My Summary of Oracle Open World 2013

This years was not only the first time that I attend Oracle Open World, but more over the first time that I presented in this event as well.  Overall it was a fantastic experience and it was worth every minute of my time not only because of the presentations and other sessions I was able to attend, but also the people I was able to network with.

Team USA Oracle won the America's Cup
Overall it was a fantastic experience but also exhausting as it was literally none-stop from 7am untill 1am (if I was lucky). Amongst the many things you could do in your spare time, the thing I enjoyed doing the most was actually the Oracle demos product stands located all over the conference centres. One could just pop up, sit down with an Oracle product manager and watch an actual demo, ask questions and even play with the tool. Because the person doing the demo was actually an expert, I was able go into details of the code, try the tools and also ask detailed questions. Some of the products for which I truly enjoyed the demos were API Gateway, Oracle Event Processing, Oracle Data Integrator, OBIEE, Enterprise Data Quality, BPM Process Accelerators, Oracle SOA Suite & Cloud adapters, and many others.

I was trying out Oracle Enterprise Data Quality (EDQ)
Adding to this my book (http://tinyurl.com/soagovernance) got officially published on Thursday the 19th just 2 days ahead of OOW. That said, I also had the opportunity to promote the book at the event. I have to thank a whole bunch of people from Oracle and also my employer that actually helped me promoting it. From Oracle I can highlight Tim Hall (Vice-President Product Management) who promoted the book heavily and also helped me distribute all the discount vouchers I had left, Peter Belknap (Director - Governance Product Management), Yogesh Sontakke  &  Mark Dutra both OER Product Management who displayed my book in their OER stand, and also Simone Gibs (BPEL Product Management) and of course Jürgen Kress (who doesn’t needs introduction) and Lionel Dubreuil  (Product Management) for inviting me to the CAB. From HCL I have to hightlight John Pridham (Head of Innovation Oracle Practice) -thanks a lot for your help and support throughout the event and Riley Roberts who helped me a lot with my presentation and to distribute my book at the stand, and Of course, Richard Tuner, Simon Pass and Martyn Capes. Overall the HCL team at the stand was great.


In this blog I want to share a bit of my experience. I have divided this post into three.

1- First section Media Interactions,   summarizes the series of interviews I had with magazines and also with Oracle.
2- In the second section, Sessions & Key Notes. I provide key notes from the sessions I was able to attend, details about my own presentation and also some relevant links.
3- The last section, Social Events, my highlights from the social events I attended.

(You can skip to a section by clicking on the links)

Media Interactions
Interview with SearchSOA TechTarget (Thursday 19th)
Prior attending OOW, I was asked by my employer HCL to take an official interview with online magazine SearchSOA TechTarget (http://searchsoa.techtarget.com/). I got really excited because I am a regular reader of this magazine so having the chance to contribute to it was overwhelming. 

Caroline de Lacvivier (editor at TechTarget) did the interview.  The interview was smooth and I really liked the way Caroline asked the questions and the way we engaged in the conversations. I think the interview went great and we really connected and this is obvious in the articles Caroline delivered from it:

This first article focuses more on general IT strategies around Fusion which I am responsible for defining at HCL. Caroline wanted to know HCL’s approach towards delivering business solutions that embrace new trends and how our end-to-end offerings built around the Fusion stack could help customer achieve business benefits:

http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/soa-talk/oracle-open-world-speaker-luis-weir-focuses-on-what-matters-the-customer/

The following article is about the controversial topic of HTML 5 vs Native OS apps for mobile apps development. She asked me a few questions on this and I was quoted a few times:

http://searchsoa.techtarget.com/feature/Mobile-developers-agree-HTML5-and-JavaScript-apps-fall-short

If you want to read more on this, I created the following post to elaborate more on my answers to Caroline

http://www.soa4u.co.uk/2013/10/analytical-point-of-view-on-technology.html

Interview with Computer Business Review (Thursday 19th)
In this second interview, the head of HCLs EMEA and ASIA PAC Oracle Practice, Richard Turner, asked me to join him in an interview with Duncan Macrae from CBR (http://www.cbronline.com/) to talk about HCL Fusion strategies and how we’re helping customers migrate from current Oracle Apps to Fusion. Richard did most of the talking however I had the chance to contribute a bit to the interview. Moreover the fact that Richard became an evangelist and an expert on the Fusion strategy that I produced for him felt great.

<<Not available yet! will provide link soon..>>

Interview with Bob Bhubart from OTN
This was a rare opportunity to actually meet Bob in person. This was the second time I had the opportunity to interview with Bob and I think this time I was I think more relaxed than the first one!


Bob started by asking a brief description of what the book was about, and then wanted to know about real life projects where we are putting in to practice the concepts, case studies and solutions described in the book. In this interview I talked about a project we are working right now where we are in fact implementing most if not all of the topics covered in the book.

Sessions, Key Notes
During the event I was able to attend several sessions and keynotes, attend a few social events organised for the Oracle SOA & BPM community and also walk around booths not only to collect goodies –which of course I did, but also learn about other vendors and SIs solutions and offerings.

Middleware Keynote: Accelerate Business Innovation with Oracle Fusion Middleware (Monday 23rd)
Thomas Kurian, EVP Product Development, Oracle

Full presentation: http://medianetwork.oracle.com/video/player/2687033686001

Excellent presentation and I although I know that Fusion Middleware it's a the very core of Oracle's strategy, it's always reassuring to hear it from the likes of Thomas and Demed L'Her (VP SOA Suite). I think SOA/BPM Suite, ODI and the rest of OFM products are definitely going in the right direction. Can't wait to try the new features though!. Only downside is that most of these features announced are actually going to be available in version 12c. So for some of us that one to use these features straight away, we have no option but to wait a bit longer.

OFM Conceptual Architecture Presented by Thomas Kurian
  • ADF Mobile: Build once deployed in multiple platforms. This is actually much needed (read this article on the topic to which I contributed http://tinyurl.com/html5vsnative)
  • SOA Suite: 
    • New Cloud Adapters, including one for SFDC
    • Mobile enablement: Support for REST and JSON adapters. This is great News as the existing HTTP adapter falls short and having to write Java in OSB to support this is also not ideal. API Gateway supports this feature so there is a slight overlap. This features also confirms my argument that REST is also SOA (read my post http://tinyurl.com/restissoa)
    • Superfast platform up to 20 times faster in Exalogic
    • Lighter footprint: This is good news as Weblogic is a bit too heavy to run especially when compared with its predecessor OAS
  • ODI: New low based ETL. More intuitive for developer and more prescriptive. Support for Oracle DB 12c.
  • Webcenter: 
    • Mobile Support: Mobile portals, Mobile Site Management and apps for content management.
    • Business User: Streamlined portal builder, external content intergation
    • Cloud services: document sharing team workspaces, integration with on-premise content
  • Identity Management:
    • Single Sign-On for mobile apps
    • Robe based access control and management support for devices and mobile.
    • Identity for Hybrid Enteprrise: SaaS, partner and on-premise support.
Oracle Fusion Apps: Overview, strategy and roadmap (Monday 23rd)
By Chris Leone (SVP – Fusion Apps)
In general I think it was a good session.  I like the example that was given around putting social media into context of enterprise apps and business processes, even though it reminded me a bit of the film the “The Interview”.  Key takes away:
  • Overall strategy: Focus on a modern UI and user experience based on a common platform
  • Core Fusion tenants:  Standards based solutions (i.e.  Java & ADF, HTML5, security, etc), strong focus on user experience and extensibility.
  • Oracle Public Cloud covers 3 main: Application Services, Social Services and Platform Services,  all underpinned by Oracle’s Common Infrastructure Services
  • Key differentiator for Oracle Public Cloud: Support for native Java language to create/customise Cloud services. This instead of the high level and restricted languages created by other cloud vendors.
  • Oracle has spent more than $27 billion since 2005 in R & D. Only in 2013 it spent $4.8 billion.
  • Oracle cloud existing user base facts: 21 million users, 10k companies in 180 countries supporting 34 languages.
  • Mobile: Oracle Fusion Tap. Excellent app and like the demo. I like the way the demo put social media into the context of apps and actual business processes.
  • Video Share feature on Fusion Tab for ad-hoc video sharing in enterprises. Seemed also an excellent feature.  I think there is currently a gap in the market for enterprise focused youtube like cloud apps.
  • It was mentioned that Talent Management is priority #1 at C-level. I did some research of this and it didn’t seem clear to me this is the case. However it was evident that it is at least in the top 5  of priorities.
  • In a survey made to ERP customers, 74% said that they wish to transform their ERP solution and 48% said that their ERP systems are out-dated. I think this is a really powerful –eye opener insight.
  • Final take away get ready for Fusion adoption by defining a strategy and roadmap for the future, then defining a solution suitable to address business goals and that reduce complexity and increase automation all leading to achieving operational efficiencies. Something obvious I would say however given the amount of customers without dated ERPs seems like a good point to highlight.
Using Patterns to Simplify Integration of Cloud Services (Monday 23rd)
This was a panel session held by Simone Geib, Rajesh Raheja, Vikas Anand and Ravi Sankaran, all Oracle SOA product managers.  It was an excellent session because it was basically an forum of discussion whereby attendees shared the challenges of integration with cloud applications like for example SFDC. It was great that many agree that session management on SFDC is a pain and that an adaptor was needed.

In fact because the session was turning into a SFDC integration discussion and many of us were not happy on the fact that there isn’t yet anything out of the box to integrate, Vikas Anand anticipated an announcement and informed everyone that a Cloud Adapter including a Sales Force adapter was developed and would be available as a patchset of SOA Suite on top of PS6.

This news made my day and I was really pleased to hear this.

Flexibility and Fusion: How to Drive Value with Innovative Fusion Middleware Solutions (Tuesday 24th) by Luis Weir
Although I submitted a few papers this year to talk about SOA Governance adn my book, SOA success stories on clients, and our SOA offerings in general, none of them got selected this year. I was also told that this year many SOA papers didn't get selected. So I guess I was lucky to had the opportunity to do a half an hour presentation on our Fusion and Fusion Middleware solutions applied to HCM and our success stories. 

In the presentation I discussed the benefits of adopting Fusion when it comes to exploiting new trends such as cloud, mobile, social media and big data. Later in the presentation I described a Fusion Reference Architecture for Fusion that depicted not only Apps but also the key Fusion Middleware components such as BPM Suite, SOA Suite, ODI, Webcenter, IDM Suite, and others. My colleague from the US and Fusion HCM expert Vamsi Reddy, joined me at the end of the to talk about one of our Fusion success stories in which he played a key role.

The actual place where I had to present wasn't great (it was a huge saloon and I could not directly see everyone) , but the overall attendance  was good (about 30 people attended).

If you want a copy of the presentation, drop me an email to luis.weir@hcl.com and I can send it.

Why Customer Experience Management Is Ranked the #1 Investment Area by CEOs (Tuesday 24th)
Presented by Steve Cardell, President of HCL, it was a full house and an amazing presentation. Unfortunately I could not attend as I was presenting at the same time. But trust me,  I wasn't even close to having as many attendees as he did!

Many commented that Steve must have a native talent to present in public as he does it so well that it feels like presenting in front of more than 300 people is easy. Well done Steve. I am really proud and honored to work under such leadership.

Here's the full presentation:

Cloud Key Note (Tuesday 24th)
I was a bit disappointed that Larry Ellison didn’t actually show up in his key note, and I guess that half the audience (of about 10k people) were even more disappointed than me because they left (more on this http://tinyurl.com/larryskipskeynote).

Fortunately Thomas Kurian was around to save the day and pulled it off. At the end I was happy with the keynote.  I did however found some similarities with the Oracle Fusion Apps presentation by Chris Leone regarding some of the cloud announcements. However the Demo done by Thomas whereby he actually created a database and Weblogic server on the cloud was good and it really looked simple, however until I try it will not jump into conclusions. Key takes away:
  • Oracle Cloud Marketplace: A portal to browse, try and buy business applications developed by Oracle partners
  • 3 big announcements on Oracle Cloud (http:cloud.oracle.com)
  • Oracle Database Cloud Service: supports 11g or 12c, single node or RAC and support for data guard.  A 3 tier service: 
    • Basic (pre-configured and automatic install, managed by customer)
    • Managed (fully managed by oracle)
    • Maximum Availability (fully managed by Oracle with maximum availability)
  • Java as a Service:  Basically a dedicated Weblogic server on which java apps can be developed fully in the cloud. Similar 3 tiers as: basic, managed and maximum availability.
  • Infrastructure as a Service:  Not a new service however it now supports:
  • Storage service
  • Compute Service (for example to deploy app servers to develop apps in languages such as C++, Ruby, and others). Fully isolated environment.
  • Others coming: Single Sign-On, and In-memory cache.
In summary, Oracle is finally targeting the cloud market aggressively and products strategies are being realigned for the cloud.

 Full Presentation: http://medianetwork.oracle.com/video/player/2690987615001

Unlocking Innovation and the Value of Embedded Intelligence on Devices (Thursday 26th)
Presented by Edward Screven - Oracle Chief Corporate Architect, this was I think one of the best presentations I attended over the event. It was so good that I didn’t even look down to take notes. Anyhow here is what I can recall:

Internet of Things
  • IoT = Internet of Things. Basically devices interconnected and that constantly data. The key thing about this concept is that this can be applied to any device. From day to day items like watches, shoes, anything, to industry such as logistics to improved supply and demand and transformation. It really is a mind blowing concept.
  • Expected that by 2020 98% of growth in IT will come from platforms in support of mobile devices and mobile apps.
  • Exponential growth expected in coming years in Machine to Machine (M2M) based integration. Consists of 3 stages:
  • M2M consists of 3 stages:
    • Acquire and transmit data: It was described how Java for embedded devices can be used for this. Because so many people in the world already knows java, no new skills are needed.
    • Integrate and secure: This is where Oracle Fusion Middleware adds value as Service Bus, SOA Suite, OEP, IDM Suite can be used in support of integrating and securing data coming from devices. 
    • Analyse and act: Basically use of Big Data technologies to exploit the massive amount of data generated by trillions of devices.
  • At the end of the event, some of the winners of the America’s Cup came to the stage to talk about how they win and how they managed to pulled it off. I recall Ian “fresh” Burns (Head of Performance for team Oracle) saying when responding to a questions “we won not only because of the software we had but mainly because of the people and the way we managed to work together as a team”. That for me was a killer phrase. That for me is the true meaning of Governance: tools, people and processes working together.

More Keynotes that I could not attend but worth watching if you have the time:

Oracle Database 12c In-Memory Database and M6 Big Memory Machine
Larry Ellison, CEO, Oracle

Transforming Businesses with Big Data and Analytics
Mark Hurd, President, Oracle

Social Events
OTN Meet-Up in the OTN Lounge (Tuesday 24th)
This was a really nice get together organised by Bob Bhubart.  He invited several of the more passionate and talented individuals on Oracle technologies out there. It was great to meet so many ACE directors together, of which I can highlight Hajo Normann! With whom I had a great time not only because he’s really fun as a person, but also because we share a common passion in the subject of Ontologies and Semantics for Web Services.  It was a pleasure and privileges to have been invited to that event and really enjoy the nice and cold Sierra Nevada ale that was served.

Fusion Middleware Partner Community Reception (Tuesday 24th)
It was again a really nice venue organised by Jürgen and had the chance to meet and talk with many Oracle product managers. My best part was when I saw Tim Hall entering the venue holding high the copy of the book I gave him.

Treasure Island: Maroon 5 & Black Keys (Wednesday 25th)
The venue was great and Maroon 5 sounded really good. I am not a huge fan of them, but I thought that their sound was very clear. The Black Keys I don’t know why but didn’t sound as good. I enjoyed it a lot though.

Lots of Food!!

Customer Advisory Board (CAB) and CAB Reception (Friday 11th)
I was under NDA so I can’t say much about the CAB apart that it was absolutely great. I really enjoyed meeting so many passionate customers many of which were in fact customers of HCL which I didn’t know about and meet there.

Also the Governance session held by Tim Hall was awesome. I like his style of presenting. Very relaxed, easing going, but full of info and strong / passionate opinions. I think that’s the way it should always be.

The after-even dinner was held at Tres (http://tressf.com/). The food was so good that I could not stop eating. Overall I really enjoyed the event and really had a chance to spend some quality time talking with other geeks like me and talk about technology details that I can’t talk about with many people.



For me the best part of the event was being introduced to the owner of the Tres restaurant; Dave Stanton. As Tim Hall said when he introduced me to him: “Luis, this is Dave, the father of web services”. That was quite a moment, and certainly wasn’t expecting it. It happens that Dave is an entrepreneur as not only he’s the owner of Tres, but also founder of Force by Design, a service company that helps customers adopt cloud services such as Sales Force.

The moment only kept getting better as Tim and Dave started talking about their tech gigs and other tech stories from the past. At some point it felt as if they were talking about some alien technologies that I've never heard of, and trust me, I know a lot of technologies. It was an awesome moment. More on Dave available in the foreword of my book (http://tinyurl.com/soagovernance) written Tim himself.


And that's all! hope you enjoyed my post!

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