Oracle OpenWorld Blog

Why Moscone North Was Buzzing
This morning Oracle President Charles Phillips set the tone for Oracle OpenWorld by calling this "the Year of Innovation." He then backed up his statement over the next hour by demonstrating just what Oracle has accomplished since we last met at Oracle OpenWorld.

First he rolled through some numbers for perspective: Oracle has made 50 acquisitions in 44 months. We now offer 3,000 products. Our number of employees has grown from 40,000 to 85,000 since the acquisition strategy began, and one-third of these new employees joined us through acquisitions. We have 20,000 developers working across 30,000 servers. And we will invest about $3 billion this year in pure research and development.

Our overall product strategy, Phillips said, remains the same. To provide products that are complete, open, and integrated. They are complete so we can control all the components and add value. They're open to create standard communication between Oracle components, and with third-party components. They're preintegrated to reduce the amount of integration the customer has to do and to reduce the growing complexity of IT systems.

Next Phillips talked about Oracle Applications, concentrating mostly on the industry category. Oracle Telco customer KPN made a guest appearance and explained how Oracle's out-of-the-box communications solution helped KPN speed new products to market faster and outpace its competition in running fiber optics to the homes of every customer.

Executive Vice President Chuck Rozwat helped Phillips demonstrate Oracle Beehive, our brand new, built-from-scratch "collaboration server, that Phillips dubbed the cure for "communication fragmentation." Oracle Beehive not only integrates e-mail, voicemail, IM, chat rooms, conferences, calendars, blogs, tags, wikis, document sharing, and more communication and content tools—it also integrates with Oracle Database, across Oracle Fusion Middleware, and with Oracle Applications.

The big announcements today for Oracle Database were the shipping of the new Oracle Database 11g Release 11.1.07. and the ongoing enhancements for Oracle VM.

Also news was the replacement of Oracle Metalink with the new and improved support service, My Oracle Support.

Ironically, for a company that built its name on database, there were so many other exciting innovations to talk about that the database brought up the tail end of the conversation. As Phillips noted, there's no other company in the world that could cover the ground that he did this morning.

The complete keynote, and tons more conference content is available through Oracle OpenWorld On Demand, which is now available to the general public.