Web 2.0. It’s Good Old Fashioned Business

A business-savvy friend asked me to explain Web 2.0. For background, this friend has built several businesses, taken disruptive new technologies to market, and has now established a thriving consultancy in Washington DC. He knows more about the psychology and the nuts and bolts of a business transaction than 99.9 percent of the people at the Web 2.0 conference last week. But he knew he needed to begin to understand how to use Web 2.0 for the future of his business. I sent him the usual reading and a link to O’rielly’s “What is Web 2.0” page. But more importantly, I emailed him this short “Old vs New” list I leaned from Greg Syverson over at Grunt Media:

Old: Brand protection. New: Brand adoption.
Old: Credibility. New: Street cred.
Old: Corporate filter. New: Personal voice.
Old: Serious and square. New: Casual and real.
Old: Everything is just great. New: Everything is cool.

My friend quickly realized that Web 2.0 didn’t negate any of his accumulated knowledge, it simply embraced and extended the way he built his businesses in the first place, with honesty and personal relationships.

Guessing at the Future

One niggling task of a Senior Editor at Oracle is to occasionally update the Oracle Timeline with product news and other notable items. The idea is that the choices I make will serve as a public record for the future.

Those choices were much easier when I was writing about 1983 when we could look back and see that the decision to make Oracle database widely compatible and portable would turn out to be monumental.

But what decisions being made today will echo through the ages? I think the fact that Database 11g adoption is strong will be important. And there might be sleepers like the new Enterprise Manager option for monitoring the user experience, or the new testing suite based on the recently announced, yet already legendary Real Application Testing.

Will Oracle middleware for applications be seen as a step towards something huge? I think it will. But will the recently announced extension of support for legacy versions of E-business Suite, which is extremely important to current customers, be remembered as “news” in five years time? Your guess is as good as mine.

ACE Adventures – Floyd Teter

When I asked Oracle ACE, Floyd Teter, if he had a minute to talk during the COLLABORATE conference in April he checked his iPhone and said, “How about 7 a.m. on Wednesday.” Here’s our conversation.
Check out Floyd's recent blog post: Fusion on a Shoestring.
And here are the OTN best practices centers where you can learn to put Oracle middleware for applications into practice.

Collaborate08 Chronicles: Hands-On Labs - Middleware

One of my goals at Collaborate08 was to learn more about how my contented life as a writer about Oracle technology (middleware and database) is going to be disrupted by the ever-closer relationship between middleware and those formerly foreign objects known as applications. I thought the Hands-On Labs for Service Enabling your Oracle Applications, would provide some clues.

Juliana Button and her team worked with 550 people over the course of three days to show them how to service enable their applications. In a break between sessions she was nice enough to sit down with me and explain. Visit the new Best Practice Centers for E-Business Suite, Siebel, and PeopleSoft for lots of information and resources.

ACE Dinner - Collaborate08

In San Francisco when you ask a waiter where their steak comes from they will usually tell you something about the farm where the animal was raised, like Neiman Ranch. At the Oracle ACEs dinner in Denver I asked and the waitress answered, “Texas”. But that is the only time at the ACE dinner when a question went curtly or vaguely answered. Oracle ACES were in fine form and the information was flowing. Highlights of the evening were Edward Roske providing the background I need to understand the things I’ll be hearing and seeing this week about Hyperion. He should know, he’s leading ten sessions in the Hyperion track over the next three days. I also met Peter Koletzke, author of JDeveloper for Forms and PL/SQL Developers, and set up breakfast to speak to Floyd Teter of ORCLVille blog fame. The ACE dinner was a great way to get in the swing for Collaborate08. And the salmon wasn’t bad either.

APEX in Three Minutes

This is a follow up to my recent post on Oracle Application Express (APEX). The new product demo is live and except for a project management snafu that voided a few of my finer edits, it works admirably to tell the APEX story in 3 minutes.

If this demo piques your interest, check out David Peake’s blog, where he’s posted a list of APEX related sessions at next week’s Collaborate08 conference in Denver.

Database 11g: All the Ingredients for Success

The PR guys sent over a draft of a release about customers who’ve adopted Oracle Database 11g.
As I read about how well Database 11g is faring out in the world, I was reminded of the days when it was still cooking in the Oracle kitchen. Oracle was flying customers in to try it and signing them up for a broad beta. In those days we were like a chef serving up a new dish. Would they like it? Would they detect the finer details – that flourish in the mid palate; would they appreciate that satisfying finish? I interviewed beta tester after beta tester when they had sampled Database 11g and after a moment’s consideration, they each smiled.

“You like it?!” With some small qualifications, they did. Which left us dying to know what it was that they REALLY liked. Was it Real Application Testing? We put a lot of thought into that one. Was it Advanced Compression? What about Total Recall? What about Active Data Guard, and on and on. We were dying to know!

For many and various reasons, they did like it (check out this interview). You could see the measured satisfaction on the faces of the product managers as customers dug into the features and asked their questions.

Oracle Database 11g on Linux has been out for most of a year now and on Windows (or here) for many months. Customers are ordering it with increasing regularity.

With the nice press release, the cooks in the Oracle kitchen; the architects, developers, testers, product managers, and the rest can take some satisfaction at the success of their creation. Then it’ll be time to get back to the kitchen.

Photo by Cindy at food migration.