Oracle Open World – Day 3

Good day today, just getting in from the Oracle Appreciation Night that included Aerosmith and Roger Daltrey (The Who). I can only hope I have as much hair as Steven Tyler when I’m 61, but I can guarantee that I will not be wearing zebra striped tights at any point in my life. As always, Oracle goes big and provides a great venue and entertainment for their customers.

So the big Oracle event of the day was Larry Ellison’s keynote this afternoon. Larry commented on the following:

1. Oracle Enterprise Linux – Out of all distributions running the Oracle database, Oracle Enterprise Linux makes up 65% of all installations. Oracle is committed to this operating system.

2. Oracle Exadata 2 – now with HP Sun technology. By far, Larry spent the most time on this subject, the second version of this hardware product abandons HP in favor of newly acquired Sun and boasts some serious benchmarks. With capacity for 400GB of DRAM and 5TB of flash memory you can run your entire data warehouse IN MEMORY (with compression). Larry also threw down the gauntlet and called out Oracle Open World sponsor IBM. Oracle will pay ANYONE 10 million dollars (yes million) if they can prove that their database application doesn’t run at least 2x as fast on Oracle/Sun Exadata servers than on IBM hardware. Larry says… “IBM, you are more than welcome to enter”.

3. Larry also discussed the new Oracle support strategy of integrating customer systems with Oracle Enterprise Manager. By directly connecting your configuration data with Oracle Support, Oracle is offering proactive problem detection and patch recommendation.

4. Finally, Larry discussed Fusion. After promising support for Applications Unlimited for the next 10+ years, Larry announced the following applications that make up Version 1 to be released “next year”
– Financial Management
– Human Capital Management
– Sales and Marketing
– Supply Chain Management
– Project Portfolio Management
– Procurement Management
– Governance, Risk and Compliance

At this point, the code is complete and Fusion is now in the testing phase. Larry was quick to point out that they have not been developing Fusion in a vacuum and referenced a multitude of customers that have consulted with Oracle on creating the best functionality and user experience.

During Larry’s speech, we were treated to a surprise guest appearance of Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. The Governor gave a great speech and even gave us some comic relief with great quotes like ‘this conference will pump you up’, ‘I’ll be back’, and ‘welcome to California… please stay and spend some money’…

That’s all for now, it’s already day 4 and I need to get some sleep…