I considered going to the early keynote on Wednesday, but ended up just hanging out in the Fusion Middleware lounge and doing some work instead. Around 10 AM I packed myself up and headed out to the day's sessions.
10:15 AM - AIA and distributed SOA at Dell - Dwij Trivedi
I'd talked to the Dell folks last night at the AIA customer dinner, so I wasn't particularly surprised by much of what I heard here. Dell has had WebLogic server for a long time so they had built many infrastructure services (logging, error handling, etc) for it before Oracle acquired BEA. When AIA came along, it initially didn't support WebLogic, so they took the AIA design patterns and applied them to the tools that were already build, creating a "Dell Foundation Pack". Some of the lessons learned from their experiences apply to any AIA implementation, though, since the design patterns were the same.
Dell implemented 5 EBO/EBS and 29 ABCS in their Order to Cash transformation project. Some of the standard AIA practices were extended to allow queuing and routing across geographies in an efficient matter. They learned that the EBO model is efficient for messaging but not a good model for an application data structure (thus the transformation to an ABM that is common in application integration). The EBO is missing quite a bit of information for a 360-degree view of the customer, but it serves well as messages between applications. They use a centralized group to manage their EBOs - good to hear, much like we do. They also mentioned that it's not always a good idea to strictly follow the ABM-ABCS-EBM-EBS pattern with modern web-services-enabled applications, since they may be capable of using the EMB-EBS directly without the added overhead of an ABM-ABCS. This would need to be considered on a case-by-case basis, since you're effectively trading performance and code complexity for the ability to easily change your EBM-EBS or application without downstream impact.
There's more information at http://dell.com/casestudies (look for How Dell Does It: Oracle).
11:45 AM - Oracle Forms to ADF - Grant Ronald
I went into this session expecting to hear that there's no easy way to do this conversion, and I was not disappointed. Grant did a great job explaining the similarities between Forms development and ADF development, but it was very clear that there's no easy path. Developers are going to need a lot of retraining, and there won't be any sort of automated upgrade path. (There may be some tools to give general guidelines around migrating - JHeadStart was mentioned - but nothing that does a full upgrade for you.) The good news is that ADF is light-years ahead of Forms in terms of capabilities - everything from the look and feel to performance to customizability has been improved.
My favorite line from this whole presentation: "The Java world is round and uses objects. The database world is square and uses relational tables." You can include Forms in that second part. I thought this was a nice way to look at the paradigm shift that's necessary for the conversion from Forms to ADF development.
Lunch - Picked up a turkey sandwich on my way to the next session. Pleasantly surprised that it was actually pretty good. And there was a small piece of chocolate cake with it. Mmmm, cake.
1:00 PM - ELT, Federation, Replication - Data architecture
An architect from Overstock.com gave this short (half hour) presentation on their infrastructure for data warehousing architecture. They use GoldenGate, a data replication tool recently acquired by Oracle, to move information from their production transactional system to their data warehouse in a near-real-time manner. He recommended the Extract, Load, Transform model (as opposed to Extract, Transform, Load) which makes the middleware component thin and puts much of the heavy lifting on the database. This isn't all that different from some of the things we at Amway do today with our GDW, although we still have a decent amount of transformation in the middle layer as well. Nothing particularly earthshaking in this session, but it was a good presentation and it's nice to hear about other Oracle customers doing similar things to our own BI team.
1:45 PM - Fusion Middleware and Applications Unlimited Q&A
Another short session, this with a couple of Oracle folks representing Fusion Middleware and Applications Unlimited (which is the term for all the existing apps like PeopleSoft, JDE, Oracle E-Biz, etc). I attended so I could ask the question "Since all these applications have their own toolsets, what's the right place to develop new functionality?" I figured I already knew the answer, but it can't hurt to see what they'll say. Indeed, the answer was pretty much as I expected: for light customization (adding a field to an exsting screen and the like) use the apps tools; for heavy customization or brand-new functionality, use the new Fusion Middleware platform tools. That's more or less the same thing that was said to us a year ago (and more) when we started working with E-Business Suite, so it's good to hear that the message is consistent. Unfortunately we at Amway haven't followed that advice very much at all, so we've got a hole that we'll need to dig out of, but at least the tools continue to get better and we can start moving in the right direction at any time.
2:45 PM - Keynote
I decided not to try to join the rest of the OpenWorld herd in the Moscone North presentation hall, instead going back to the hotel room to watch the keynote on the live Internet broadcast. A bit of a risk, since I'd miss out if the 'cast went down, but well worth it to avoid the crowds in my opinion. There were some minor interruptions in the webcast, but overall I was very pleased with the quality.
Charles Phillips started off the keynote with a quick introduction of Roger Daltrey, which was very cool. Then Infosys CEO Gopalkrishnan put everyone to sleep. The speech content wasn't bad, basically describing how the customer experience is extremely important in all IT areas: end-customer interaction, learning activities, etc. We have the tools now to make the experience good, but we have to use them correctly. He covered several key industry examples. Unfortunately, his presentation style was awful, reminding me of all the professors I hated in college. I was glad to be watching remotely and not forced to sit through it in person.
Larry's speech was much better, kept me awake and interested. He started off by describing Oracle's committment to Oracle Enterprise Linux, Oracle VM, and Open Source in general. Very cool, and certainly good news for Amway as we consider moving to OEL as our server OS. Then he moved on to DB performance on the ExtData machines, talking about last year's V1 and this year's V2. Very nice, although I have to imagine it's way overkill for any of Amway's needs (at least until we bring China onboard). The ExtData spiel went on longer than it needed to, in my opinion, perhaps because Larry was stalling until the next speaker arrived...
Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Governator himself, came on next. I've got to hand it to Arnie, he gives a good speech. It wasn't a particularly innovative speech, being about the benefits of technology in general and how wonderful California technology is in particular, but it was very well presented. Lots was about green technologies, no surprise being on the West coast. There was a nice shout-out to Larry and Scott about the Oracle/Sun merger. He complimented the California government in its adoption of and approvements in technology. And then wrapped up with a joke (maybe...) to spend a lot of money in California while we're here...and best of all, dropped an "I'll be back" near the end.
After Arnold left the stage, Larry continued with a few more topics. He spoke about bringing My Oracle Support and Oracle Enterprise Manager together to improve the responsiveness and timeliness of customer support. Upload your configurations to My Oracle Support and get proactive patch recommendations, information data-mined from other customers that applies to your configuration, etc. Definitely some potential benefits there. I notice he didn't mention how this also lets Oracle sales reps take a look at what you might be running unlicensed, or analyze your data to tailor sales pitches to your environment, but I guess nothing comes for free. Then Larry segued from the technical support space into business-level SLA monitoring, talking about monitoring service levels and notifying of exceptions. Then he used the business service level monitoring subject to transition to a discussion of Fusion Applications.
The very first thing on the Fusion Apps subject that Larry said was that the "legacy" apps like E-Biz, PS, JDE, etc won't go away any time soon. Oracle will continue to support and even enhance all of those, as well as working to bring the next generation of technology in the form of Fusion Apps. Fusion Apps could be deployed as a replacement for existing applications, but it will also be built to run alongside the older systems if that makes sense in our environment. He gave an overview of Fusion Apps V1 which appears focused mostly around risk management, project management, and HR. It's all built on the industry-standard Java-based Fusion Middleware stack. Design and coding is complete, and testing is in progress. He mentioned several times that Fusion Apps is built to be customizable from the ground up, to allow customers to use the components of the systems in whatever way makes the most sense to them. No specifics on release date, just a vague "next year". Sounds excellent...be interesting to see the reality.
And now, I'm headed off to the customer appreciation night at Treasure Island. Aerosmith and Roger Daltrey will both be playing, there will be much food and beer, and I intend to enjoy all of the above. I'm not planning to attend any OpenWorld events on Thursday, so this is it for the 2009 recap. It was a great time and I'd be happy to do it again!
