Given that Oracle’s flagship product is a database, you might be surprised about how little we know about your E-Business Suite environments and requirements.

Our team often struggles with prioritizing conflicting requirements, and in the absence of accurate information about our users, we’re sometimes forced to make seemingly-arbitrary product decisions. 

For example, we don’t know how many of you have implemented Demilitarized Zones (DMZs) in your corporate networks.  Supporting DMZs isn’t exactly a picnic, so early releases of the E-Business Suite omitted support for this.  We only released DMZ and reverse proxy support in 11.5.9 and later.  I plan to discuss DMZs and reverse proxy architectures in a more detailed future post.

One of my goals for speaking at the Oracle Applications User Group (OAUG) COLLABORATE 06 conference next week is to gain insight into your requirements.  I plan to ask everyone I see to complete a survey about their E-Business Suite environments and plans.

Even if you’re not attending the conference, you’re invited to participate in this survey, which I’m going to run continuously on this blog, too.

Every answer counts — you’d be amazed by the amount of influence that a handful of customers can have on feature priorities.  To participate, email your completed survey to me: