Todd Biske: Outside the Box

Full disclosure: I’m attending Oracle OpenWorld courtesy of Oracle.

Thomas started off with an overview of the “red” stack (my words, not his) and the major releases that have occurred this year. He’s starting with a video from a fictional company called Avitek discussing the importance of user experience. Ted Farrell then came on stage to demonstrate advances in Siebel CRM and Oracle Fusion in the UI layer. He showed a UI feature he called “carousel” which looked strikingly like CoverFlow in iTunes, some use of JavaFX, mapping technologies, live chat, and more. They demonstrated integration between Siebel CRM and Oracle e-Business Suite (EBS). This continues with the theme yesterday of top to bottom integration.

After the next video, Thomas is now talking about BPM and has David Shaffer on stage to discuss Fusion Middleware and applications. He started with an ADF application on his iPhone showing him an alert, and then went to the Oracle BPM worklist that shows the task required, moving into a visual representation of the flow required. From there, they were able to determine that they needed to go into EBS to remediate the problem. This demo was a bit too canned for me. The process flow shown looked like something a developer should be looking at, not something someone in a support center would be using. David then moved on to show the Oracle Business Process Composer and its support for BPMN 2.0. From there, a composite service could be drilled into, going straight into JDeveloper. Seeing these demos definitely shows me why Oracle’s JDeveloper strategy makes sense, even though it can be frustrating for organizations that only use Oracle middleware, and not Oracle applications. To properly support development and integration with Oracle apps, a very powerful development environment with integration into design-time metadata systems is necessary.

The demos continued with Ingersoll Rand coming on stage for a demo of Oracle BI and its integration with EBS. After that, they moved on to governance, controls, and security. Norm Fjeldheim, CIO of Qualcomm, and Steve Miranda came on stage for the next demo. Through integration with EBS, they demoed how areas of risk can be shown and addressed via Oracle GRC. Next up was scalability and high availability, and the demo started with Oracle Enterprise Manager. Enterprise Manager is being used to show the end-to-end view, highlight hot spots, link to management consoles of WebLogic, etc., and take action to fix. It continued on with operational management (there was a LOT in this keynote). This includes real end user experience, correlation between business and system monitoring, and root cause identification. Marshall Lew from Office Depot came on stage to assist in this demo. I wasn’t aware that Oracle played in the operational management space, so this was new to me. It’s all built from their Enterprise Manager product. If your infrastructure stack is red, this is a nice centralized management system.