Happy New Year and Here's to 2009

Happy New Year to all our readers around the world from the team here in Australia.

First of all, I would like to take this opportunity to update you on our contributors here at Oracle. We would like to thank Barry Matthews and Steve Williamson for their contributions during 2008. Barry and Steve have moved to different roles within the organisation. We do welcome 3 new regular contributors to the Blog though, may I introduce to you...

Sean Boiling - who joins us from the Oracle Sales Consulting team. Sean has been contributing to the Blog for some time now and now becomes a regular contributor. Sean's interests lie in Fusion Middleware covering SOA, Enterprise 2.0, BPM, and the BEA-products we acquired during 2008.
Richard Ward - who joined Oracle Asia-Pacific in November 2008. Prior to this, Richard spent time with Oracle South-Africa - his homeland - and with one of our partners here in Sydney. Richard will focus on SOA with Saul Cunningham.
Marc Caltabiano - who is Oracle's Director of Enterprise Architecture for Australia and New Zealand, based in Melbourne.

Sean, Richard and Marc will be posting to the Red Room and join Carl, Saul and myself as regular contributors for 2009. Gareth Llewellyn, our roving-reporter in waiting, will continue to contribute on a specialist basis as he did during 2008 for the Oracle OpenWorld.

We aim to deliver more content, more regularly during 2009. We reach our 1-year anniversary in February and look forward to celebrating (virtually) with you all at that time. We have some special features coming up this year - starting with a 10-part series around SOA Governance that we know so many people are interested in (from the feedback you give us). We will continue with the Enterprise 2.0 product stack - talkling about our portal offerings and giving some real-world examples of where we have deployed the products for our customers and discussing some of the benefits that have been gained. IDM and Enterprise Architecture will also get some significant coverage this year - driven by some of the current business-challenges faced by organisations trying to support Web2.0 initiatives for example.

Here at the blog, we think that 2009 is going to be an incredibly interesting year around the world considering the current economic environment and the changing drivers for businesses as a whole. There will be a lot of consolidation, merging and acquisition during 2009 and beyond as organisations are challenged to respond to changing conditions and external pressures. This activity will affect our customers, our partners and our competition - the global marketplace for our technologies, products and solutions will change - our challenge is to prepare for this and be in the best position possible when it happens.

The greatest possible challenge for organisations is going to be adapting a business model to the Web2.0 way of doing business. During 2008, it was reported on several occasions that successful businesses were addressing end-user requirements through a collaborative approach. Rather than trying to second-guess what might be popular - these organisations actually listed to what their customers ask for and address these needs. This is based upon the simple principal that if you are selling something that somebody wants at the right price - they will probably buy it!

A Web2.0 approach introduces challenges for an organisation. There is structured and unstructured information to be managed, CRM and ERP systems to be intergrated with, Portals to be deployed and mass-security to manage. Ever-increasing storage requirements need to be met and the IT department is challenged with Green issues. Organisations want a complete solution from a single vendor, it has to be able to be integrated into any legacy system or application and must support an open standards approach to enable ease of development and supportability.

During 2009, we will concentrate on how organisations address these requirements and talk in-depth around Oracle's products and solutions in a non-sales manner. We realise that many of our readers want to learn about our offerings and this approach should provide some context for you all. Of course, if you want us to concentrate on something else - let us know and we welcome any feedback on the blog you want to give us.

We wish you a prosperous New Year

Paul, Carl, Saul, Richard, Gareth, Sean, Marc.