Thanks to my "press" pass, I got to sit in the first (second) row, right next to Floyd Teter. I even got to say hello to Jan Wagner, whom I interviewed last year.
Started off with the 3 presidents from IOUG, OAUG and Quest. That would be Ian Abramson, David Ferguson and Sue Shaw respectively.
They welcomed everyone to the event and introduced Charles Phillips.
Charles Phillips - Bio
Mr. Phillips must have been caught by the ash cloud too, as he spoke via satellite.
He talked quite a bit about the integration of all the Oracle products from the storage layer up to the application layer. (I actually attempted to record his presentation then my camera battery died on me...I'll put what I have up on YouTube as soon as humanly possible). The integration theme naturally took him into the acquisition of Sun and what the future holds in this regard.
With Sun now under Oracle's umbrella, the ability to tune the SPARC chip for specific purposes will allow them to do so much more. Apparently the engineers from both Oracle and Sun are chomping at the bit to be able to work together. Ideas for this "fusion" are plenty which means more goodness for many of us in the future.
I think the main point he tried to hammer home was Synchronization; the ability to build, test, configure and deploy a complete solution from the hardware to the software. Many customers are asking for this type of thing so that they don't spend as much time on integrating disparate products. Of course, this doesn't mean that it will be a closed system, the ability remains to plug and play your desired components.
Thomas Kurian
I've heard Mr. Kurian's name before but I hadn't actually seen him. According to his Oracle Bio, he is the Executive Vice President of Oracle Product Development and reports directly to Larry Ellison.
COMPLETE.
OPEN.
INTEGRATED.
That's the main theme Mr. Kurian followed.
He echoed many of Mr. Phillips' talking points and provided a couple of pretty cool demos. One in particular was a...a business process thingy (outside my scope of knowledge). Basically he used Outlook and Excel on top of the Universal Content Management in a very seemless way. Drag an email from the Inbox to the UCM folder for a given customer and you can then see the presentation that you gave to the customer and any other relevant materials. Very cool stuff.
He also talked about their upgrade to EBS 12.2, back in August (has this even been released yet?). I love it when companys use their own products. Even better, there is supposedly a single EBS Global instance. That's impressive (but should be expected from Oracle). Back in 2002 Mr. Ellison mentioned that Oracle had over 500 database instances throughout the organization and his goal was to get that down to a single instance. I followed up a short 7 years later here.
I know there was more to his talk, but that's what I got out of it. If I find any others that summarize the keynote, I'll link them up here.
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