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The Word from the Web – 10/10/08

Attendees are still posting their reactions to the 2008 Oracle OpenWorld conference. We’ve found a ton of great summations of the sessions, keynotes, and overall conference experiences, but this week, we’ve also included links to the content you created from the show. Thanks for clicking, shooting, tagging, and sharing!

Your OpenWorld08 Photos
Shutters were clicking all around the conference events. Whether it was catching Michael Phelps in the DEMOgrounds, the Oracle Exadata display after Larry’s keynote, or a restaurant full of Oracle ACEs, you can see them on Flickr.

Your OpenWorld08 Videos
YouTube seems to be the “go to” source for a great deal of your Oracle OpenWorld content, but don’t forget to check out Vimeo, and even Flickr, for other short videos from the show.

Oracle OpenWorld
After driving cross-country to Sandy, Utah, Steve Karafiath continued his U.S. travels with his first visit to Oracle OpenWorld. Find out how many times he rode the mechanical bull—er, “hard drive”—in his collection of conference anecdotes.

OpenWorld: A Big Week for Oracle or Much Ado About Nothing?
Shayna Garlick, Assistant Editor at TechTarget, compiled some of the blogosphere’s reaction, both good and bad, to the products, announcements, and events at Oracle OpenWorld.

OpenWorld 2008
After returning to Buffalo, New York, Mike Radomski found time away from his supervising analyst duties at the State University of New York to share some of his Oracle OpenWorld experiences.

Join the Discussion About This Information Overload eBook

If you agree that Oracle OpenWorld is about getting all the great information you can handle, and then some, here’s an additional resource you’ll want to add to your library (or to your Kindle).

Three Oracle experts and the CTO of Buzzlogic combined their vast knowledge to write Reshaping Your Business with Web 2.0, an innovative guide to leveraging today’s culture of participation at the enterprise level. It’s an excellent source of strategies and blueprints for aligning Web 2.0 technologies with your business goals to help drive growth and profitability

We liked it so much we featured the eBook as part of our Oracle OpenWorld Information Overload Package. And we set up an Oracle Mix group to discuss both the topic at large and the book in particular. We invite you to join the group—and the discussion—whether you’ve read the book yet or not.

Special Access for Oracle Employees

In a dynamic company like Oracle, there’s always something new for employees to learn—and there’s nobody better to learn it from than our top execs, our product experts, our partners, industry leaders … and, of course, our customers. That means there’s no better place to learn than at Oracle OpenWorld.

Unfortunately not all of us could make the trip—and most who did were so busy helping to run the show that they didn’t have a chance to take it all in. Never fear, we can see and hear it all with Oracle OpenWorld On Demand at the special employee rate of $100 per user.

Here’s how to do it.

If you attended the conference:

• Go to the Oracle OpenWorld home page
• Under ORACLE OPENWORLD TOOLS click on My Oracle OpenWorld Reg
• Enter your username and password
• Add the Oracle OpenWorld On Demand package

If you did not attend the conference:

• Go to the Oracle OpenWorld page on MyOracle (Oracle intranet access only)
• Click on Registration for Oracle OpenWorld On Demand
• Follow the instructions

Check it out. Then come back here and let your fellow employees know what you found.

How to Make the Most of Oracle OpenWorld Year Round

Oracle OpenWorld 2008 was a fantastic experience, and the partners who sponsored the conference were key to making it the tremendous show that it was. Many thanks to this year’s sponsors, and to the more than 450 partners in the Exhibition Halls.

At the conference, we heard news from scores of Oracle partners about Oracle-based solutions and services for customers, and we witnessed the unveiling of new and innovative Oracle initiatives for our partners. The announcements once again demonstrated the tremendous breadth and depth of the Oracle ecosystem—and you can check it all out in the Oracle OpenWorld Partners News Center.

If you’re an Oracle partner—or considering becoming one—you’ll also want to spend some time at Oracle PartnerNetwork Online. At Oracle OpenWorld, we had a lineup of executives from across Oracle talking about partner enablement, and all the sessions are available on demand.

At Oracle PartnerNetwork Online, you can also download presentations about partnering opportunities and strategies. Don’t miss Partner Enablement 2.0, the new and improved partner enablement strategy that will provide expanded education choices including new Boot Camps, Solution Kits, the OPN Competency Center, and an updated OPN portal.

Sharlene Ratcliff-Korenica
Director, Worldwide Alliances & Channels

The Word from the Web – 10/03/08

You're probably just now assessing the sessions you missed or encounters you wish you'd had at the conference. Read reflections on Oracle OpenWorld 2008 from some of your fellow Oracle enthusiasts.

The Oracle OpenWorld 2008 Summary Post Thingie
John Bredehoft blazed a large digital trail through Oracle OpenWorld. You can track his daily movements in this comprehensive recap of the things he saw, people he met, and games he played.

Oracle OpenWorld 2008 — NOT LIVE FROM SF #10 – and Final
CRM expert Paul Greenberg wraps up his impressions of Oracle OpenWorld in the tenth(!) post in his series about the conference. Looks like this author of CRM at the Speed of Light: Essential Customer Strategies for the 21st Century loves to write almost as much as he loves the Yankees.

My. Open. World.
"Quick, quiet, on time." That's how Ted Simpson, Maryland Institute College of Art director of administrative systems, approaches his work. He shares his favorite sessions, and a higher-education perspective, from Oracle OpenWorld.

Pissing from the Mountaintop at Oracle OpenWorld
The Oracle OpenWorld Green Room was the site of many engaging and spirited discussions. Ted Cuzzillo, a business intelligence writer, posted his reaction to The Great Debate: Economy or Environment.

Oracle OpenWorld—Done and Dusted
First-timer Mark Lancaster talks about the standout sessions, networking, and success stories that made his trip to the show from Australia worth every moment.

The conference may be over, but the learning opportunities are not. Here are three excellent ways to review your favorite keynotes and sessions—or see them for the first time. There's an offer for every budget, including free PDFs for Full Conference attendees.

Oracle OpenWorld 2008 On Demand Offering

Available here for US$400 to Oracle OpenWorld Full Conference attendees. Available here for US$700 to anyone who was not a Full Conference attendee or who did not attend the event.

• Find all keynotes and breakout sessions (more than 1,700 presentations) in an online streaming rich media portal.
• Search all breakouts in one central repository.
• Search keynotes by attributes including the spoken word. Keynotes are available with synchronized video, slides, scrolling transcripts, and downloadable MP3s and MP4s.
• Comment on and rate presentations online, and post your own user-generated content.
• Blog, participate in communities, and network with your peers.

Oracle OpenWorld 2008 DVD Kit

All attendees may purchase the complete presentations and keynotes for US$200. The DVD kit is available here.

• A complete set of conference presentations and keynotes (PDF only).
• DVDs will be mailed to your mailing address three to four weeks after the conference.
• Available only while supplies last.

Full Conference Attendees—Access to Presentations Through Content Catalog

All Oracle OpenWorld 2008 Full Conference attendees, including customer speakers, have free access to the following:

• Presentations in PDF format. (Audio is not available with this option.)

Access to the presentations is available through the Content Catalog on the Oracle OpenWorld 2008 Web site. Please note:

• You must have your registration ID or username and password.
• When downloading presentations, you will be prompted to enter a username and password. This username and password are listed on the Content Catalog page in red.

Oracle's Efforts for a Greener Enterprise

By Stephen Fox.
Oracle's Vice President Paul Salinger and Mergers & Acquisitions Communications Director Phyllis Davidson opened the final session in the Green Room on cranking Pedal-Power Generator bikes provided by Sustainable Energy Partners.

In the Big Red Going Green session, Salinger and Davidson highlighted the efforts that we made to ensure that Oracle OpenWorld implemented environmentally sensitive choices. "We partnered with Meeting Strategies Worldwide to help establish green meeting policies for all of our events to help reduce our footprint," Salinger said.

Davidson and Salinger also elaborated on Oracle's companywide environmental policies. "We have 84,000 people in the Oracle company, and we have a corporate commitment in senior management; but also the employees themselves have ideas of different things we can do as a company," Salinger said.

The presenters were joined on stage by John Humphrey, Chief Technology Officer from Sustainable Energy Partners, and by two athletes from 24 Hour Fitness who continued powering the LCD screen from the bikes. "We have these all set up around the center to connect people to energy, get a feel for how much energy a person can produce while biking, and it also gives people an opportunity to get a little bit of physical fitness in while they're here, which is all too uncommon," Humphrey explained.

The steps Oracle has taken to reduce, recycle, and reuse have led to some tangible results. Davidson explained how Oracle worked with Business for Social Responsibility to develop meaningful metrics to evaluate Oracle's practices. For example, the modern efficiencies of Oracle's revolutionary Austin Data Center, together with new policies to reduce paper use and evaluate procurement activities, have saved 121 tons of paper and enough energy to power 1,700 California homes for a year.

Later, Ram Nidumolu, PhD, Corporate Eco Forum Research Director, took the stage to examine a survey of senior executives from Global 500 corporations. He found that their top priorities were virtualization, greening their data centers, and consolidating data centers. Surprisingly, 42% of the executives said they did not have a budget dedicated to these efforts for the upcoming year. Other obstacles Nidumolu discovered included conflicting priorities and a lack of management systems to make needed changes.

We'd love to know what you thought of this year's Green Program. Let us know by leaving a comment.

Listen to Podcasts from OTN and Oracle Magazine

The folks from OTN and Oracle Magazine were busy at Oracle OpenWorld talking to Oracle customers and experts about the latest products, technologies, trends, and more. These interviews are now available in their growing libraries of informative podcasts.

OTN TechCasts
The OTN podcasts dig into application development, from using Oracle+PHP and Ruby on Rails, to Web 2.0 and Rich Client development, to in-memory data grids, to embedded databases.

Oracle Magazine Feature Casts
Oracle Magazine regularly takes you deeper into their featured articles, allowing you to get the bigger story straight from the people they write about.

Dan Esty Makes the Case for Better Environmental Business Practices

Story by Stephen Fox. Video by Kirk Donnan.

The Oracle OpenWorld Green Room was once again the venue for an interesting and eye-opening discussion about green initiatives and their place in the enterprise. Dan Esty, the Hillhouse Professor of Environmental Law and Policy at Yale University and author of Green to Gold, recounted why businesses should, and have, made the switch to environmentally conscious policies and practices.

“It’s not good enough to get the top-line story right,” Esty warned, adding that companies need to bring their core green agenda into a broader business strategy.

Esty and his team spent five years traveling around the world discovering why businesses were making greener choices, what choices were working, and which ones fell short. They found a few similarities during their travels.

Esty recognized a greater public interest in the environmental area. “Hurricane Katrina gave us a picture of what a climate-changed world would look like.” This awareness, paired with a growing concern over the sources of fossil fuels, is forcing a new understanding of environmental policies. “What we’ve seen is a big and new commitment to a different energy future.”

Esty also found an evolution toward market-based regulation, where companies pay for the harm that they cause. He sees a change not only in how we regulate, but also what we regulate. “We are going to have a price on carbon going forward,” he said, adding that this new approach to regulation holds, “big opportunities for companies.”

Companies are feeling additional pressures from communities, both internal and external. Esty noticed that employees want their office life aligned with their home life and are urging employers to implement the same green programs the employees practice at home. Business-to-business pressures were similar. “A number of companies have begun to signal that they want their suppliers to do better for the environment,” Esty said. “We do see a changing world.”

Recognizing the current financial challenges for some businesses, Esty noted that, “although there is some hesitation on environmental agendas while they get their economic footing again, green business is no longer fringe. This is now about high growth, high margin businesses.”

The bottom line, according to Esty, is that, “environmental concerns are here to stay, and IT’s role just gets bigger and bigger.”

To learn more about how your IT choices can change the environment, and your bottom line, visit some of the remaining green sessions in the Green Room.

Preview Site Is Now Available for Free

Sessions are wrapping up even as I type this post, but that doesn't mean Oracle OpenWorld is over. Far from it. Using Oracle OpenWorld On Demand you can review or share your favorite sessions and Keynotes or check out the ones you missed—any time you want. It’s also a great place to discuss everything you learned this week and stay connected with the people you met.

You can register for full access or learn more about it from this earlier blog post. Better yet, see it for yourself. The following free sessions are now available for everyone.

General Session:
Best Practices for Oracle Database—Information Management in the Enterprise
Duration: 01:01:321 Presentation

General Session:
An Introduction to Oracle Beehive
Duration: 01:02:211

Executive Solution Session:
How to Build an Agile Foundation for Change
Duration: 00:53:281

General Session:
Oracle Applications Unlimited and the Future of Applications
Duration: 00:59:01

Keynote: Charles Phillips and Chuck Rozwat
Duration: 01:16:161

Keynote:
Tom Georgens, NetApp
Duration: 00:29:101

Eat, Drink, and Be Merry (and Network)

When the sun goes down and conference activities conclude, it’s time for our exclusive nightly After Dark hosted events. Tonight’s final gathering is at Roe Restaurant and Prive Bar, 651 Howard St., from 8 p.m.–2 a.m. If you’re a local, or if you’re not ready to return home to work quite yet, be sure to stop by and toast another successful Oracle OpenWorld.

Dan Esty Makes the Case for Better Environmental Business Practices

By Stephen Fox.

The Oracle OpenWorld Green Room was once again the venue for an interesting and eye-opening discussion about green initiatives and their place in the enterprise. Dan Esty, the Hillhouse Professor of Environmental Law and Policy at Yale University and author of Green to Gold, recounted why businesses should, and have, made the switch to environmentally conscious policies and practices.

“It’s not good enough to get the top-line story right,” Esty warned, adding that companies need to bring their core green agenda into a broader business strategy.

Esty and his team spent five years traveling around the world discovering why businesses were making greener choices, what choices were working, and which ones fell short. They found a few similarities during their travels.

Esty recognized a greater public interest in the environmental area. “Hurricane Katrina gave us a picture of what a climate-changed world would look like.” This awareness, paired with a growing concern over the sources of fossil fuels, is forcing a new understanding of environmental policies. “What we’ve seen is a big and new commitment to a different energy future.”

Esty also found an evolution toward market-based regulation, where companies pay for the harm that they cause. He sees a change not only in how we regulate, but also what we regulate. “We are going to have a price on carbon going forward,” he said, adding that this new approach to regulation holds, “big opportunities for companies.”

Companies are feeling additional pressures from communities, both internal and external. Esty noticed that employees want their office life aligned with their home life and are urging employers to implement the same green programs the employees practice at home. Business-to-business pressures were similar. “A number of companies have begun to signal that they want their suppliers to do better for the environment,” Esty said. “We do see a changing world.”

Recognizing the current financial challenges for some businesses, Esty noted that, “although there is some hesitation on environmental agendas while they get their economic footing again, green business is no longer fringe. This is now about high growth, high margin businesses.”

The bottom line, according to Esty, is that, “environmental concerns are here to stay, and IT’s role just gets bigger and bigger.”

To learn more about how your IT choices can change the environment, and your bottom line, visit some of the remaining green sessions in the Green Room.

Exerpt from the official daily newspaper from Oracle Magazine and Profit. By Fred Sandsmark.

Leading off Wednesday afternoon’s keynotes, HP Technology Solutions Group Executive Vice President Ann Livermore talked about HP’s server, storage, software, and services offerings—the nearly US$38 billion global business that she leads—and her company’s relationship with Oracle. She also outlined HP’s initiatives in two hot areas: cloud computing and green IT.

Livermore began her 30-minute presentation by describing how HP relies on Oracle technology for its own operations. But HP hardware is what she came to talk about.

One-third of CIOs and CEOs know that their data centers won’t meet their demands by 2010, she said, and more than half acknowledge an urgent need to transform and modernize their data centers today.

HP is in an ideal position today to provide that next-generation data center. One of every three servers shipping today (and every other blade) is an HP server; the company ships a server every 13 seconds, and a Linux server every minute.

Livermore said that with the acquisition of EDS, HP is now the world’s second-largest IT services organization. Meanwhile, HP’s software business makes it the world’s sixth-largest enterprise software company. Finally, Livermore discussed how HP is developing hardware for cloud computing and green IT. She described HP’s Performance-Optimized Data Center (the HP POD), a 40-foot shipping container holding a self-contained, scalable, flexible computing environment with up to 22 racks.

Get the full story in the Oracle OpenWorld Daily.

Don't Miss Your Final Chance to Celebrate

Join us in the beautiful Yerba Buena Gardens today from 4–6 p.m. to cut loose and meet up with new and old friends for one last time before Oracle OpenWorld closes its doors. Enjoy hors d’oeuvres and cocktails in the setting of a swanky jazz lounge, with the hottest bands on the ticket. From there, the night is yours, and there’s still plenty of time to enjoy it. Make sure to take advantage of all the finest San Francisco has to offer before you head home.

Exerpt from the official daily newspaper from Oracle Magazine and Profit. By Rich Schwerin.

In his much-anticipated keynote address, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison announced Oracle’s first-ever hardware product, the HP Oracle Database Machine. Introduced as the world’s fastest database machine, the HP Oracle Database Machine improves data warehouse query performance by a factor of 10 or more. The machine is a combination of smart storage software from Oracle and industry standard hardware from HP; it consists of a grid of Oracle Database servers and a grid of new Oracle Exadata Storage Servers packaged in a single rack along with the required InfiniBand infrastructure and related hardware.

“Talk about extreme performance—you’re looking at the world’s fastest database machine,” said Ellison, as the HP Oracle Database Machine rose from beneath the stage next to him. “For the first time, customers can get smart performance storage designed for Oracle data warehouses that is 10 times faster. And this is 1,400 times larger than Apple’s largest iPod,” he added.

Designed for high-performance data warehouses and benefiting from Oracle’s and HP’s long-time engineering relationship, the HP Oracle Database Machine breaks the performance bottleneck between database servers and conventional storage by shipping less data through larger pipes.

The machine includes a grid of eight database servers featuring 64 Intel processor cores, Oracle Enterprise Linux, and a grid of 14 Oracle Exadata Storage Servers that include up to 168TB of raw storage and 14GB per-second data bandwidth to the database servers.

Get the full story in the Oracle OpenWorld Daily.

Larry Ellison Announces the World’s Fastest Database Machine

(You can also view this video at http://vimeo.com/1808185)

Here’s a quick peek at Ellison’s Oracle OpenWorld keynote from yesterday. The big announcement: Oracle’s first-ever hardware product, the HP Oracle Database Machine—it’s the world’s fastest and runs with a grid of new Oracle Exadata Storage Servers. Mark Hurd, HP’s chairman of the board and chief executive officer, joined the keynote via videoconferene, and the first customers raved about the new product across the 6 massive screens of the Keynote Hall. Watch for yourself with Oracle OpenWorld On Demand, and read about it in the show’s daily newspaper (excerpt to be posted shortly).

(You can also view this video at http://vimeo.com/1805601?pg=embed&sec=1805601)

This video will give you a feel for some of the latest and greatest innovations in Oracle Fusion Middleware that Kurian covered in Tuesday's Keynote address. Check our earlier post from the daily for more details. Better yet, watch the entire Keynote at your leisure (and with a full searchable transcript) with Oracle OpenWorld On Demand, now available to everyone.

Oracle OpenWorld On Demand Is Available to All

If you missed any of the conference sessions—or didn't even make it to San Francisco this year—you can still take a peek at hundreds of presentations, breakouts, and keynotes (like yesterday's Keynote pictured here) on Oracle's online streaming media portal.

Oracle recently made this On Demand content available to all Visitor Plus attendees and the general public for just $700 (still only $400 if you have a Full Conference Pass). Plus, you can rate presentations, post comments in community forums, and network with your peers. Register here and start today!

Exerpt from the official daily newspaper from Oracle Magazine and Profit. By Bobbie Hartman.

“Time plays a very, very critical role in the running of Intel,” declared Intel President and CEO Paul S. Otellini during his Tuesday keynote. Otellini’s lively presentation combined a historical perspective on business productivity with a review of Intel’s latest technological achievements.

Otellini reviewed the role that time has played for Intel customers from several industries: finance, medicine, shipping, and even movie animation. In all of these, new Intel product innovations recently made the difference by enabling these organizations to gather and analyze
data faster.

Customers can expect a new level of performance from Intel products every single year, Otellini promised. He reviewed several new Intel products, including a microprocessor platform called Dunnington, a member of the Xeon family. “It’s only been out a week, and it’s already breaking benchmarks,” he added.

“Time is a very scarce and precious commodity,” Otellini concluded. “Intel technology can actually help you turn it into money for your businesses. Independent of any businesses that you’re in, optimizing in the three areas of performance, software optimization, and energy efficiency has an immediate and tangible payback for your business.”

Get the full story in the Oracle OpenWorld Daily.

Streamlined UI Based on User Input

By Richard Levitt.

The popular Oracle CRM On Demand Mobile Sales Assistant app is now available for iPhone users and was highlighted at one of yesterday's sessions. "Both the iPhone and BlackBerry versions are streamlined to feature the tools users say are most important," said Hody Crouch, Oracle product sales manager, "primarily contacts and account status." Salespeople will recognize the familiar tabs from their CRM On Demand start screen. They can then work through their daily sales routine while on the road. The most important information presented in large, clear buttons. Complete detail is available just by drilling down through the intuitive interface.

Salespeople can further customize their homescreens and menus so that the tools they use most are available first.

"Oracle is staying current with the kinds of devices our customers are using," said Crouch. "And our customers are excited about it."