To which I replied: Why not? In fact we already did one, at last year's OpenWorld conference.

For whatever reason - perhaps because unconferences can only be organized by those with purity of spirit - @yinchang wondered aloud whether "corporate sponsorship" and "unconference" cannot be reconciled, as if unconfs are typically held in the wilderness, away from corporate things like meeting rooms, lunch buffets, and hotels. Her next step, rightly, was to crowd-source the Twittersphere:

...with His Appleness @guykawasaki himself replying matter-of-factly (and correctly):

I, of course, duly referred both of them to the OpenWorld Unconference page, which is fairly self-explanatory in its openness. (Hey, even SAP presented last year.) All's well that ends well:

I don't mean to pick on @yinchang personally; her semi-rhetorical question was a sincere one. My point rather is to illustrate the fact that communication will trump cynicism, and thence move on to building trust, every time.

Released by BEA in tech preview in November 2007, 10.3 is the first "Oracle-compliant, feature-bearing" release - meaning: it now functions as official JDeveloper/ADF/TopLink runtime, and it has lots of new stuff in it. Workshop for WebLogic is still in there for all platforms and it's now free, to boot.

If you're a former BEA customer, you've probably been waiting for this for a while. If you're a longstanding Oracle one; well, this is your chance to get your feet wet with what is now Oracle's strategic Java platform.

I feel compelled to add that despite what you may have read elsewhere, the WLS install is fairly lightweight (154MB) when the a-la-carte approach is taken. Or, you can choose to download the entire entree (WLS, drivers, plugins, JDKs, samples) at about 735MB.

These folks should be happy to hear that on Aug. 25, Oracle will host an OTN Developer Day focusing specifically on database app development, with a core curriculum based on Oracle Database 11g w/In-Memory Database Cache and Oracle SQL Developer supplanted by afternoon breakouts on developing with .NET, Oracle Application Express, Java/JDBC, or dynamic languages (PHP and Ruby). Something for everyone!

I can tell you from personal experience that the database app dev team has been working really hard on this for months. Laptops will be provided.

Register the old-fashioned way or via Upcoming.

I've never seen Mark speak before, which is unusual in itself; Oracle tends to trot out more or less the same pool of spokespeople. This fact, combined with the content of his keynote, was refreshing - after all, Mark is himself a practitioner, not a marketer, and his talk was a reflection of that status.

After describing what anyone would consider Oracle's monstrous IT environment - which makes Oracle "the largest user of Linux for running an enterprise environment anywhere in the world" - Mark explained not only the next-generation-data-center principles guiding the construction of a new data center (Project Sequoia) in Utah (green computing being a top priority), but also the "Grid Operation Life Cycle" that his organization is striving to implement, piece by piece, enterpriswide. In this life cycle, which is made possible principally by the combination of clustering (Oracle RAC) and virtualization (Oracle VM), the entire configuration and provisioning process is automated as well as "self-organizing". (The latter word is mine, not his - the point being that the process self-organizes toward maximum resource utilization.)

As Mark explained, a principal example of this process at work is the scenario in which software certification on hardware is no longer relevant; the question "What new hardware do I need to run my new app?" becomes moot. Instead, all enterprise resources are fully virtualized and managed in a single pool, even live-migrated if need be, across the grid.

Edward Screven, more or less the leader of Oracle's virtualization initiative, followed Mark with an overview of the free-to-used, free-to-distribute Oracle VM (which by now should be somewhat familiar to this audience). Edward put an explanation point on Mark's presentation by declaring that one of Oracle's virtues, which has served it well across 50+ acquisitions, is its "willingness and ability to change" - and that this virtue is crystallized in Oracle's grid-driven global IT infrastructure.

Edward also announced the release of new Oracle VM Templates for Siebel (templates for Oracle Database and Oracle Enterprise Linux have been out there for a while now), which he amusingly described as "freeze-dried" software. But his quote of the day - delivered in characteristic, full-speed-ahead fashion - had to be "Virtualization is not a product; it's a feature". (Stockholders of a certain Palo Alto-based company may be increasingly inclined to agree, but that's just a personal observation.)

On the general subject of the Oracle Unbreakable Linux program, I find it amusing (is that the right word?) that people out there who continue to confuse/conflate - and perhaps this is partially our fault for not making it crystal-clear - the Red Hat-compatible binaries that Oracle makes available with the Linux support program known as Unbreakable Linux. (Heard on Twitter today: "Is anyone actually using Oracle Enterprise Linux? What a flop..." Dude, it's NOT about this distro vs. that distro; in fact, that's where Linux is going wrong!) Use of said binaries is not required for support and is thus not a measure of its success; RHEL is 100% covered (for apps certified against it) by the Oracle Unbreakable Linux program, whether Oracle products run in the stack in question or not. As Edward said, "Linux vendors should compete on support and pricing, not on bits." Amen.

As AppsLab Jake has already duly pointed out, this is a great opportunity for all you "Suggest-a-Session" folks who didn't make the cut to present nonetheless, under more community-oriented auspices. (I see that Tim Dexter of BI Publisher Blog fame intends to do exactly that.)

One of the the first unconference-ees this year is Chris Muir (an Oracle ACE Director for Middleware from Australia), who had the great idea of convening a workgroup during the unconf for the purpose of jointly producing an Oracle ADF development methodology "for the masses", as he puts it. As Chris explains, the ultimate purpose is to use the Oracle Wiki to document user experiences about best practices for completing successful ADF development projects. The workgroup is currently scheduled to convene on Wednesday Sept. 24, between 9 and 11am.

I hope that this year, thanks to better promotion and more mindshare (I'm told that the unconf link is among the most popular on the OpenWorld homepage), we'll see a more diverse unconf crowd this year - not just technology end-users. Apps end-users, industry experts, and business process owners, we want to see you there too.

Someday, someone in the community management best practices area will do a case study about this, do mark my words.

This is a bittersweet event; on one hand, a familiar experience for a whole lot of developers will no longer be available. But on the other hand, the content and services they have come to expect from those portals will live on under the OTN umbrella.

You can find the text of the migration notice that was email to the Dev2Dev/Arch2Arch lists last week here. It's a nicely packaged set of links to all the URLs BEA-ers will need to know and contains information about the Edocs, forums.bea.com, and commerce.bea.com sites as well. You may also want to reach Bob Rhubart's post on the same.

I'm happy to address any questions or concerns in comments, or, you can jump into Oracle Mix for that purpose.

Ajay Gandhi, previously from BEA and now a senior member of Oracle's Enterprise 2.0 team, provided a nice, balanced introduction. We had two very good overviews of corporate blogging, an introduction to social media strategy from our own Marius Ciortea, a wiki primer from Stewart Mader (formerly of Atlassian), and perhaps best of all, a deadpan delivery of "Enterprise 2.0: How You Will Fail" from the illustrious Bex Huff (an Oracle ACE Director). The latter was a source for some particularly good quotes, such as my favorite: "Where there is lack of shared purpose, information sharing leads to chaos." Amen, my friend.

More color is available at the Boot Camp wiki; we expect all presos to be available there shortly.

There were some surprises. First of all, despite the fact that we explicitly targeted LOBs as recruitment targets, most of the people who showed up were in IT. I was also surprised to see virtually all of Oracle's global advertising team there - I'm not sure why exactly, but kudos to them for playing.

The working group was small, but it was active, with plenty of questions pertaining to privacy/security (one recruit from a bank was particularly discouraged by these challenges) and metrics/measurement. We're all in the same boat, folks.

All in all, a good time was had by all. Will we do more? Yeah, I think we will.

Aseem Bajaj (WebLogic Server)
Sean Boiling (Middleware)
Bob Rhubart (Architecture)
Michael Stamback (SOA Governance)
Chris Tomkins (Service Bus)

I also want to welcome some other new blogs and bloggers, not specifically BEA-related:

Social CRM Blog
Oracle Developer Tools Blog
Oracle Certification Blog
Oracle OpenWorld Blog
Visualize This (Enterprise Visualization Blog)
Pervasive Computing Blog

May I remind any new bloggers reading this post, BTW, that we need your name here (and here for Tweeters). This is a wiki-based self-service process now, so get to it.

Signing off for now and for the following week, as I intend to be drinking Tecates on the beach, with no digital connections whatsoever.

The author, Ben Worthen, hits the nail squarely on its head:

Businesses launching online communities repeat a series of blunders. First, they have a tendency to get seduced by bells and whistles and blow their online-community budget on technology...(They should) spend resources identifying and reaching out to potential community members instead of investing in software that makes predictions, or even social-networking technology.

And this:

Businesses say that their primary objectives are generating word-of-mouth marketing and increasing customer loyalty. Yet the metric that businesses use most often to measure success is the number of visits to the site.

If you've seen me speak or present, you'll remember that one of my favorite statements is "I don't care about page views", which often elicits gasps from the audience.

Community is about community and community leaders, folks (eg Oracle ACEs); don't be seduced by eye candy!

As is our custom, we have built out a preview page in the OTN portal that offers all kinds of useful info, such as the fact that beer will once again be available in the OTN Lounge in the afternoon (hey, so it really IS a "lounge"!).

You'll also find a rundown of the Oracle OpenWorld Unconference, the expected swag list for OTN Lounge visitors, etc.

Most important, there will be several "lounges" at OpenWorld this year. Don't be fooled by imitators! Oracle ACE Office Hours, daily iPod Touch raffles, free software & T-shirts, and special "Welcome Wagon" swag for BEA-ers can only be found at the OTN Lounge at Moscone West, Floor 3 (same spot as last year) and no place else.

Finally, the OTN Webpage I referenced here will transform at show time into a one-stop-aggregator for all online community activity, so you do want to bookmark this URL.

Most of you would agree, I'm sure, that the "soft" issues pertaining to deployment/use of Web 2.0 tools and technologies in the enterprise ("Enterprise 2.0" for short) - cultural change, privacy, best practices, internal collaboration - are top of mind right now. What company worth its salt has *not* considered, or begun to consider, the organizational impact of such deployments (exclusive of specific technology choices, which comparatively speaking are rather tactical in nature)?

We think these issues are really important, and we also think that the people affected by them are eager to share their concerns and experiences, as well as to hear those of others. Why do we think this? Because at Oracle we are going through this same process. For example:

- What are the privacy and HR implications of internal social networks?
- What are the "fiduciary" responsibilities of employees in the blogosphere?
- What is the business value of building "community"?

Notice that I have not mentioned technology here, because these questions are pertinent and important regardless of your platform/technology choices.

Perhaps most interesting - and also most risky - is the unconference format of this event. After a brief welcome, we will encourage attendees to form their own working groups/sessions and follow through accordingly. At the end of the day, we'll all rejoin for knowledge transfer, networking, and drinks. We don't expect every attendee to be familiar with this format, but we think it's important that the event itself align with the principles involved.

Enterprise 2.0 Boot Camp is free, and we'll get breakfast and lunch. Please do register, because we'd love to hear from you there.

Some supporting resources: Mix group, wiki

I must confess that I don't understand why these podcasts were published in the "OFM Radio" feed, which has a subscriber base that pales in comparison to that of the OTN TechCast show, but I suppose I can steal some of this content and syndicate it that way too.

- Connecting JDeveloper to WebLogic Server and Deploying ADF Applications
- WebLogic Server Application Redeployment
- Deploying AD4J Agent on WebLogic Server
- Enterprise 2.0 User Experience

(SOA-related demos to appear later this week).

That helps!

Oracle President Charles Phillips has just completed his introduction of the Webcast, characterizing the BEA deal as "not just another acquisition" and explaining the reasons why: including the facts that BEA was a leader and pioneer in the middleware area, because it offered a complementary product set/architecture, and because of its strength in key markets, especially China.

But here's the key take-away: All BEA products will continue to be supported under the same timelines previously published by BEA prior to its acquisition, and there will be no forced migration policy. (This approach is quite similar to the well-known Apps Unlimited one, which according to Charles has resulted in a 96% renewal rate for PSFT apps, e.g.).

Charles also said that Oracle will be taking a "pragmatic" approach to product integration - in other words, "best-of-breed" will be the watchword going forward, as usual.

Thomas Kurian is still in the process of deep-diving, which I cannot relay in its entirety. But here are the points that I personally find the most interesting:
- Some products are "Strategic" (immediate integration into Fusion MW stack), some are "Continue & Converge" (some redesign necessary with gradual integration into stack; support for at least 9 years), and some are in "Maintenance" mode (those same products identified as such by BEA pre-acquisition; support for at least 4 years)
- WebLogic Server is now Oracle's strategic JEE container and will be integrated into Fusion Middleware stack immediately; OC4J dev to continue though. TopLink/JPA, Coherence, SCA, and other key technologies will be areas of "convergence" with WLS.
- Technical direction is to continue to modularize the AS under the OSGi model.
- JRockit is "critical" JVM technology for Oracle going forward, but Fusion Middleware will continue to support other JVMs
- (Added July 2): Tooling: JDeveloper will remain Oracle's strategic IDE, but the Eclipse-based Workshop will continue to be available (and it's now free, just as JDeveloper is); eventually Workshop will become part of the Oracle Eclipse Pack offering
- SOA: all components will continue to be hot-pluggable; combined platform offers tools, middleware, governance, and packaged components
- SOA: Oracle ESB and AquaLogic ESB to be converged into the new Oracle Service Bus
- BPM: Oracle to combine system-, human-, doc-, decision-centric BPM into single runtime under combined BPEL/BPMN metadata model
- Portal: WebCenter Framework and WebCenter Suite continue their key roles, Ensemble and Pathways to provide lightweight REST-based portlet assembly in those offerings; continued development of WebLogic Portal and WebLogic AquaLogic UI (now called WebCenter UI) but eventual integration with WebCenter portfolio
- Systems management: Enterprise Management Packs to be extended to BEA products; BEA Guardian will be integrated with Oracle Enterprise Manager
- SOA Governance: AquaLogic Enterprise Rep becomes Oracle's SOA governance repository; Oracle Service Registry will continue as the UDDI registry
- Support: No forced migrations; BEA products to be supported under pre-existing policies (before acquisition); existing Fusion Middleware support to be extended by 1 year

I will provide some interesting tidbits from Thomas' upcoming briefing with bloggers later this AM.

BTW: The first wave of BEA-related downloads and product info can now be found on OTN.

Update (11:51am) - I just want to add some choice quotes/points from Thomas during his call with bloggers:
- "BPM makes SOA declarative"; this is a big requirement from customers
- "When we don't have a product offering in a particular market, we try not to stretch the truth about that"/"We want to be clear about what we're solving, and what we're not solving" (in reference to question about SOA governance from Vance McCarthy)
- "Why do you need a single BPM runtime? Because every system process has human-oriented behavior, and every human process has system-oriented behavior"
- "Today, the notion of a grid that runs on someone else's server is called 'cloud computing' "
- "SOA and grid/cloud are very complementary"; it is much easier to deploy a stateless SOA (workload, services) onto a low-cost-hardware grid than otherwise
- Oracle is exploring the concept of a packaged product in the "SOA Grid" area, but that would be difficult