The Oracle Australia and New Zealand Middleware and Technology Blog.

Friday, September 26, 2008

Oracle CFO Accounting Luncheon with ACCA

Oracle ran a CFO Luncheon around ANZ with ACCA Industry Accounting body. This Planning best practices lunch with guest speaker, Malcolm Ferguson, Committee member of ACCA Australia & New Zealand and guest Oracle customer presentations.

Malcolm is an expert in business intelligence, specialising in planning systems for large organisations, mainly in the areas of budget forecasting and long term planning. Malcolm has occupied a number of financial management positions in the UK and Australia and is currently Practice Lead for BI and Analytics. As part of this role, he has spent the past few years working in-house at BHP Billiton. Malcolm’s presentation will focus on case studies from his experience, from a Financial Manager’s perspective.

This was an opportunity to learn from Industry experts ACCA Australia & New Zealand, and Oracle customers; how performance management will help reduce your planning, forecasting, budgeting time, and improve the predictability of your future results.




Malcolm Acca
View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: oracle bi)
To view the case studies please go here

Thursday, September 25, 2008

Final Day at Openworld - The Joy of "X"!

Wednesday was very clearly "Larry Day" at the Moscone centre in San Francisco. Overnight the excitement had built in The Blogosophere about the mystery X announcement and speculation was rife.

CFO Safra Catz took the stage at 2.30pm to introduce HP as Oracle's closest partner and largest customer and pretty soon the hardware theme was becoming prevalent. In particular, Ms Livermore highlighted that 51% of CIOs say they need to modernise their datacentre today to meet rapidly growing data requirements.

Then Oracle founder and CEO, Larry J. Ellison, delivered the answer to the question on everyone's lips: what is X? He announced Oracle's formal move into the hardware business. In partnership with HP he first announced the Oracle Exadata Performance Storage Server capable of 1GB per second. Then, explaining with his characteristic sense of humour that it seems a shame to enter the hardware business with only one product, LJE debuted The HP Oracle Database Machine with great fanfare as the huge box - "1400 time the size of the largest iPod" - emerged from out of the stage. Then HP's Mark Hurd was beamed into the Keynote hall by video to add his excitement and to highlight the fact that the whole system is built on open standards.

See Exadata here live on stage, and read the specifics here of the new offering here. Also, listen to Aussie Oracle ACE and blogger Alex Gorbachev give his reaction directly after the keynote and read his live blog from the Moscone Centre. Alex posted several pieces on today's announcements so worth reading extensively.

Wednesday, September 24, 2008

Excitement builds at Openworld...The X is coming!

Tuesday was dominated mainly by speculation at all three Moscone venues about what the "X" announcement could be. First there was this teaser by Andy Mendlesohn in his Keynote late monday.

Tuesday morning Delegates were met with several banner's stoking anticipation and you can read more at
Alex Gorbachev's blog post about the excitement surrounding tomorrow's highly anticipated announcement expected at Larry Ellison's Keynote Wednesday afternoon.

Alex Gorbachev also talked to YouTube about the Cloud Computing announcement made on monday.

Aussie Oracle ACE, blogger and CTO of Australian Oracle Partner Piction Marcel Kratochvil presented to the conference in the afternoon on the subject of customer migrations to Oracle Database 11g and shares some of his thoughts on 11g from the conference floor on YouTube. For more from Marcel on Multimedia and its use within Oracle database, read his blog, The Oracle Multimedia Blog.

Paul Otellini gave a very interesting keynote on the importance of time, performance and energy cost optimization in business, and amid it announced a major partnership with Oracle to help customers migrate data between private and public Cloud Computing networks safely and at the highest performance levels.

In the next Keynote of the afternoon, Oracle SVP of Fusion Middleware announced the next update of Oracle Business Iintelligence 10g that integrates with Oracle Enteprise Performance management to help customers derive more value from existing EPM (Hyperion) investments.

As always with everyday at Openworld, there were several announcement are key importance made:

· New Offering Combines Oracle and BEA Systems Technology to Extend Enterprise 2.0 and Portal Leadership
· A new Industry Business Unit for the Insurance industry
· New releases of the popular JD Edwards Suite:

You can follows all the announcements made throughout the week at the Openworld Media Centre.

Just to prove Openworld is really hard work for those attending and not just a junket, read Chris Muir's latest update about his time in San Francisco.

Tuesday, September 23, 2008

Openworld in full swing…

Monday morning (PST) Oracle Openworld got underway for real with an opening Keynote from Charles Phillips that saw a swathe of news announcements that included:

* A demonstration of Oracle Beehive – the Only Complete and Open Platform for Integrated and Secure Collaboration

* Middleware, Database and Enterprise Manager capabilities to help customers take advantage of the benefits of Cloud Computing, starting with support for the Amazon Cloud

* The launch of My Oracle Support – a personalised and proactive platform for customer support

Following Charles Phillips and a surprise appearance from Olympic Swimming legend Michael Phelps; Senior Vice President for Application Development, Ed Abbo, announced an extension to Oracle’s portfolio of solutions for the Apple iPhone – Business Approvals on the move; as well as an extension of Oracle's Web 2.0-friendly Social CRM Applications with Sales Campaign and Sales Library.

Senior Vice President for Oracle Fusion Middleware, Thomas Kurian, opened his Keynote in the afternoon by formally welcoming BEA customers to their first Openworld as Oracle customers and then announced the launch of the Oracle Weblogic Application Grid , an architecture for application infrastructure that enables greater resource efficiency, dynamic scale-out, and predictable quality of service for enterprise applications.

For more insight on the announcements of the day, New Zealand Oracle Blogger Gareth Roberts provides a great summary on his blog.

Oracle Openworld sees a much larger Unconference session than last year. Watch this short video vignette from Australian Oracle Ace and "One-size-doesn't-fit-all" blogger - Chris Muir - talking about the Oracle Openworld "Unconference" and his presentation which he got elected for inclusion via the Oracle Mix community.

Finally, CBA’s Jon Waldron spoke in a panel session on Clusterware about how he was able to consoilidate an 8 node Grid at the bank on Oracle-only software including Oracle RAC High A availability clustering technology to create a multi site failover with Data Guard.

Monday, September 22, 2008

Oracle Openworld 2008 gets underway...

As Oracle Openworld throws open its doors to the expected 43,000 delegates on Sunday evening in San Francisco, there's plenty already going on.

The Oracle Partner Forum in the San Francisco Hilton brought together partners from all around the world to share ideas and learnings. There is some video footage of Charles Phillips presenting there.

Several of the more than 1,800 sessions set to take place throughout the week have already taken place, including one by Oracle Ace and blogger - and newly Australia-resident - Alex Gorbachev. His session in Moscone West R2002 on "Under the hood of Oracle Clusterware" was extremely well attended with more than 230 delegates attending.

In addition, Commonwealth Bank's Executive Architect - Jon Waldron - took part in an open Q&A session on "RAC OLTP Scalability".

Throughout the week, live coverage of the show can be found at the Oracle Openworld Video Blog.

Australian Oracle Ace and "One-size-doesn't-fit-all" blogger - Chris Muir - has already posted a report from his first day at Openworld.

Then finally, the main conference got formally under way in the main Keynote Hall in Moscone North with an introduction by San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom followed by political strategists James Carville and Mary Matalin with their unique and insightful take on the current US Presidential Election Campaign. Selected highlights of the keynotes can be seen at the Video blog mentioned above.

Ultimately the lesson for businesses to take from the highly unpredictable nature of this campaign, said Mary Matalin in her Keynote, is to remember to "control what you can but be prepared for the things that you can't" and that "we don't know what we don't know".

But James Carville's powerful and memorable message, however, most likely resonated most with the delegates: "You are living in the period of the most rapid change that has ever happened!"

Thursday, September 18, 2008

Sundance, Snow and the Data Center


I know what you're thinking, Sundance the famous ski resort in Utah and snow paint interesting images so why have i destroyed this very appealing vista with the words Data Center? Well that's because Oracle is building a new data center near the Wasatch Range that is nothing but ordinary. Although this data center may not make it on Lonely Planets top 10 attractions in Salt Lake City it probably should. Especially if you're one of those CIO's that has been tasked with greening your data center or in Oracle's case a snow white data center.

Data centers have enormous pressures on then now, years ago 5x9's was an admirable goal for uptime. Storage has ballooned to over 45 gigabytes per person and terms like Exabyte have entered the vernacular (1 million terabytes). Storage however is now reducing in costs, in 2009 the second highest costs according to IDC for a data center management is energy with labour being number one. Along with energy comes heat, the two go hand in hand with the more equipment comes more heat and then more cooling. Data centers according to McKinsey and Company could exceed airlines as a greenhouse polluter by 2020.

Simply put we all need to do out bit for the environment, and data centers need to move along with the times. So what's special about Oracle's new data center or "Project Sequoia: Oracle Utah Compute Facility" in simple terms – everything. Not everyone gets to build a data center from scratch, fortunately for Oracle we are old hat at this - the data center in Austin is our current facility and won the "data center of the year" when commissioned and Oracle was the recipient of the "EPA Green Power Leadership Award" since it consumes approximately 50% less power than equivalent sized facilities. Project Sequoia has further optimisation around HVAC using the environment for instance- if you have been to the snow the air is cool and dry which is ideal for data centers and even on days up to 29deg C the cooling systems will have savings.

But power and cooling efficiency will only take you so far, Linux and virtulisation change the game further. And we have seen within our own environment how these technologies have an impact on real estate, electricity and improved utilisation of the infrastructure. Oracle Open World in San Francisco is occurring next week and will have a strong green theme with some exciting announcements to follow.

In ANZ we will be running a series of "Greening The Data Center" forums in the coming months. At these events you will hear firsthand about Project Sequoia which when complete will stretch to nearly half a kilometer, Linux, Virtulisation and other solutions that can help transform your Data Center.

I look forward to seeing you at these events, in the mean time get your lonely planet guide out and head for them snow peaked hills in Utah.


Monday, September 15, 2008

Oracle Openworld just around the Corner!

Oracle Openworld opens in San Francisco on Sunday 21st September.

Details of all the Keynotes can be found here and those not able to travel to the US for the show will be able to watch keynotes by Larry Ellison, Charles Phillips, Thomas Kurian, Paul Otellini and Mark Hurd among others will play live on the web but will also be archived for later viewing.

Note in particular that James Carville - the election strategist credited with Bill Clinton election success in 1992, will be opening the conference on Sunday evening.

For those heading out to San Francisco next week, the following ANZ presentations will be worth attending:

  • West Australian Dept of Educ (WADET) speaking on the use of Oracle L360 for 800 schools across 2.5m kms - 24th September at 1pm at Westin hotel.
  • Australian Oracle ACEs and bloggers Chris Muir and Marcel Kratochvil presenting at the Openworld Unconference on "ADF Methodology" and "Using PL/SQL Conditional Compilation" respectively on wednesday 24th September at 9am (Overlook I and II) in The Moscone Centre, Level 4
  • Australian Oracle Certified Partner, Seertech, is presenting on "BPO: Beyond the Obvious" on Tuesday 23rd September at 12.30pm in Moscone West Room 3018 and also on "Learning Management Outsourcing" Wednesday September 24th at 5pm Moscone West Rm 3018
  • Newly arrived Oracle ACE and blogger Alex Gorbachev presenting on "Under the Hood of Oracle Clusterware" on Monday 22nd September

For those not attending, the following online assets will help you get the most from the show fromn the comfort of your desk:

1. Openworld Twitter Feed
2. ANZ Openworld Twitter Feed
(Twitter users will be able to follow all discussion around Openworld by searching Twitter search - http://search.twitter.com/- for #openworld08)
3. Openworld @ YouTube:
4. Openworld Blog
5. Openworld Home page

Watch this space for more news and highlights as the show unfolds next week!

Monday, September 1, 2008

August Aussie Blog Highlights…

Our regular round-up of what piqued our interest in the local blogosphere in August:

IT Project Management IS rocket science!
Aide Memoire – August 13
Kate Carruthers
For years I've been telling people that delivering successful IT projects is not 'rocket science'...
Inl. Comment by Oracle’s Saul Cunningham

Change management and technology implementation
InSpecht – August 20
Michael Specht
For many years I have felt that change management has been one of the most underrated and overlooked component during technology implementation...
Incl. Comment by Oracle’s Marc Caltabiano

The trouble with Enterprise 2.0
Aide Memoire – August 24
Kate Carruthers
It's not the technology that is the problem with adoption and implementation of enterprise 2.0, rather is the people, culture and habits we have built up in the workplace...
Incl. Comment by Oracle’s Paul Ricketts

Non-Unique Indexes and Direct-Path Inserts (What In The World)
Richard Foote’s Oracle Blog – August 6
Richard Foote
The OTN Database Forum has had some really good threads lately and something that came up was the question of indexes and Direct-Inserts which I thought might be worth a mention here...

Aside from The Red Room, there are several other local Oracle blogs, this month we thought we’d shine the spotlight on these two:

eDiscovery and Information Lifcycle Management
The Light Bulb Effect – August 14
Marc Caltabiano
This week I attended a customer event around the impact of eDiscovery for the legal community...

Social Networking: The Art of conversation
Oracle’s ANZ Recruitent Blog – August 8
David Talamelli
I have written a few entries on the increased use of Social Networks in the IT and the Recruitment Industry...

Finally – a couple Of Blogging Oracle ACEs presenting at Openworld this year:

A presentation trifecta
One Size Doesn’t fit all – August 14
Chris Muir
I'm happy to announce that my presentation "Back to basics: Simple database web services without the need for an application server" has been accepted at 3 conferences...


Alex Gorbachev at Oracle Open World 2008: Under the Hood of Oracle Clusterware

The Pythian Blog – August 15
Alex Gorbachev
If a MySQL DBA from Pythian goes to Oracle Open World, it would be a shame not to send an Oracle bloke, so there I am — presenting a 90-minute session on the first day of the OOW 08 entitled Under the Hood of Oracle Clusterware...

Oracle Security Forum



Oracle last week completed its latest security forum in Sydney and Melbourne with a host of industry leading speakers from organisations like ISACA, PWC, Agreon and Oracle. We also had the fortune of BAE presenting their case study on deploying IDM.

The day started with Raymond Young from ISACA (in picture on left) presenting Governance for Performance as our keynote, Raymond discussed why IT projects ofter fail and his quest to improve the greater good of project management by addopting some sound princilples.

Chris Pickett from Oracle deliverd two presentations, one on Dataprivacy and Complaince. The second one was a look into the future with a preview of how IDM has evolved and where its heading to.

Andrew Elsworth from PWC gave guidance on Developing a compelling security strategy. If you have ever wanted to get a project funded, Andrew is the guy to help you and his presentation gave an excellent insight to some of the proven methodologies that PWC have developed.

Last but not least we had Brian Brannigan from Agreon one of the leaders in IDM project deployments in ANZ. Brian gave us an excellent insight into the pitfalls of IDM projects and how to maximise the chance of success.

Here are the presentations for you to browse and the accompanied podcasts.