Oracle Open Week – Tuesday September 20, 2005
Today was a cooler but sunny day, reaching a high of 65 degrees.
The OOW days always starts with keynote speakers. There are never any speaking sessions (concurrent sessions) during these keynote presentations. This mornings keynotes were delivered by Mark Hurd DEO and President of HP and John Wookey, Senior VP of Applications at Oracle Corp.
The attendees of this event have evolved over the years. Oracle Corp used to have a separate event for their Applications. PeopleSoft and JD Edwards also had their own events. These application-oriented events tend to have both the decision makers and the end-users themselves. The original OOW tended to attract more of the IT professional, IT consultants, and IT management and company decision makers. This combined event has all of these people! There doesn’t seem to be more concurrent sessions than in the past but there are topics for each of these original groups of people. Perhaps these will be expanded in the future? Perhaps OOW will cut back on the keynote speakers to allow for another entire track of speakers for each day? I have heard that there will be an additional exhibition hall to accommodate more vendors than this year and in years past.
Oracle Corp has always had the ‘camp grounds’ staffed with technical people typically from the development labs at Oracle Corp. These campgrounds have been a great source of information, problem solving, and idea exchange between the attendees and the staff at Oracle Corp. OOW has always had a database campground. The Applications events had campgrounds with areas for each part of the Oracle Application. This year, being a combined event, Oracle has added campgrounds for PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, and the theme of the show: Oracle Fusion Middleware. There was always a good crowd in all of the campgrounds. There was always a good crowd in the exhibition hall. One needed to arrive as early as possible for the concurrent sessions they desired to see as the sessions were closed when the maximum audience for the room size was reached. I manage this by selecting more than one session I wanted to see per time slot. This allowed me to quickly move to another if my primary selection was already full before I was able to get in.
The pm keynote was delivered by Scott McNealy of Sun Microsystems. Scott is an entertaining speaker, mixing his dry humor with Oracle/Sun technology advancements. This presentation, he outlined the ever-evolving Oracle/Sun relationship along with the results of the past 3 years of R&D at Sun Microsystems.
I took notes and I hope I get most of the facts correct.
Scott feels that the world of computing is moving towards the ‘participation age’. This particiapation age allows people to learn from information entered from other people. Examples include blogs (such as this one), instant messaging, distance learning, trading, etc. Scott says that this new age should allow people onboard to share with others information and knowledge in such a way that it makes the planet a better place, ie: planet sensitive computing.
Scott went on to describe how the ‘S’ in the Sun Microsystems logo stood for sharing, that Sun now supports more open system code, java code, and open interfaces for free or near free. These open interfaces allows Sun to easily adapt to most any computing environment. He described this as ‘Best of Breed’ (best components of various vendors that you have to assemble) versus ‘Truck off the shelf’ (has best components already assembled and integrated). He went on to describe this to include the major components of any companies IT infrastructure. If you assemble all the pieces (best of breed), it is you that has to maintain it, fix it, track the parts that need replacement, etc. If you buy the truck off the shelf, all of this work is done for you and is far easier to manage.
Scott went on to point out some of Sun’s larger customers and their importance to the participation age. Again, forgive some of the facts here if I did not record them accurately…Scott spoke quickly. He claims that Goodle handles over 2 million search requests per month and that this single application might be the most important single app. He indicated that Yahoo collects over 10 terabytes of information per day (roughly the size of the Library of Congress!). Ebay handles 1.4 billion auctions per year and as many as 15 million concurrent auctions at any one time. Using these as examples, he said applications for the participation age are on a bigger scale, at a bigger cost of failure, and that failure affects more people.
Inovation matters. Standards matters. Scott spent time with what you do with a hair dryer that runs on 220 volts but your house is only wired for 110 volts. Google just requires a Java-based browser. It is the standards within the browser and Java that allows for any computer to use Google.
Scott spent time with the latest innovations at Sun…hot swappable memory/processors…the fact that you can mix processor types/speeds, and that it all is smaller and takes less energy (he kept referring back to his original theme of ‘making the planet a better place’…using less energy/giving off less heat is good for the planet. He used this example again to explain how the typical technology has a shelf life of 18 months, cost of ownership is considered, cost of running it, as well as the ‘cost to exit’, or change to a different computing environment. To quickly sum up what he was saying: Scott pointed out that the new technology at Sun could co-exist with existing technology from Sun (longer shelf life, lower cost of ownership), newer technology took less energy (planet friendly), tape storage took no energy at all (to have archived data sitting on a tape on a shelf), and partnering with various other IT vendors, the cost to change platforms (because of Sun-supported binary code compatibilities).
I completed my research in the exhibition hall today. I did spend some time in the Discoverer campground, working with the staff at Oracle to show me the finer features of the web-based Discoverer tool.
