Monday, September 19, 2005

OOW2K5: "Information Matters"

The warmup to Charles Philip's entrance was some lovely Flash animation with a modish soundtrack of (primarily British) pop rock. U2's "Beautiful Day" consolidated its position as the acme of corporate cool. First New Labour, now Oracle. Tranc techno remains the manadatory choice for soundtracking the videos.

The animation included some interesting phrases - "Information Matters", "Adaptable Process", "Information Driven". My personal favourite is "Execute With Insight"; h I can this see replacing "Terminate with extreme prejudice" amongst a certain sort of geek. Well, me at least. They also included a lovely quote from Ihop Corp endorsing the Data Hub: "we know how to sell more pancakes to our customers", which I think is a message we can all get behind.

Charles Philip's keynote was focused on Project Fusion and Oracle Fusion Architecture. It will be interesting to see whether this amounts to more than a marketing exercise in rebranding but it definitely sounds like Oracle is committed to building a complete technology stack that is both a fully integrated set of modules and a fully open framework in which any individual component can be substituted for another vendor's product. This will be an impressive one if they manage to pull it off.

I'm particularly intrigued to know how Oracle intends to implement all its apps as web services without the XML wrappers killing the performance of the suites. I know Microsoft's approach will be to use proprietary compilation of SOA calls to get the necessary performance. It can do so because it owns the OS and there are enough wholly Microsoft shops for this to be a viable strategy. Oracle can't do the same because they need to remain cross-platform, they don't own any OS and they have this tricky commitment to open standards to live up to. In the meantime, be the first on your block to describe yourself as "Hot-Pluggable!"

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