Oracle BIWA User Community

Cloud Computing is drawing attention from almost all the CIO's. Is it another fad or is the Cloud "real." Since the field is evolving, let us look at some of the details here. In general Cloud Computing allows users and organizations to use computing power on demand just like water or electricity from the grid. Users can request computing power, storage, enterprise applications or even databases from such Cloud services providers. These Cloud Services providers will act as data centers, except they are no longer privately owned by each company. I simpler analogy would be single family home v/s a condominium with multiple tenants who share the common facilities like the hallway, elevator, pool and the club house. The users of Cloud pay only for the computing or storage they use. Thus, companies no longer need to create their own data centers thus do not need to buy servers and massive storage arrays. Cloud Computing is not really something obscure, a lot of us are actuall...

The keynote sessions have started and CEO of Infosys S (Kris) Golapakrishnan is now speaking on innovation and how he create a culture of innovation in his company. Each department has to come up with at least 2 new innovations for productivity boost every year. Every building looks different in Infosys, some even like flying saucer. Thus the culture of innovation has to be ubiquitous. Kris is explaining the need for simplifying Organizational complexity. They operate in 27 cities but airline booking is done from one city (Bangalore). Anyone can email Kris (Ask Kris) directly, he gets about 600-800 emails a week and directly responds or are posted in company blog. Kris saus we often use 2000 year old learning techniques..."Learning through collaboration and personalization delivered at their own pace" is most effective" Infosys uses web based training delivery internally to achieve these. ICICI bank of India is power by Infosys solution and is an exaple of branchless ban...

Highlights include key note by Michael Dell Release of Oracle BI Apps 7.9.6.1 with support for databases like DW DB2 and Teradata. My session was at 5:30PM

The OTN night started at 7PM, in the Tent, good food as usual and the drinks! Entertainment in the far side of the tent, Middle Eastern dancers... On the near side (towards 3rd st) was the Trivia sponsored by Blackberry. I was drafted to be on the stage with 5 other contestants to fight it out for a Blackberry, in front of the crowd! It was a tie with 300 points each, the other contestant from was from Canada. The questions were in three different categories - about Oracle , about RIM/Blackberry and about San Francisco. So what was my winning strategy? Let me explain it in Exadata terms. The storage index is a new concept which is not a pointer to the row or block rather a negative index, i.e. where not to look for data. Likewise, I won with a similar strategy today, the last question was about San Francisco and neither on knew the answer, the other contestant answered and lost the point on the tie breaker, I won... so my "negative" strategy of not answering won me the Bla...

I spent a good part of the day in the Exhibit Hall (Moscone West and Moscone South). Some of the things that caught my attention were: 1) Pretty Large Presence of Salesforce.com ( I think it is their first time at OOW) 2) Focus on Oracle on the Cloud, Amazon is also present 3) A real Sumo wrestler in the booth on Application Security - You don't know who you are up against? Steve Miranda is talking now about Oracle Applications including Application unlimited. The customer Smucker is also expected. Janet Foutty of Deloitte will be on the stage. Deloitte is the sponsor of this session. "Business Led and Technology Enabled" is the mantra. Tie back every penny to shareholder value. Janet is talking about Value maps that Deloitte uses to map business problems to Oracle products. Janet has a financial services background. Clients are focussed on cost cutting, efficiency and re-tolling their IT. What's next, in the mind of clients - Improved Agility... is one of them. Nex...

According to Ann 40% of Oracle deployments are on HP!!! Ann will tell how HP and Oracle work together to unleash the business potential. Now that EDS is part of HP, it is a big services company as well. Businesses spend 70% of IT budgets on routine operations and 30% on innovation. HP's goal is to help businesses reverse this tread. HP has 3400 Oracle related professionals. I wonder if that includes that came with EDS. HP's goal is to help manage the Information explosion. Now Ann is talking about BI solutions? HP is number 1 on number of server for BI deployments, a lot of these are on Oracle software stack. She mentioned about Neoview - the HP DW appliance.

It's Monday at the Openworld. Having breakfast when my biological clock thinks it is lunch hour (almost!). Karen Tillman VP of Oracle Corporate Communications is sharing details with the media today. Now Oracle is a software and a systems player rather than just a software company. This is the media briefing event. The keynote today is called the Art of the Impossible by Safra Catz and Charles Phillips. Next is Ann Livermore from HP. There are general sessions today in the Hall D (keynote hall) such as the Andy Mendelson's session on Database. Judy Sims is now introducing the event - 1900 sessions, 81,000 hotel room night impact, will serve 170,000 cups of coffee to the guests!!! Spin to Win is a new attraction where some attendees will be able to spin the wheel for VIP status in the customer party. This year most of the reading material will be in the Virtual Collateral with e-bag. Show your badge and get 15% off with 138 merchants here. Use opentable to book dinner. Ton...

It's 5:30 PM (PST) now and am getting situated for the first keynote of the OOW. Just finished a hectic day of user group events, most of the BIWA SIG and Exadata SIG sessions were very well attended (multiple sessions with over 100) in the audience. That is impressive as there were ~140 user group sessions today at Moscone West. The day ended in BI Panel discussions that I moderated where Mark Hornick, Mark Rittman, Greg Rahn and Marty Carangelo kicked off some really interesting discussions with good audience participation. Now I see Safra Katz, Larry and Judy Sim walking in to take their seats... at 5:48PM The event starts with a video on Scott.... He is dressed in almost red... and he commented that as Sun is "almost" an Oracle company but not fully red yet. He started with his top 10 list that is known for....top 10 list that makes engineers go wild... Scott's list of top 10 innovations (after 27 yrs of business) under the "SUN": PC NFS SPARC first ...

Oracle Openworld 2009 is here, sitting in Moscone West (Room 2002 BIWASIG, Exadata SIG 2004), in San Francisco downtown. The sessions are open to all categories of registrant of Oracle Openworld 2009. The Special Interest Group sessions will go on till 5 PM. The first BIWA SIG session was on real world OBIEE implementation related experiences and had over 100 (114) attendees which is a good number for a session right 8:30AM in the morning while folks are busy picking up their badges and taking care of registration. The room 2004 is full of Exadata SIG sessions, the 8:30 session was kicked off by Matt Morris of TUSC and then Dan Norris did a session on best practices. The next session in 2004 is a panel of X team experts from Oracle. More to come....

BIWA SIG is very excited to be present at the Oracle Openworld 2009 with its sessions as below (all these are on Moscone West on Sunday Oct 11): 1) Deep Dive into Oracle Data Integrator Enterprise Edition Support in Oracle BI by Mark Rittman 2) BI Panel: Critical Success Factors for Business Intelligence/Data Warehousing Projects, Moderated by Shyam Varan Nath 3) Lies, Damn Lies, and Visualizing Data with Oracle Business Intelligence Applications by Dan Vlamis 4) Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition Implementations in Real-World Environments by Richard Solari and Teresa Wong 5) Oracle Industry Data Model: An “off-the-shelf” Data Warehouse- Faster and Cheaper by Sudip Majumder Thus the topics covered range from Data Warehousing, Business Intelligence, Data Mining to OLAP. Enough content to keep you busy for whole day on Sunday!

I attended the Speakers meeting on Monday (Oct 5), and wanted to share some of the things I learned: 1) There are 5 Streams, 47 Tracks, ~1963 sessions and 398 Partners in the event. Last year the attendance was close to 45,000, I wonder with the developments with SUN, what will be the attendance this year! 2) Management and Infrastructure Track is new this year. This stream talks about OEM, Storage/Flash Storage, Compliance, Oracle VM ... 3) Primavera Conference is new this year with a separate 2 day registration. 4) Oracle Develop is a 3 day event at Hilton, San Francisco. Tom Kyte is one of the Keynote speakers in that event. 5) The Sunday keynote, after a full day of User Group and SIG sessions (140+), will feature Scott McNealy and Larry Ellison at 5:30PM. This is followed by the Tent Party on Howard Street , yes it is really a tent.... 6) There will be a Green Market Place this time. others things of interest are Solution Spotlight, open to Discover Oracle Openworld pass hold...