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SAN FRANCISCO—Whats hot at Oracle OpenWorld, an astonishing beast of a conference, crawling with 25,000 Oracle enthusiasts, technology gurus, analysts, vendors hoping to make a buck, and journalists from countries across the globe?
Youll have to click on the attached slideshow in this reporters notebook to see the heat in full color—please dont neglect to view the vixens of Satan, aka BEA Systems Inc. hawkers in fetching Diablo app server devil garb—but heres the gist:
This year, Oracle Corp. is turning up the volume on its 10g message, driving home the concept of having a pure, consolidated Oracle technology stack living and breathing at the center of your enterprise world. Already this week, it has bolstered that message by rolling out a BI (Business Intelligence) environment that ties together SQL and OLAP (online analytical processing) and features a stoplight environment that showgoers adored, with its ability to red-light cells with data that show where your business is flubbing and, for once, flag data that really matters in the undifferentiated gray fog of BI data.
The company promised to make major announcements on content management with Collaboration Suite and its Tsunami initiative on Wednesday, thereby spreading ever further the message of Oracle everywhere, Oracle forever.
Paradoxically enough, in the midst of all this Oracle love, Microsoft Corp. made a historic first-time appearance at the show. Im sure the presentations were well-attended, since, after all, the company was giving away 25-client licenses for Windows Server 2003, although the seating was a bit, shall we say, “underpopulated” when this reporter popped in.
The show floor was bubbling with enthusiasm for 10g, with DBAs and IT managers from insurance companies, steel companies, government agencies and more taking a serious look at upgrading from Database 9i to 10g, many of them buying into the concept of using grid to tie together cheap, commodity servers and making better use of the resources already lying around an enterprise.
Of course, some people, such as Keith Tomlinson, manager of IT at Orenda Aerospace Corp., in Toronto, were a bit leery of drinking the Oracle Kool-Aid, as in, Just what, exactly, am I going to have to buy to get these Oracle goodies?
Maybe more Oracle, probably all Oracle, if Oracle has it way. But as far as these showgoers went, that might just be OK.
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