Oracle Technology Network Blog (aka TechBlog)

Now that Oracle OpenWorld is history, I wanted to recount a few of may favorite things/experiences. Sadly, I don't have much time to enjoy the actual content of the show anymore, so I will have to live vicariously through others for that experience. But a few things really jumped out at me:

1. The Cloud Computing support announcement.
Although plenty of SaaS/Cloud purists have quibbled about this (the announcement did not include utility-based licensing), 95% of humanity will agree that the new ability to provision supported Oracle Database/Fusion Middleware instances in the Amazon cloud is very, very positive. If you're a developer, your prototyping options on Oracle just expanded considerably: Instead of taking the time and expense to procure and manage boxes or database access for hot or short-term projects, you can now be and up and running very quickly, with little ongoing administration required. Or, if you're simply interested in evaluating Oracle products, you now have a nice, hardware-free alternative to doing an install. We're already looking at ways to take advantage of this new capability for workshop purposes, for example.

2. The Oracle ACE experience.
It's getting to the point that for me, the entire purpose of OpenWorld is meet and greet ACEs, and I know that the ACEs themselves relish the opportunity to interact in person. (For an interesting perspective from an ACE outsider, read this post from Robert McMillen.) The number and quality of new ideas that fall out of these meetings is just staggering, and we've barely scratched the surface.

3. The Unconference.
No surprise there, I loved the unconference. By opening the agenda up early this year via wiki, we succeeded in attractive some great presenters, and great content. Unfortunately, the sessions themselves were not well attended in general, for various logistical reasons I expect. For 2009, we will press for integration with the Session Builder tool, and consider moving the venue to Oracle Develop (where most of the attendees will be). I welcome any other thoughts or ideas you have.

4. The community content network.
Every year, an ad hoc online community forms around this event, with YouTube, blogs, Twitter, flickr, and this year Oracle Mix and Qik serving as the chief content creation and networking tools. It's almost more fun to vicariously participate via this network, as opposed to actually being there ("almost" being the operative word).

Those are a few of my favorite things. And yours?

BTW, during the conference I spoke with Michael Kastler about OpenWorld goings-on for his TechTalk radio show; you can hear the results here.

I was privileged to be among the invitees to Forrester analyst Jeremiah Owyang's "Future of the Social Web" round table yesterday. Although I got the invitation relatively late and didn't have a huge amount of time to think about this issue in advance, the time was more than well spent.

With approximately 40 participants from all walks of the "social web", this event, which I would characterize as an interactive workshop, could plausibly be considered a bellwether of the industry. At the start of the day, Jeremiah challenged us to:

1) make four predictions about the future of the social web (5 year horizon),
2) identify one chief key challenge to that prediction coming to pass, and
3) propose a solution for overcoming that challenge and thus fulfilling the prediction.

(Looking back on this agenda now, I think "prediction" was probably not the right word; "requirement for success" is probably more in line with what we discussed.)

To that end, we broke up into focus groups (brands/practitioners, whitebox vendors, enterprise CRM providers, etc.) to build this content out. Here are the fruits of our labor:

• Prediction 1: Community will participate in all aspects of marketing/strategy, product development, and support.
  Challenge: Brands have difficulty managing the culture shift.
  Solution: Develop a business program to create incremental benefits
• Prediction 2: Brands present and participate where organic communities exist.
  Challenge: Reorientating the organization to deliver value to the community first.
  Solution: Brands require monitoring tools, internal training and processes, in order to deliver value to communities where they exist.
• Prediction 3: Workstyle evolves as employees collaborate beyond colleagues to get work done.
  Challenge: Rules within corporate culture prevent adoption.
  Solution: Develop strategy for internal process change
• Prediction 4: One identity with controllable multiple facets.
  Challenge: Industry does not agree what should be portable, and how it should be, resulting in no trust.
  Solution: Despite this being a prediction, market demand doesn’t yet exist to spur adoption and innovation

One of the most interesting observations (made by Jeremiah) was the fact that brands are apparently much farther along the social web continuum than is generally assumed - but this may simply be a statistical artifact based on the fact that attendees were hand-selected. I also find it interesting that the most important as well as difficult requirement - the concept of a truly portable profile/identity - is by consensus completely outside current market conditions at the moment. For that reason, in the near future we may be using the plural term "social webs" (remember AOL's "walled garden"?)

I was also very interested to learn that IBM recently put 2,000 marketing employees globally through intensive and lengthy "social media awareness" training. We are doing something similar at Oracle but in an ad hoc fashion, so IBM's model may be of interest to us.

If you're interested in a play-by-play, Jeff Nolan live-blogged the action here. I'll add more resources here as they become available.

As you may already know, I have particular fondness for the business intelligence area, which goes all the way back to my days as an associate editor for AI Expert Magazine (at the time one of only two trade publications specifically covering the commercial application of artificial intelligence systems). One of my favorite duties was the authorship of the "Application Watch" column, wherein I described interesting and at times whimsical examples of such applications. (Eg, I was recently disappointed to read of the impending bankruptcy of Mrs. Fields' Cookies, one of the earliest and most successful endorsers of commercial expert systems.)

Eventually I ended up as editor-in-chief of CMP Media's Intelligent Enterprise mag, which was all BI, all the time. You might say that I got my "black belt" in the BI marketplace there.

So, I am particularly looking forward to the Oracle Business Intelligence, Warehousing, and Analytics (aka BIWA) Summit at Oracle HQ, Dec. 2-3. For anyone interested in these subjects, the lineup is pretty incredible: in addition to a full deck of relevant Oracle product managers, there will be several influential practitioners there - including Oracle ACEs and ACE Directors like Dan Vlamis and Edward Roske. It's not all PPT either - hands-on labs covering data warehousing, OLAP, enterprise performance management, and data mining are involved.

In addition Oracle's Juan Loiaza and Ray Roccaforte, keynoters include Usama Fayyad - a BI/analytics legend, now Chief Data Officer for Yahoo - and Accenture's Jeanne Harris.

This is a good one, folks. I hope to see you at the BIWA Summit in December!

Carl Backstrom (@carlback), a member of the Oracle family, died last weekend in a tragic car accident.

I did not know Carl well, but my few interactions with him were always a pleasure. He was one of those people with a permanent smile on his face, and I know he was a great asset in, and contributor to, the Oracle APEX developer community.

His manager, Joel Kallman, blogs here about a possible memorial fund; you may want to check back there for details as they emerge.

My condolences to Carl's friends and family.

Yesterday @eddieawad let the proverbial cat out of the bag about the new My Oracle Support community set to launch within the next few days. My Oracle Support will replace Metalink as the formal process channel for Oracle customers with support contracts.

I got a demo today, and it's pretty slick - nice UI, tagging, new forums built on WebCenter Interaction (formerly AquaLogic User Interaction), document sharing, etc. The community is also aligning with OTN in recognizing Oracle ACEs, and their reward points system is also identical to ours. The My Oracle Support team is very interested in collaboration with us, which is a good thing.

The question will surely arise though: Why YAC (Yet Another Community)?

Well, the simple answer is: because support customers want it. These features have been specifically requested by those folks. And it's plain common sense to accept that the community peer-support model can help defray support costs.

Confusion is sure to occur, however. People who are active OTN members may now be tempted to donate their precious time elsewhere, especially in a new community that is a blank slate - think of all the new community reputations to be built! And Oracle end-users who are unfamiliar with our Chinese menu of community offerings will wonder where to post their questions (if they don't already).

It could end up being a boon to OTN however - we will have to sharpen our commitment to evangelism, and make our differences with formal support even more stark. I would also like to think that people will tend be more active in and committed to a free and transparent community, vs. one behind a firewall. Time will tell on that subject.

What do you think we can and should do to make OTN and My Oracle Support as complementary as possible?