Oracle OpenWorld 2007 - Day 3

Michael Dell and Larry Ellison gave their keynote today. Dell is a hardware systems company, so the talk naturally revolved around "boxes". One thing that I found interesting was that there was a very heavy emphasis on power consumption. Yes, I am aware of the power wattage and cooling problem, but I guess I haven't really spent extensive time thinking about it. In his speech, he even got to the details of how Dell's simplified packaging helps save a couple trees. I then started thinking - does application management have anything to do with preserving the environment? Hmm... Maybe. Maybe if we could tune the application better and utilize resource more efficiently, we would need fewer boxes. Need to think about this more.

During Larry's keynote, he reiterated that Oracle expects customers to adopt Fusion Applications at their own timeframe, and they could very well be running Fusion Applications side-by-side with existing applications during a multi-year transition period. This is the assumption that we have built into our appication management strategy. We want to enable customers to centralize the management of their existing applications on Oracle Enterprise Manager, plug in new Fusion components as they become available so that these components can be managed together with the older apps, and eventually retire their older applications and the management of these apps on Enterprise Manager.

I had Meet the Expert session immediately following the keynote, and one of the customers asked what needs to be done to prepare for Fusion Applications. There are really multiple dimensions to this questions. The general answer is to consider augenting existing applications using Fusion Middleware technologies that are available today to fulfill business requirements not met in the current applications. These Fusion Middleware components may include SOA, WebCenter, BI, Identify & Access Management, etc... From the application IT operationals perspective, it means planning ahead to manage all these new components together with the existing application, which is something that Oracle Enterprise Manager is designed to do.