Today was the second day of SIGs. As President of IOUG I spent the day in the several IOUG SIG meetings. The first (starting at 8am) was the Cerner SIG. Cerner is a healthcare application, and Oracle is the vast majority of the backend database. The Cerner SIG liked how IOUG provided their listserv. Cerner has a conference coming up in Orlando in mid-October. One comment from the room was that competitors to Cerner come to management and convince their companies to switch applications, promising no downtime and better performance. After management switches vendors it ends up being costly to roll out and not as reliable as promised.

Next was the IOUG RAC SIG. The attendance was large, and we broke into different groups first based on OS’s (Linux, HP-UX, etc), and next on applications.

Paul Dorsey and Shay Shmeltzer led the J2EE SIG. Paul is developing the IOUG’s developer content for Collaborate ’06, and is also the NYOUG President. Shay is an expert on J2EE from Oracle Corporation.

The Peoplesoft SIG had a large crowd. There was a panel of four Peoplesoft experts: Edric De Armas of Darden Restaurants (Red Lobster, Olive Garden owners). Upgrades are big efforts for them – it takes five weeks without tuning. The other panelists were Jerry Treshinsky (President of the Peoplesoft SIG), Judi Hotsinpiller (Sandia), and Kyu-Mok Stricklin (Boeing).

After lunch was Charles Phillip’s presentation for the user group day. Jeb Dasteel, VP of Oracle, kicked it off. Pat Dues, President of OAUG introduced Charles Phillips, the President of Oracle. He said it was in Oracle’s interest to inform the leaders of the user groups Oracle’s messaging. Some interesting numbers:

- Oracle OpenWorld expects to have 35,000 attendees, 3,000 partners, 300 exhibitors, 650 press and analysts, 800 sessions, 100 user group meetings.
- Oracle has 275,000 customers, 15,000 partners, 7,500 ISVs, and 1.6 million active developers and DBAs

The four strategic messages at OpenWorld are 1) applications, 2) standard and open, 3) middleware/SOA credentials, 4) grid momentum

Why are user groups important to Oracle? Community, connecting Oracle with the broader customer community, facilitating dialogue so customers can get value.

During the Q&A, yours truly asked the first question on the business drivers for the Siebel acquisition. The answer was that Siebel had the best of breed in CRM.

Next question was on Fusion. John Wookey and Charles Phillips flew around and met with customers to get feedback on direction. This is the fusion strategy council. In addition is the IOUC Fusion Council. Oracle values collaborating with the community, listening to feedback, and they want the feedback.

Next question was about Oracle Fusion running on non-Oracle databases? The answer was that Fusion will work under IBM Websphere. Running off of the database (DB2) is more complicated because Oracle Fusion integrated with Oracle technology. Oracle is talking with IBM and the Fusion Council to evaluate.

Question: what are the timetables for Siebel with regards to support, licensing, pricing? Answer: First Oracle needs to finish the acquisition around January and cannot do any changes due to regulatory laws. When the deal closes Oracle will investigate how they will handle licensing and pricing. For technology, Oracle can today plug into Siebel’s open services.

After the Q&A Charles took the time to meet with the IOUC Presidents (IOUG, OAUG, ODTUG, APOUG, Quest).

This made me late for the IOUG DBA SIG. Peter Koletzke gave a presentation, and then there was very good technical Q&A with both Peter and Gaja Vaidyanatha.

The IOUG SAP SIG was presented by a panel led by Christian Graf, who is SAP’s product manager for the Oracle platform. The SAP SIG meets at every IOUG conference, and was founded in 1997. Christian’s topic was requirements for running SAP with Unicode (international character sets).

From 5:30 to 7:00pm IOUG hosted our appreciation reception for our volunteers, SIG and RUG leaders, and BOD members of other user groups from the IOUC. It was the “launch party” of the new IOUG brand. People came to relax before the big week and meet new friends and catch up with old friends. I enjoyed meeting more of the Oracle community and hearing how things are going around the world for our community. I had a good conversation with a regional user group leader that told me he thought the formation of the RUG council and communication was great, and is also participating in the IOUG HTML-DB benefit for our RUGs (IOUG hosts the website for free using Oracle’s HTML-DB technology so that the user group does not need the infrastructure and support efforts involved with managing a website).

In parallel to the IOUG reception was Dana Carvey of “Wayne’s World” and “Saturday Night Live” fame. I heard it was very funny.

After the IOUG reception I went to the Oracle Magazine awards dinner. Congrats to all of the winners of this year’s awards. The contributions of these volunteers and professionals are very much appreciated by all of the Oracle community. I had some good conversations – my table had Ken Jacobs (“Dr. DBA” and IOUG BOD member), Tom Kyte, the head of PL/SQL for Oracle, and a few Oracle professionals. Also I learned that Jeff Spicer is now in charge of not only Oracle Magazine, but Profit Magazine, and OTN.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 20th, 2005 at 1:09 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.