Join Us For The Launch of Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g

Thanks to our good friends at NASA for the launch picture. This is the space shuttle Discovery blasting off on July 4 2006, click for the details of mission STS-121.

Our launch is at 8:00 AM, on Thursday July 9 at the Hilton Hotel - 488 George Street, Sydney.

We're launching Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g and you're invited, click here to register. We're going be joined by one of our product development Vice Presidents - Amit Jasuja - for the keynote session, and we'll follow that with overview sessions on the main product components of the 11g release - Identity Management, Enterprise 2.0, Application Grid and Service Oriented Architecture. Oh, and there's a lucky draw prize too!

7,350 years of development time have gone into this release so taking half a day out of your schedule seems a small price to pay. 7,350 years! That means that if you started developing today, you'd just be getting ready for your launch event in the year 9,359. By which time we will have all hung up our hydrogen powered personal jetpacks and just teleport oursleves everywhere right?

Once again, register here, and I look forward to seeing you there.

-sean

Turnbull's Fake Email

Hi all

There's been some interesting activity here in Australia this week surrounding an alleged email that purports to implicate the government in allegations of favouritism in assistance being offered to a car-dealer by the prime-minister's office. After a brief investigation, the Australian Federal Police announced that they had 'found' the email and identified it as a fake.

Interestingly enough, a few years ago, things would have been very different! Firstly, we wouldn't have been talking about an email but about a printed document. Secondly, locating and identifying the document as a fake would not have been as easy. With a physical document, creating a forgery can be achieved relatively simply and assuring its authenticity would be an expensive process. In the past few years, we've witnessed changes in the way that any organisation manages its information and with the quite-recent BAT and C7 cases here in Australia - now have changes coming through the court-system in the manner of practice notes leading to cheaper and easier eDiscovery activities and processes.

The government departments concerned in this case probably utilise a number of business-tools that made the discovery and identification of the email a quick and easy process and to be brutally honest, the perpetrators involved in this really should have known better. You simply cannot, today (and without some deep, deep, deep knowledge of the underlying systems) create a document and pass it off as something it isn't!

Whatever happens in the coming weeks - one thing's for sure, the real winner in this case is eDiscovery and the tools that support the processes required! I just would not want to be in Godwin Grech's shoes at the moment......

Paul

It's the little things that count

I was thinking the other day about the new major features in Oracle DB 11g whilst preparing for a presentation when a thought occurred to me. What about all the other features in 11g? All the new features that were not "banner headlines" but that make life for people working with the Oracle database a whole lot easier. I then came across a list on the net with almost every single new feature in 11g over the previous release. These thoughts were then cemented when i attended the oracle user group meeting run by Alex Gorbachev (Pythian Group).

The main reason why these thoughts were cemented at the meetup with the oracle user group was because of one of the main discussions with Carl Young from Metcash. He spoke about how much easier life is now that he has migrated to Oracle 11g and about how it's the simple little things that have been changed, upgraded and produced in Oracle 11g that are allowing this to happen. Reduced bath report execution times, no more excel, improved performance through query caching (meaning he didn't have to rebuild the material based view aggregate), and the ability to store more data online are but a few of the main benefits Metcash has received by moving to 11g. The details of his migration can be found here and thanks to ZDnet for such a compelling read. Metcash in Oracle 11g upgrade


Alex also released a lot of the "tricks of the trade" in his presentation. Some of the interesting things that were spoken about involved Automatic Storage Management and RMAN's ability to check and verify the database.

The sydney user group presentation can be seen here:

Oracle 11g New Features Out-of-the-Box by Alex Gorbachev (from Sydney Oracle Meetup #5)

View more PDF documents from Alex Gorbachev.

with some comments about the meetup by Alex.

The group meets bi-weekly in the city (usually) over beer and pizza for a discussion about how Oracle is working in their environment whilst sharing experiences about moving to the latest technology. If you wish to sign up to future meetups the link can be found here: http://www.sydneyoracle.com.au/

All in all it was a good user group meeting. There were many topics discussed and it was awesome to hear about Carl Young and Metcash's transition to Oracle 11g.

The beer and pizza cliche for user groups was well lived up to as well. I'm looking forward ot the next one, which reminds me, we've just created a group on linkedin called "oracle red room". Sign up now, the link is here: http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=1983966

Dave

david.centellas@oracle.com

Oracle/BEA: 12 months on.

I saw this headline recently in a 2003 article from Mining Journal and I thought it was great, "Some years, 12 months can seem like long time." (You may well ask why I was reading 6 year old back issues of Mining Journal but I'm sure you've all been in a dentists waiting room). Some years 12 months can indeed seem like a long time... but not this one, well, not for me anyway.

I really enjoyed reading this article from my friend Chris Duckett - OK, so I follow him on twitter, that means I can say he's my friend doesn't it? - on the Oracle/BEA acquisition 12 months on.

We get so caught up in the 'what if's?' in our industry that it's really good to take time out and look back at the 'what happeneds'. 12 months ago we were full of what if? Two major middleware product sets were coming together, what would survive and what would perish? And what did perish actually mean? Would Oracle force a BEA customer to move to an Oracle product? How would BEA products be supported? What would the future product strategy look like?

My summary is that the reality of the acquisition was nowhere near as doom-laden with grave concerns some had predicted. There were no forced migrations, in fact products that didn't make it front and centre into the plans for the future are still being enhanced and supported, as Derrick Wheeler says in Chris's piece, "We were concerned about WebLogic Integration a little bit as to where that would fit... We've since been assured that we can purchase more licences and that we'll be supported — at least five years developed, another five years supported — that makes us feel more comfortable."

There were decisions about the product roadmap that needed to be taken, as Cameron Tuesly from Integral Technology Services says in the article, "There was a few overlapping products, I have to say that I thought Oracle did a pretty good job of clarifying early on where they were going... I think they picked the right products, where there were two products they seemed to have picked the stronger one rather than the incumbent."

And there is some evidence that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts in these acquisitions, a sort of 2 + 2 = 5, in that the organisation is able to turn its big brains loose on new and innovative ways to combine some of the products together. Case in point here is the WebLogic Application Grid. Oracle had Coherence, BEA had JRockit... to use a catchphrase, "Will it blend?" Well, turns out they blended very well - without the dust, smoke and general destruction that our good friends at Blendtec will show you if you click on that last link.

Coherence is a highly clustered, highly fault tolerant in memory data cache, JRockit is the fastest Java Virtual Machine in the world. Mix them together, add some management and operations control and you have the WebLogic Application Grid, bringing maximum performance, scalability, predictability and reliability on commodity hardware to Java applications.

So good on you Chris for taking a moment to reflect and examine what actually happened. I liked this quote from Chris Muir as I imagine a future 12 months from now, "... they are accumulating some of the best products in the world". That sounds good to me, working with some of the best products in the world.

-sean

Enterprise Consistency

Picture (c) www.despair.com

So, let's start with a tongue-in-cheek question.

What's the difference between a political leader (substitute you own relevant PM, president etc. here) and an ECM Solution?

The answer is of course, consistency! Most people vote for their political leadership on the basis that what they promise in their pre-election program is actually going to be stuck-to whilst they are in office. Of course, we all realise soon after election that the promises made previously are rarely upheld in full and quite often - are reversed entirely.

Organisations know that a database provides consistency in the storage of structured information. If you are running an application like Siebel or eBusinessSuite (SAP if you're mad, bad, loaded and have the palette for years of customisation) you rely upon the fact that a piece of information stored in a particular field will always be there - and other users in other parts of the world who use the same information will store their data in exactly the same way. Now, imagine for a minute that the applications used by an organisation stored the same data randomly in the database with a complex algorithm to be manually followed in order to locate the information. Imagine if this information concerned the number of customers ordering a piece of kit, or the financial records for the organisation - how long would it take the accounts department to balance the books at the end of the month or year if every record of income and expenditure had to be manually retrieved from a random storage system.

CRAZY????????????

Funnily enough, there are a lot of organisation out there (and you know who you are) that manage their unstructured information is exactly this way! These organisations wouldn't consider themselves mad but I would question their sanity any day of the week. You see, things are changing rapidly in the world of enterprise information. We've all seen the slides that state how much data is being created daily and how much of it lives within databases as opposed to on file-systems etc. The thing is, it's all true and guess what - the stats show that it's only going to get worse; a LOT worse.

Think about structured data as being an animal's skeleton and unstructured information being the muscle, skin, organs and flesh. With just a skeleton, you could probably build a structure resembling closely what the animal looked like. With everything else, you bring that animal to life and allow it to live. This is the same as any organisation. Without the management of unstructured data - all you have is a skeleton, the flesh that brings life (or context!) is lost or simply REALLY, REALLY hard to find.

Organisations are being challenged to better manage their unstructured data. Here in Australia, the Federal Court has released its practice note that pretty much tells organisations that they had better get their act together else heavy fines and potentially jail-time can be placed on the organisation and its directors. ECM solutions can be really simple to implement and use effectively by an organisation. You don't need the overkill and complexity that a solution like Documentum or FileNet brings - in fact, the majority of these organisations customers only use a tiny subset of their overall functionality offered. Oracle's Unified Content and Records Management solution provides a simple to use, easily configurable, non-intrusive environment for managing unstructured information. Along with the Universal Online Archive, Image and Process Management and Information Rights Management solutions - an organisation can cover just about any requirement they have for managing what constitutes around 85% (and growing!) of their entire organisations information-set.

We are ready to sort-out an organisations enterprise information management craziness with real-world solutions for real-world problems. Consistency comes from using an ECM solution correctly - embedding the business-rules around information storage that make the location and retrieval of unstructured data as easy as for structured information.

Paul

Supercharge Your Applications

What do James Bond, W. O. Bentley and Shawn Fanning have in common?

Well you'll have to head to my presentation called "Supercharge Your Applications" over on slideshare to find out. They all feature in the presentation I gave recently at the InSync09 conference.

Here's a taster... Walter Owen Bentley once famously said, "There is no replacement for displacement" He proved this by taking the 'standard' 3.0 litre Bentley engine and increasing the capacity to 4.5 litres. But then he ran out of money. Just as he ran out of money, the designers that took over his work had run out of space. The engine bay of that car was only so big, they couldn't squeeze any more cylinders, any more capacity in there. So, in their quest to improve performance what did they do? They bolted on a supercharger (much to W. O.'s disgust, he hated forced induction) and took the output from 82kW to 140 kW.

And what does this all mean for you? Well, click here for the presentation to find out how you can bolt some already existing technology on to your applications to improve performance - say hello to Oracle Coherence.

-sean

Failure to implement and adhere to SOA Governance

Today we want to talk about a key reason that SOA does sometimes fail - lack of governance. I have asked Mervin Chiang from Leonardo Consulting to blog this for me. Mervin is one of Australia's leading BPM/Governance experts and has great insight into both the technical and business aspects of SOA/BPM projects. Over to you Mervin...

I have been a Business Process Management (BPM) practitioner for 5 years and in the last 2 have been working with companies to “Automate Business Processes” using Oracle Middleware technologies. You see, I try not to call it SOA, seeing that it has been getting a bad rep recently (see: SOA is dead). I see many similarities in both acronyms’ history…

The Birth – BPM, as a core concept, started very early and was not even called BPM. Someone smart (e.g. see: Scientific Management) realised that people work, and their work can be “chopped” up and studied and strung together... (A.k.a. “workflow”)

The Craze – Then we had Business Process Reengineering (BPR). “Let’s toss the organisation’s core processes in the air and see how it lands!”… “Ah, it landed well! Let’s spend money and lots of time to implement these process changes!” Meanwhile in the IT world the CIO goes… “Let’s toss our IT landscape in the air, screw on all web services in every hole and see how it lands! Then document it…” (A.k.a. “Enterprise” SOA)

The Epiphany – The statement: “Oh no! There are too many moving parts. How do we handle them?!” gave rise to BPM (keyword: Management).Much literature out there that talks about how SOA has failed or how we can save it, all point to the same realisation from the IT paradigm: SOA needs management… (A.k.a. SOA Governance)

Just as BPM, discusses the lifecycle of processes, we see the need to understand the service lifecycle. Also like processes, there are different “layers” of services (granularity). All These layers make up a service portfolio. So, how do we manage all these moving parts? In his article, Mike Kavis talks about design-time and run-time governance requirements. In addition to these two views I see the need for “management-time” or “continuous-improvement-time” governance.

At one of my recent customers, we’re using Oracle Fusion Middleware tools to achieve such an ecosystem. I call it an “ecosystem” or “platform” as this cannot be successful if only taken from a project level context (See Saul’s article on Viewing SOA as a project instead of an architecture).

Let’s start bottom-up shall we?

Oracle Service Registry (OSR) handles all the run-time knowledge of the services we have in the organisation’s landscape.

Oracle Enterprise Repository (OER) has knowledge at design-time of impact if one service, application system or business process were to change. It also talks to the OSR and has knowledge of usage to report on reusability of services.

Business Process Analysis (BPA) then uses information from the OER to build its catalogue or library of objects to aid during both design-time and continuous-improvement-time. We will use the BPA’s repository in various ways:

· To graphically represent the components of the Enterprise Architecture (EA)

· To launch process improvement, redesign and reengineering projects in alignment with the organisation’s strategic plan

· To do BPM itself

· To execute process automation projects (BPMN to BPEL, direct requirements implementation)

So, if we were to work top-down:

1. Identify/discover requirements to improve, redesign or reengineer using BPA and start a project. BPA gives you an enterprise or cross-project view of the organisation.
2. Analyse and (re)design your solution with the aid of BPA and OER. Run simulations in BPA, and undertand technical impacts with OER.
3. Build and deploy your solution into OSR. The service catalogue will be synced in OER and BPA for future projects.
4. Monitor performance to start round 2 of the lifecycle if needed (go back to point 1)

We’ve just talked about the tools that help us in this governance journey. There are also the challenges of people and process. The processes defined to do SOA governance are just as important as the people who will be carrying out these processes. In the customer example I mentioned earlier, we’ve used the publishing capabilities of BPA to communicate this to all roles involved in the business process and service lifecycle as an educational resource. We didn’t name it “governance” of course!

Ultimately, SOA governance as with anything; implementing software, BPM, building a house, getting married or having an operation, it’s the method of implementation itself and not the technology that determines success or failure. Just because I bought a shiny new scalpel doesn’t mean I am qualified to operate on you to take out your appendix!

Thanks Mervin for you valuable insights into how we should put Goverance at the core of SOA/BPM projects. However I will ensure that I don't end up at your surgery for my next operation! If you are interested in finding out more about the best practice of Governance and BPM technology you should check out Leonardo Consulting's Process Days Seminar in Sydney August 5-6.