Oracle BIWA User Community

Once I was at Oracle Openworld 2011, it became so engaging between my speaking sessions, Customer Panel, Keynote sessions, IBM (GBS) booth duty, customer meetings and all the "appreciation" events, that I could not find time to update the blog sooner. I was able to Tweet regularly as it is so much easier to do that from a Smartphone as against need for portable PC or Tablet for blogging. So I decided to summarize my impressions of OOW 2011 here. While Oracle Exadata and Exalogic have been around for some time, it is now clear that Oracle is focusing on an appliance or "engineered" system like approach. While industry cynics say it is Oracle's approach to "lock" the customer into single vendor, really speaking the trend was started by likes of Teradata and Netezza who build machines for specific purposes be it data warehousing or something similar. Greenplum, Vertica, Aster Data, PacAccel are some of the ones to follow and their subsequent acquisition

The OOW 11 has 45,000 attendees from 117 countries as per Judy Sims at the 5:30 PM keynote. It has 380,000 customers. The Sunday is marked by User Group and SIG event from 9am to 5 PM. The BIWA SIG had 6 sessions in Moscone West 2003 all day long. The key announcement expected in the keynote from Larry is Exalytics or the BI appliance on the lines of Exadata family. This "appliance" is likely to empower OBIEE for "visualization at speed of thought."  Oracle set the stage for this when OBIEE 11.1.1.5 had support for Times Ten the in-memory engine. Besides, SAP with HANA has set the tome for the need of dedicated hardware for BI at the speeds users "desire." Chairmen of the Board Jeff Henley is now awarding the Oracle Excellence Awards for 2011. The winners are on the stage now. Deloitte got the middleware partner of the year CapGemini got the applications partner and Accenture the Industry partner. These are the Specialized Partners of the Year 2011.