Oracle OpenWorld 2014 - Back to the Future

Having to watch Oracle OpenWorld with several time zones between me and San Francisco has the benefit of getting enough sleep and waking up to interesting news. Again, we have to thank our friend Richard for going the extra mile of providing us with fresh-from-the-oven news from the Siebel sessions. Some of the announcements sound like from another planet indeed.

Artist from 1900 imagining 'Aero-Cabs' in 2000

So will we have something like flying taxis anytime soon? Probably not. But will we have Siebel Tools in a browser? Maybe that's not so far away.

http://localhost/tools_enu: we will probably sooner have this than flying cabs.

Obviously we are close to a radical shift in the way we work with Siebel CRM. From Richard's post, here are some highlights of the near future of Siebel, some of which were already mentioned in an earlier article.

The general idea is to web-enable the Siebel Tools application, which - when you look at it in the current Siebel Tools fat client - is just one of 80+ application definitions with a bunch of screens, views etc. So this makes total sense and editing Siebel metadata from a browser is just a natural thing to do. Put in some nice features such as conditional expressions, slick drag and drop editing and versioning and nothing is going to stop us ;-)

Getting rid of the need to compile (and distribute) the SRF and other files on Siebel servers such as web templates in order to make the development more agile is something that more and more customers demand from Oracle. I have once stumbled upon old Siebel documentation and an abstruse server parameter (which I cannot recall or find at the moment) which actually enabled an object manager to read metadata from the SRF or directly from the database. Maybe some Siebel veteran who reads this can confirm but the first Siebel versions did not have a SRF file (and neither did they have web templates) to my knowledge.

So everything that goes around comes around, just like Shuttle Applets which disappeared in Open UI (for 2 years) and magically come back (at least that's what the Siebel team is planning) in IP 2014.

have a nice day

@lex

Oracle OpenWorld 2014 - The Story so Far

As day 2 of Oracle's annual fest begins to unfold, let us attempt to summarize what big announcements and not so big news were reported so far by Oracle itself, the media and hundreds of determined tweeps and bloggers.

Quote from Larry Ellison's Sunday keynote

1. Cloud

Unsurprisingly, the dominating topic is cloud. As Larry Ellison announced in his Sunday keynote (which you can watch here), Oracle is not only aiming at becoming a PaaS, IaaS or SaaS vendor but providing all three layers of cloud computing at once. This included announcements to make six new cloud services available in the near future.

You can educate yourself on the current status of the Oracle Cloud on the ever-changing and ever-growing landing page here.

Oracle definitely sees itself as a full-stack vendor, and rightfully so. From "silicon" to applications, we have it. The only thing that Oracle does not (yet) have is our own browser ;-). So Oracle is indeed in a good position to become a major player in the enterprise cloud arena.

In this regard, let me "borrow" a nice diagram I spotted on Floyd Teter's ORCLville blog:

The diagram should prove helpful if you get lost in the stack. Thanks to Floyd for this and the comprehensive articles.

2. Silicon

Yes, "silicon" - or semiconductors - or just bare metal: Since the acquisition of Sun Microsystems, Oracle is a hardware shop. And of course there is a lot of innovation in this sector. Here are a few example from the announcements made so far:

• Oracle FS1 Series Flash Storage System
• Exalytics In-Memory Machine X4-4
• Zero Data Loss Recovery Applicance

3. What about Siebel?

OOW isn't over yet, but we are still waiting for some buzz following the (hopefully) exciting announcements and sessions from the Siebel CRM team about the imminent Innovation Pack 2014.

So far it has been a bit quiet in terms of Siebel but fellow blogger and friend Richard Napier is on the premises (pun intended) and shares his findings with us on his blog.

have a nice day

@lex

Oracle OpenWorld 2014

'tis the season again to turn our heads (or travel) to San Francisco where Oracle hosts its major event, Oracle OpenWorld, from Sunday, 28th September to Thursday, 2nd October 2014.

As usual, Siebel Essentials will try to digest the firehose of information and put into reasonably sized articles. This year, our friends and fellow bloggers Bruce and Richard are on the premises, so watch the On Demand Education blog for some Siebel related information too.

Maybe it's not just Siebel that attracts the crowd...

As a special service, we added a Twitter stream to our sidebar, so you can follow the event as it happens. If you tweet from the event, please use the #oow14 hashtag.

If you cannot make it to OOW this year, ensure you have bookmarked the live 'On Demand' video channel where you can see and replay the major events and keynotes.

have a nice OOW

@lex