Oracle + Open Source
two worlds inexorably colliding

Although this years event was huge, and as such a bit of a jumble at times, I enjoyed it very much.  I made many many new contacts this year, spontaneous hellos, introductions, business connections, and so on.

There is a *LOT* of new stuff going on in the Oracle space, what with various new acquisitions, and no one person probably understands it all.

I’ll also say that I ran into an incredible number of new terms which I like to think of as reframing, or looking at things in a new way.  You might also call them buzzwords, so take your pick.  Some you may have heard before, some appear in a new context, and some are old and familiar.  At any rate go ahead,  mull over them and digest:

• information fabric
• information as a service
• service oriented architecture
• what’s the cookbook for doing that?
• oracle by example
• business process management - from order to cash
• extreme transaction processing
• data virtualization
• coherence
• data masking
• it comes baked in or built in
• moving from reactive to proactive
• we can triage their problem
• the democratic, approachable, modern leader
• preintegrated
• comprehensive
• hot pluggable
• go around the corner to find the treasure of an idea
• drinking the open-source koolaid

So long Oracle OpenWorld, see you in 2008!!

Well, Oracle has definitely drank the web 2.0 koolaid. It’s exciting to see it happen. From a new wiki, to a video cast, and even an unconference!

OTN has also been podcasting for some time via the OTN Techcasts which I like. We even see some twittering, and meeting with bloggers.  I also see an Oracle user on twitter, and Justin Kestelyn.

Overall I think Oracle’s moves to promote social networking and transparency are good ones.  Perhaps it will be widgets and OpenSocial next, or maybe mashups!!

It seems that Friedman’s “flat world” is now doctrine.

Certainly The World Is Flat is a powerful book, and a powerful idea about what is happening to our global marketplace of ideas, products, and services. But once something becomes a marketing slogan you know it has reached another level of headiness, and universal application. Folks in technology may have had a particular propensity toward those ideas because of such outsourcing pressures on our skills in recent years.

But hold on, haven’t you heard about the new trend? The world is *not* flat, or so says the Economist, after reading Pankaj Ghemawat new book Redefining Global Strategy: Crossing Borders in a World Where Differences Still Matter. I agree wholeheartedly. Granted the pressure to outsource has been felt, but if economic numbers are to be trusted, it is quite small as a percentage of the whole, and now it seems the pendulum is swinging back the other way.

Rob Preston at Information Week argued something similar, that “The new ‘Flat World’ tilts back and forth and does not stay horizontal for long!”

Still it looks cool as a slogan on a stairwell anyway… Cheers!!

Gosh I really love that word “open”.  When I hear it, I just get all warm inside.  I’ve always liked that Oracle used the word in it’s big annual conference name.  And this year’s show is bigger than ever.  I heard a rumor that there were 50,000 people here this year.  With an ever increasing round of acquisitions, the exhibitor and user communities just keep growing.

As you can see from this photo, they’ve totally blocked off Howard Street.  The video billboard there is at the 3rd street end.  I managed to catch it showing a frame of an open world!

Behind the billboard are tents where the lunchtime cafeteria was, because all the other square footage is now taken by exhibitors big and small.

And wow, were there a lot of vendors.  Even MySQL AB was here, as I blogged about earlier.  Open-source is a huge and growing component to the Oracle landscape now.  Oracle users seem to concur.  In 2000 when I was writing my book “Oracle and Open Source” no one would have believed that.  But the market pressures are working their magic, whether we like it or not.  I talked at length with Anand Pandey, a Senior Consultant with MySQL.  He handed me a very interesting whitepaper “Open Source in the Enterprise: New Software Disrupts the Technology Stack“.  A very interesting read indeed.

Stay tuned for more tomorrow.