Rob Smyth's Blog

I have started to blog because I would like to offer a different perspective that I don't see in the other Oracle blogs yet.  I work as a Sales Consultant, customers may think of me as being "presales" but I haven't had that title for more than five years.  I hope to give an insight into the type of work I do on behalf of Oracle.  Feel free to comment, cajole and suggest areas you wish me to discuss.  I will include links to stuff that people are asking me about to see if that may be interesting for other people too.

This week has been a little different.  There seem to be so many meetings with customers that it's a pleasant change to meet with some of my customer's partners.  This week alone I have been involved with Accenture, Siemens, EDS, some private contractors, Microsoft, Sun and Fujitsu.

I have referred partners to white papers on performance and scalability design.  I have looked at Severity 1 TARs that have since been managed so the panic is over.  I have volunteered to do a User Group which has led me to a bit of diary juggling.  I have attended webcasts on our new Database Vault and Identity Management products and I have looked into how our VMWare images could be used for my customer to show innovation in their own environment.  Oh, and I have booked my car in at the garage because the red Air Bag light has gone on. 

I have emailed, voicemailed, imed and even met face to face.  I hate to think how many days this would have taken back in 1995 when I first joined and had to share a landline phone with a VT terminal as my eye on the world.

The Second one 

 On Wednesday Oracle received an award from the Prince of Wales

  This was in recognition of our work on Think.com.  Oracle UK won the Merrill Lynch "Investing in Young People" award.

Think.com is a global
programme, started in the UK, which is free to the schools where it is
implemented, and has an international participation of 7,393 schools
and 643,003 pupils, at the last count!  The programme
is designed to help young people to develop communication,
collaboration and creative skills via a web-based education service.  For more information visit them at www.think.com. and if you have children, maybe their school can get involved in this worldwide initiative.

Think.com has been ably
supported in the UK by a colleague of mine Christine Payne who is also
based in the Manchester office, so congratulations to her.

Over the last few years, I have had the pleasure to implement many Real Application Clusters.  I have worked on AIX, Solaris, Linux and with a colleague even Windows clusters.  I have created a cluster that stretched 14km with Comic Relief for a system that had to be highly available.  I have used RAC to create high volume transaction systems. 
In the last couple of years, many more customers have adopted RAC and I think this is due to the Clusterware features that have come out with 10g. This ties the Database, the Database Instances and the failover and interconnect technologies together without the need for 3rd Party software, a significant improvement over the 9i implementation.  Oracle Clusterware can be used for 3rd Party Applications.  This link will show you how to do this if you are interested.

In my time working in the Public Sector it has become clear that there is a sea-change in how software companies are approaching problems with security.  Oracle's own E-Business Suite supports multiple configurations to help this (see Steve Chan's blog for more information).  But for most government departments there is still the old-fashioned view of restricted and de-restricted networks.  The restricted network is then used by 'Trusted' staff who can access data even though their roles don't merit it.  Oracle recognised this problem and has recently launched Oracle Database Vault which allows for formal separation of duties so that, for example, a DBA can alter tablespace information without being able to see the data within the tables within the tablespace. As I believe that citizens will want more interaction with their government departments I think this change will be embraced more and more in the future.

I was asked to present by a partner on Oracle's vision of 2020.  This is always an interesting area for discussion, we do not preannounce dates for products so I focused on what alternatives may be available for customers in the next few years.

Plan A:  This will be based around Grid Architectures, Service Oriented Architectures and the next generation of Oracle Fusion Applications

Plan B: This will be based around Applications Unlimited and allows you to Protect, Extend, Evolve your investment with the Oracle Lifetime Support Policy

Plan C: A composite plan where a strategy is put in place to adopt technologies as they become adopted within the industry while using Applications Unlimited to smooth out progress in keeping with the business or government need.