By Brian Dayton, Senior Director, Oracle Fusion Middleware

Washington, D.C. – July 1, 2009
Welcome to my first post on the innovation blog. I’m writing this from Washington, D.C. as we’re just about to launch the 11g release of Oracle Fusion Middleware. It’s been a long and sometimes crazy ride. But it’s great to see the story about this latest release finally unveiled to the world.

Just as this is the kickoff to the innovation blog, it’s also the kickoff of a 100-city tour to share the realities, key features and innovations in the Oracle Fusion Middleware product line. At 10am Eastern we start here in Washington, D.C. and from there the road show will cover at least ten more cities in July including London, Munich, Sydney, Beijing, Seoul, Tokyo, Sao Paolo and Mexico City…to name a few.

Much of yesterday was spent on rehearsals, final checks on demonstrations and technical checks. We were all up early this morning, but it’s going to be a great event.

Oracle President Charles Phillips and Senior Vice President Thomas Kurian will be starting the show, with a tag-team keynote covering the overall strategy as well as key innovations and enhancements to a number of middleware products. Hope you can catch the keynote online—or better yet, in person if you’re in the greater Washington, D.C. area. Look for some interesting guest speakers to join them on stage. The venue is great and only a few blocks away from the White House. I haven’t been here since 1986, so it was nice to get a chance to walk around a bit last night between rehearsals and catching up on email. More soon.

By Brian Dayton, Senior Director, Oracle Fusion Middleware

Wow. That was probably one of the most impressive—and ambitious--keynotes I’ve seen. Just a quick break here in the press room before I head off to finish lunch and then to breakout sessions later this afternoon. Hope you caught it online.

A lot of information covering Oracle’s development tools, service-oriented architecture, enterprise portal, application server and identity management strategies. A ton of information. Even though I’ve seen everything a number of times—starting at the very beginning, years ago, and more recently as the presentations came together, the demos were built and up into rehearsals at Oracle’s HQ and today in the Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium— I’m still glad that I’ll be able to look back to it online. The replay should be available tomorrow.

Who’s Here and Personal Highlights
It’s always interesting to see and hear what resonates with the crowd, especially as we go from city to city. Here in the federal capital of the U.S. we obviously got a solid showing from public sector customers but also a good representation from some commercial ventures—many of which have a solid presence in the area.

Five demonstrations and five customers who are already using Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g products or were a part of the beta were the highlight for me. It really brought everything to life and made it very real and tangible.

What Resonated…at Least What I Heard People Talking About
It was interesting to see how many people were interested in the Oracle Identity Management 11g sections and the Oracle WebCenter Suite 11g sections. Maybe I’m picking up on that more because I was surrounded by public sector customers. As I anticipated, the complete identity management strategy that Thomas Kurian spoke about had people listening intently. There are a number of enhancements to the Oracle Internet Directory and Oracle Virtual Directory that will definitely be time savers down the road for many of our customers.

Another key innovation is the fact that this release delivers on Oracle’s strategy and vision to deliver service-oriented security. Expect to hear a lot more about that from us in the coming months. At a high level, we’re talking about abstracting away access and entitlements management from the application. This may or not make sense, depending on how technical or security-savvy you are. But for developers and development managers this makes a lot of sense. Historically, security has been so tightly bound to the actual application it makes development, changes, reporting and administration difficult. By abstracting these away you will now be able to define and implement security declaratively—building applications in Oracle JDeveloper, and Oracle ADF app, SOA application or Web Portal.

Speaking of Web portals, the latest view into Oracle WebCenter Suite 11g looks awesome. Vince Casarez, VP of Development, did a full-on run-through of the latest—including a live demonstration of an Oracle WebCenter application on an iPhone. I’ve spent a lot of time working with some of the early adopter and beta customers over the past few months and I keep hearing great things from the Oracle WebCenter crowd. The new Composer feature for quick development, even by business users, and WebCenter Spaces for team collaboration are definitely hot with the agency and federal crowd. I was talking to two gentlemen on my way over here about how these features would apply to rolling out new services to constituents and making their virtual teams more connected.

Off to the breakouts now.

By Brian Dayton, Senior Director, Oracle Fusion Middleware

The afternoon breakout sessions in Washington, D.C. were great. Unfortunately we had to turn people away from the Oracle WebCenter session. Vince Casarez must have done such a great job with the demo during the keynote that he over-packed the house. SOA, Application Grid--featuring Oracle WebLogic Suite--and Identity Management were also really, really well attended. I'm glad that we made the call to run the sessions 2 times to make sure that attendees could see what they came for. For those who didn't catch the keynote live, it's now available on-demand. We didn't webcast the breakout sessions but they will be available in-person when the 100+ city Oracle Fusion Middleware Forum kicks into high gear later this month.

Another thing that really started to resonate were some points that Thomas Kurian made during his keynote about the amount of time and effort that has gone into the development of the Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g release. He spoke about millions of person-hours in automated and stress testing, the thousands of developers who worked on the release...and more. It really came together when I saw and heard the breakout presentations, the features, and realized the thought (and sweat) that has gone into it. Innovation takes a lot of effort.

Washington, D.C. - By The Numbers
2 - (At least 2 that I'm aware of) all nighters pulled by some of the public relations and OTN folks to make sure that all of the information, documentation, and downloads got out and posted on-time for July 1st
1,000+ - people who were registered for the event at the Mellon Auditorium. It was standing-room only.
1 - Satellite truck to get the live keynote webcast out
1 - X-ray truck to x-ray our satellite truck to make sure that everything was OK. We were in a federal building.
3675 - Miles (or 5915 km) from Washington, D.C. to London---the next stop for Thomas Kurian, Charles Phillips, and the demonstration crew for the next event on July 2nd
66 - The highway between the Mellon Auditorium and Washington Dulles Airport that got closed while our demo crew was on the way to the airport trying to get their flight out
1 - Big sigh of relief, from me and many other folks, when everyone made their flight
3 - Ring Circus
Given that European holidays are fast approaching, we decided to go with a three-prong approach to the initial European leg of the tour. So while the Washington, D.C. team kicks off another event in London, two more teams are doing the launch in Paris and Munich.

It's going to be another long day.

By Brian Dayton, Senior Director, Oracle Fusion Middleware

After an overnight flight from Washington, D.C., Oracle President Charles Phillips and Oracle Senior Vice President Thomas Kurian and some of my friends on the demo team packed the Hilton London Paddington to kick off the European launch events. Concurrently, Munich, Germany and Paris, France hosted similar launch events on July 2nd.

New Oracle WebLogic Server and Oracle WebLogic Suite Innovations
There was a lot of interest, particularly in London, in the strong Oracle WebLogic Server and Oracle Database installed bases. The announcement about the new Oracle GridLink for Real Application Clusters (RAC) feature was a big hit. Enhanced integration between Oracle WebLogic Server and Oracle RAC means higher data access reliability and performance in clustered environments. And it’s easy to set up—which cuts down on implementation time. Another Oracle Application Grid feature that had people asking questions was Oracle ActiveCache, enhanced integration between Oracle WebLogic Server and Oracle Coherence. It’s going to be key for organizations that need accelerated responsiveness for Web applications but need to get from point A to point B quickly and without code changes.

Online Resources
In addition to the physical events, the team also rolled out an impressive 11g revamp of www.oracle.com/middleware Web pages, Oracle Technology Network pages, blogs and downloads—and a brand-new Web site called the Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g Launch Center that’s dedicated to 11g release product information, tutorials and overviews. A lot of work went into every single asset, page forum and blog—like the Application Grid blog. But what was more impressive was that it was all rolled out in the span of about an hour.

World Tour – Coming to a City Near You
If you don’t happen to live in or near one of the initial 10 launch cities, the Launch Center is a great place to start. Even better, we’re now going broad in our plans to take the show to over 100 cities starting later this month. Check out the Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g Forum events for a city near you.

Next stop on the launch tour, Sydney, with Beijing, Seoul, and Tokyo to follow next week. At least it was nice to relax a bit during the July 4th holiday.

By Vivek Kumar, Senior Applications Engineer, Fusion Technical Architecture, Oracle

Most of the dictionaries define innovation as a new way of doing something. It’s also defined as an incremental, radical, or revolutionary change in products, processes or organizations. However, bringing that mindset to your day-to-day work is something that needs a lot of courage, time, dedication, and support (from your superiors as well as from peers). Work can become boring over a period of time if nothing changes. On day one it may be too complex to even understand what all it is about. But on the fifth or tenth day it becomes manageable--then comes the day when you feel the job is taking you nowhere. This is what happens to more than 99% of the people doing same or similar work every day. The other 1% are able to avoid that boredom by trying to do their work differently or looking for the ways to do it faster or more efficiently. That mindset, that determination to kill the boredom from everyday life, is another kind of innovation.

Everyone wants his work to be interesting and most people want it to be challenging as well. Nobody wants boring work that never changes. Still, most people fail to be innovative. What does it take to be innovative?
· Willingness to look for new ways of doing your job
· The ability to manage work pressure so that you can analyze what is happening with your job and what needs to change.
· Support and encouragement from your supervisor and peers.

As soon as a process or a work methodology becomes an everyday job without any significant changes, then it is probably a good time to start thinking about bringing innovation into the job. I believe it is good to be selfish in this regard. If innovation happens, then anyone can generalize it for the betterment of the organization. Not everyone may be innovative but they can be very good watchmen. If someone dares to try a new way of doing something and it works, no one hesitates to start doing it the same way immediately.

Further, I believe innovation cannot come in isolation. In other words, you cannot set up a group of 10 people in the organization to bring innovation into the system. A dedicated group can facilitate or focus on innovative people but cannot bring all the positive changes that the system may need. Innovation needs real people working on real problems in their day-to-day work and identifying the areas that need a different treatment. So, an organization that believes in innovation must make sure to identify innovative people and nurture them in the organization irrespective of the employees’ type of work and role.

For more blog posts from Vik, visit Dare to Code at adfjsf.blogspot.com