Monday October 12th

It has been several years since I went to my last Oracle User Group meeting, prior to them buying PeopleSoft, Siebel and BEA.  Here are my thoughts around the first day:

The Keynote

Charles Phillips and Safra Catz kicked things off and were helpful in shaping how Oracle is planning on not only rolling out Fusion but also how Sun will fit into their strategy.  Unlike other firms like CA or Infor who just purchase software firms and milk them for the maintenance dollars, Oracle is spending $3B a year on research and development.  They are trying to fit all of these acquired pieces together for their customers, to making them easier to install and purchase.  The analogy of buying a car piece by piece is one that is often used by firms that are looking to provide a tightly integrated ecosystem.  I am not sure if this is really what customers are interested in buying because it really creates a classic vendor ‘lock-in’ scenario.

Larry’s vision is to tightly assemble all the technology components a customer might need; horizontal and industry applications, middleware, databases, infrastructure and, after the Sun deal is approved, they can offer hardware too.  This type of vertically integrated strategy seems to work beautifully for Apple and their consumer-oriented iPhone but will this approach be as widely adopted by Global 2000 organizations with very complex requirements?

The other surprise to me was that there was no announcement of any ‘native’ Oracle Fusion applications. Many of us were hoping that there will be more news about Oracle Fusion application delivery dates, but maybe something will be announced over the next few days.  I believe that when the very smart development people at Oracle started working through the plan to rewrite JD Edwards, Siebel, PeopleSoft, Hyperion, Retek, etc…. Maybe taking a phased approach over 5-10 years might be more realistic than rewriting all the products into a new suite all at once.  That is probably why we saw all of the application ‘mash-up’ demonstrations using Fusion this morning.   This Fusion middleware mashup approach is the near term future for Oracle application customers.

This was only Day One, so stay tuned.

Here are some other general observations from Day One.

Open World Positives

• I was really impressed with the size of the event with more than 35,000 attendees, even in a recession.  The show appeared to be well organized and all of the keynote sessions that I saw were well executed and informative.  So Judy Sim, Oracle’s CMO, should be given a lot credit for her team’s efforts.

• Most of the customers that I interacted with appeared to be interested and engaged.

• The partner pavilion (trade-show) was completely filled out and appeared to be well attended.

• The Oracle Fusion middleware and Oracle Business Intelligence solutions were full featured and had  many new enhancements.  The little 5-minute demos were helpful and gave the audience a quick look at each product.

• I was pleasantly surprised to see the number of global customers and many provided public testimonials.

• I liked the tables (with power-strips) that were set up for analysts and bloggers for all of the Keynote sessions.