OTN TechBlog

I had briefly mentioned The No Slide Zone at Oracle OpenWorld in a previous post about a session there in which I'm participating, but I think it's worth providing a bit more information.

The NSZ is essentially an "experimental" track in which you can see popular presenters (such as Tom Kyte) work in unconventional session formats, such as fishbowls, reverse panels, and virtual whiteboarding. It should be a nice breath of fresh air for PPT haters (and I'm one of them). There also happens to be a lot of very interesting content about Oracle Database 11g and Fusion Middleware that you didn't know (and won't learn about anywhere else at the show).

It's been a few months since I ignited a
firestorm over Oracle's "Web 2.0" credibility (looking back,
"social media" would have been a more accurate term), with Dennis
Howlett and others subsequently taking me to task. (Scoble
was more kind, conceding my point to an
extent.)

Let's overview our progress since
then:

- Oracle has sponsored a BarCamp as well as a
Lunch
2.0.
- For the first time, a formal blogger
relations program was implemented for Oracle OpenWorld
(criticism of certain details notwithstanding; we're just getting
started here). We've
just put the finishing touches on the suggested agenda (or "unagenda"? totally
optional of course), which I am confident will be of great
interest.
- Also for the first time, Oracle OpenWorld will
include an unconference
track

Yet more progress to report: Today, Oracle
launched the first official public-facing Oracle wiki. Some
screenshots:

This
wiki is another great step. Although members of the Oracle community
have
long had the ability to directly interact/collaborate with employees as
well as each other, it's always been in a one/off manner: you ask a
question, and I answer it. (Or I write a blog entry, and you comment on
it.) With the wiki, the community can now collaboratively create and
share content (as well as rate and comment on it). This is fairly
standard functionality, but it's never been available on this scale for
Oracle-heads until now.

I love this
thing! Get your wiki page started today; the community is waiting to
hear from you.

Snapped my first photos this AM, with a heavy emphasis on OTN of course.

This is by far the busiest Sunday I've seen at an OpenWorld yet.

Several product managers and me spent the whole of this afternoon showering Oracle ACE Directors (for Database and Middleware) with information, including product direction for the SOA Suite, Identity Management Suite, WebCenter, and Database. We also had a very productive roundtable about the program in general, in which we most of the time discussing the new Oracle Wiki.

It would take me several pages to convey everything covered here, and it's best anyway that I leave that job to the ACEs themselves. Suffice it to say there were many exchanges not only about functionality, but about licensing and pricing as well. The synergy in the room was tremendous, given the presence of experts from not only around the globe, but across the tech stack. (Next year, we should have reps from the world of packaged apps as well.)

Perhaps most important, this meeting provided a rare opportunity for the far-flung ACEs to meet each other in person and trade war stories. In a couple hours, that process will re-start at the Oracle ACE dinner, which will include an even richer cross-section of the Oracle community. Looking forward to it!

Having just deployed the agenda whiteboards for the Unconference (begins today at 2pm), I ran into Tim Bonnemann, one of its "godfathers". (No Tim, I won't refer to you as a "midwife".)

I'll check back on the status of the board (still largely pristine) after the Charles Phillips keynote, which will contain Oracle's official announcement of Oracle VM.

On Wednesday I'll be speaking with Linux Engineering VP about this announcement. You can download Oracle VM (and seed templates) from OTN that day too.

Marius Ciortea, Paul Pedrazzi, and I just wrapped up our "Welcome to Change" session in the No Slide Zone. Julio Fernandez was kind enough to capture it for us:

Now it can be said: Oracle Co-Prez Charles Phillips met with a select group of "media" bloggers today, including Dan Farber, Josh Greenbaum, Vinne Mirchandani, Jeff Nolan, and other "Enterprise Irregulars." Here's the proof:


Honestly, how many of you ever thought this would happen? What a great step for Oracle, and for "transparency" overall.

See also deconstruction from Jeff Nolan.

Many, many pix to come from OTN Night - which I don't understand why
anyone at OpenWorld would miss. I'll take it over "Appreciation Night"
any day.

First, I chatted with Chief Installfest
Officer Todd Trichler and SQL Developer mastermind Kris Rice during
Installfest setup.

I also caught my colleague Marius Ciortea, Oracle Web Strategist and internal social media evangelist:

You can also explore tons of photos in the openworld07 flickstream.

Thanks to Anne Zelenka for her nice summary of Oracle's recent activities in the social media world at GigaOm.

Anne, you conclude with a thought about "how these various social web efforts might change Oracle's way of of working." The "Welcome to Change" session that Marius Ciortea, Paul Pedrazzi, and I did on Monday offers a lot of information in that area. It is definitely doing so, yes - on a number of levels. Check out the video!

Ed Abbo, VP Development for "Applications Unlimited" apps (basically everything excepting Fusion Apps), gave a knock-out keynote yesterday that has been resonating in some corners of the blogosphere. You can view it here in its entirety; there are some killer demos in here - including CRM on Demand social apps based on the OpenSocial API.

Larry Ellison may have more comments about this process in his keynote, to be delivered within minutes.

You can do that from here now (and read the doc). Guest templates for Oracle and Linux TBD soon.

I also recorded an awesome podcast with Kurt Hackel, Oracle VM's primary architect, at the OTN Lounge.

Larry Ellison's keynote yesterday offered a nice encapsulation of the conference themes across the week:

1. Oracle is embracing hardware virtualization and will attempt to provide a superior product in that area (Oracle VM)
2. Oracle Fusion Apps are imminent (first three releases in early 2008), and are defined by their service-oriented architecture/pre-packaged integration with legacy apps, embedded business intelligence, and ability to function in on-premise as well as SaaS modes
3. Social apps, such as social networking, will become features of enterprise applications (such as Fusion Apps).

The keynote included a nice demo of the Sales Prospector functionality that will be the centerpiece of Oracle Fusion SFA, one of the first three Fusion apps to be released. Oracle Fusion SFA features social networking functionality that allows salespeople to select and build presentation content based on shared experience (eg, a given preso may be highly rated by the community based on its effectiveness in a given scenario).

Interestingly, Oracle Database 11g was not even mentioned. I take this omission as a tacit implication of Oracle's success in the database marketplace.

I corralled Oracle Magazine editor-in-chief Tom Haunert at the conference late yesterday afternoon; he was in rare form:

Tom, where's your blog anyway?

So, Oracle OpenWorld 2007 is over. It was a milestone for a several reasons, the main one being: the conference was reinvigorated thanks to innovations like the Unconference, No Slide Zone, Oracle Wiki, Oracle Mix, etc. - the latter two still being in heavy use, even after the buildings have emptied.

(See the complete conference photostream here.)

The introduction of the Oracle Wiki has been a interesting case study in the collision between the "old" Web (information publisher-driven) and the "new" one (information consumer-driven).

Most users "get it" and are already carpet-bombing the wiki with new pages and edits to existing ones. But there is a minority who don't understand what the wiki is "for" - which is an interesting indicator of their expectations. (Billy Cripe offers a good definition of Web 2.0; he characterizes it as partially a set of "expectations".)

These traditionalists expect a Web application to dictate the conditions of its use (this is what corporate Web sites are designed to do), whereas a wiki does no such thing. It does the opposite in fact; it moves this responsibility back to the user. (Obviously, the wiki is not a completely blank slate; there are Rules of Conduct that are designed to maximize its value to the community.)

One wiki contributor, girlgeek, asked me how she would know if her contributions have any value or whether other contributors want her to "stop" making them, which I found to be a charming concern. You go, girlgeek - your participation is where the value resides; the content is just icing on the cake.

This issue is one aspect of the larger existential issue of Web 2.0 - similar to business intelligence (many parallels here in my opinion), Web 2.0 is a business process/cultural issue, not a technology one. Sure, in both cases, technology is an enabler, but it's not the "point" - the slickest technology in the universe won't get you to nirvana in either case.

The latest all-time stats are out, hot off the press:

Had a visit yesterday with Paul Vallee of Pythian Group, a Canada-based outsource for DBA operations of various kinds.

Paul has some interesting perspectives as he works with clients with varying DBA requirements (including platform). He also brought me a great poster: "The Family Tree of Ottawa-Gatineau High Tech Companies", which is a surprisingly leafy tree - think Corel, Databeacon, Liquid Computing - all companies that have some lineage back to U. of Waterloo (AI hotspot in the 80s), Cognos, Northern Electric, etc.

Thanks Paul!

Some members of the Oracle Apps User Experience team have put a nice new blog together. If the first entry is any indication of what we can look forward to, I'm jazzed....