one person's voice.

So all in all, I reckon getting free registration is a pretty good first step (despite the fact that other companies may do more for you). It's not like the information won't be available for all to see and share after the show, so if you want the prestige of having the first blog post up on a particular subject maybe paying some of your own way ain't such a bad deal.

I would make one concession however: I do think it would be in Oracle and the community's best interest for Oracle to have some flexibility when it comes to the (very) few bloggers who have truely crossed the line and are in fact analyst/press and should thus be treated as such.

So much for my post about nothing;-)

Disclosure: since I work at Oracle, I never expected a blogger invite (and I wasn't able to wangle an employee seat), so perhaps that explains my disinterest in getting all het up about the issue!

OTN in China and the importance of aggregators

Justin reported the stunning success of the OTN lounge at OpenWorld Shanghai 2007. Although I never made it to the lounge, the buzz in the halls and corridors was great testament to the enthusiasm of the Oracle community in this part of the world.

My trip up to Shanghai also provided a pointed reminder of China's on-again-off-again dance with blogspot (currently "off-again") when I tried to update my blog.

Now I'm not going to argue that China needs to cease its attempts to censor the net since I respect it's authority to exercise such control, just as we do in the west but with different values. However I must admit I had never thought of the collateral damage inflicted on the Oracle community of users in China, since it seems quite a large number of bloggers on Oracle topics are using one of the blocked platforms.

Fortunately it seems that the various Oracle-topic aggregators have not been hit by any of the blocks (and presumably won't be because of the generally non-political content).

So I'd encourage the aggregators to note the importance of aggregating full-text feeds with attachments ... it may be the only chance that some people may have of reading the content (also works better for anyone with an offline reader anyway).

For Oracle, I'd suggest this is another reason why it would be great to open up to hosting non-employee blogs.

Innovation on show at OpenWorld Shanghai

I've just spent the past few days at Oracle OpenWorld Asia Pacific in Shanghai. Although of course a smaller scale to the one coming up in San Francisco in November, I think there were 8000 or so attendees and in true OOW style, each session slot presented the challenge "which of these 10 concurrent sessions do I want to attend?!"

I also got to present a session myself, which was great fun (thanks to those who filled up my session on the last afternoon of the last day!) More of that in future posts maybe ...

Innovation was one of the key themes of the conference and Charles Phillips' keynote. And I think there was no better illustration of this than the demo that the OARDC team were showing in the demogrounds. It got my "best in show" vote!

Their Second Life "Innovation+ Village" show-cased a solution concept bridging the real and the virtual worlds, and they brought some interesting ideas into play.

The scenario was a Second Life wine store. In the room you can examine the products and get some gratuitous live-video. But then you can make purchases (using Linden$), which are captured in iStore for delivery in "real life" (I hope .. still waiting for my case of Bollinger;-) BI dashboards track order volumes and status. Then back in Second Life, you provide feedback on the wine purchased. The feedback is not only collated in Oracle Database for analysis (more dashboards), but also fed into a blog of comments on the particular wine (WebCenter).

Overall, a great example of an "Enterprise Mashup". I don't think the team created any new technology pieces, just a novel solution using a combination of available components and APIs, and provided the content.

While you may doubt the financial viability of doing business in Second Life, it does emphasise the fact that creating Enterprise 2.0 value for your organisation does not necessarily involve a huge development investment. Just as a great artist can produce a masterpiece with a child's paintbox, real solutions are possible today if you have the imagination and creativity to combine the youthful "Web 2.0" component palette with your existing IT infrastructure.

Congrats to the crew from OARDC that put the solution concept together - Lennard Low, Teo Kian Hui, Wang Rong Rong, Zhang Rong (I believe this is a group photo below) and thanks Rong Rong for the demo;) Hope you get to show this in San Francisco too ... make sure you get a more prominent space in the DemoGrounds though, and don't have the screen facing away from the entrance!