A narrative summary of the news announcements from the show, including JavaOne and MySQL Connect
30 September 2013 – Dubai, UAE:
General
Oracle OpenWorld 2013 ran from September 22 – 26 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco with more than 60,000 attendees expected from over 145 countries. It's the largest and most important educational and networking event for Oracle technologists, customers, and partners. Oracle OpenWorld features education and insight into Oracle's strategy and roadmap, including insight into Oracle’s engineered systems, cloud computing, business analytics, big data and customer experience initiatives.
This year’s event features participation by Oracle CEO Larry Ellison and other leading Oracle executives and technologists including Mark Hurd, Thomas Kurian, John Fowler, and more. Critical busines themes of Human capital management (HCM) and Customer Experience (CX) feature their own streams - HCM @ OpenWorld and CX @ OpenWorld
Oracle Executive Vice-President for Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA), Loïc Le Guisquet, gave a press briefing in which he hailed the importance of technology in transforming lives, businesses and economies across EMEA.
And, of course, the excitement of the show was further heightened as ORACLE TEAM USA won its eighth consecutive race to claim the 34th America’s Cup against Emirates Team New Zealand.
On-demand replays of each day's keynotes can be accessed at http://www.oracle.com/openworld/live/on-demand/index.html. Photos from keynotes and the event's media programme can be found at http://www.flickr.com/photos/oracle_images/, with a specific collection of photos from Oracle OpenWorld 2013
Oracle Cloud
Oracle OpenWorld 2013 saw the launch of several important announcements in the area of Cloud Computing:
- Thomas Kurian, Senior Vice President, Oracle Server Technologies Development, used his keynote to announce that Oracle is expanding the Oracle Cloud with new services that give customers access to the world’s leading database and Java application server in the cloud, with managed service options and full administrative control. The new Oracle Cloud services include Oracle Database as a Service, Oracle Java as a Service, and Oracle Infrastructure as a Service, and augment Oracle’s comprehensive portfolio of Application, Social, Platform, and Infrastructure Services, all available on a subscription basis.
- With the proliferation of cloud, mobile, and social technologies, organizations want easy access to innovative, trusted business applications. To meet this demand from customers and create new opportunities for partners, Oracle unveiled the Oracle Cloud Marketplace, which will provide customers with access to a wide variety of partner applications to extend Oracle Cloud.
- The company also announced Oracle Mobile Cloud Services, which simplifies enterprise application development. It enables developers and IT to create and manage mobile friendly APIs making it very easy for mobile developers to integrate their applications with enterprise data and services. Part of Oracle Cloud, the Oracle Mobile Cloud Service leverages Oracle’s Mobile Platform by allowing organizations to easily build, securely extend any application to any device, and connect to any data source whether it’s custom, a packaged application or a cloud service.
- These service are among 10 new services added to Oracle Cloud, expanding Oracle’s comprehensive portfolio of Application, Social, Platform and Infrastructure Services - all available on a subscription basis. These include Compute Cloud, Business Intelligence Cloud, Documents Cloud and Database Backup Cloud.
- Additionally, Oracle revealed the roadmap for Nimbula Director and OpenStack API Integration with Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud. This Infrastructure-as-a-Service evolution will provide customers with a highly scalable, self-healing and resilient private cloud environment. The integration of Nimbula Director into Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud will enable customers and service providers to deploy an open, standards-based Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) foundation with proven breakthrough application performance for Java, Oracle Fusion Middleware and Oracle Applications.
There were also several Cloud Applications (Software as a Service) announncements - see below for more details..
Oracle Engineered Systems
The show kicked off with a keynote by Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle, which included the launch of the fastest and most scalable server and Engineered System – the SPARC M6-32 and Oracle SuperCluster M6-32. Oracle’s new systems dramatically redefine the price/performance equation in the high-end server market, offering customers entry-level price/performance, while maintaining extreme performance and the highest levels of availability. SPARC M6-32 servers with up to 32 terabytes of memory and up to 384 processor cores can run entire applications and databases in-memory to deliver unprecedented performance.
Ellison's keynote also featured the launch of Oracle Database Backup Logging Recovery Appliance, the industry's first backup appliance engineered specifically for database protection. This appliance delivers near zero data loss data protection, minimal impact to user performance, and a massively scalable architecture.
Oracle continued its dominance in Engineered Systems with the launch of Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine T5-8, a breakthrough engineered system based on Oracle’s SPARC T5-8 server with 4TB of memory per machine to drive extreme performance for Business Intelligence and Enterprise Performance Management applications. With enhanced storage and processing power, Oracle Exalytics T-5 supports massive server and application consolidation, while scaling to tens of thousands of users.
The event also celebrated the rapid adoption of Oracle Exalytics worldwide, which is enabling customers to quickly uncover business insights. Zagrebacka banka , Immonet GmbH, Nilson Group AB and Siemens Healthcare are among the many EMEA-based organizations leveraging Oracle Exalytics to deliver extreme performance for their mission-critical BI and enterprise performance management (EPM) applications. Oracle has doubled the number of Oracle Exalytics customers in the last six months, with new customers in nearly every region and industry sector.
Finally, Oracle has made software enhancements to its Big Data Appliance to help organizations secure data and accelerate strategic business insights. The Oracle Big Data Appliance now offers integrated enterprise security with pre-configured Kerberos authentication, LDAP based authorization, and robust centralized auditing with Oracle Audit Vault and Database Firewall.
Oracle Database and Middleware
In-Memory databases featured heavily in Larry Ellison's keynote speech, including the unveiling of Oracle Database In-Memory option to help customers accelerate database performance for analytics, data warehousing, reporting and online transaction processing (OLTP). Oracle’s unique in-memory optimizations enable real-time ad-hoc analytics on live transactional data while also accelerating OLTP. This dramatically accelerates database performance enabling new business insights, real-time decision making, and much faster online transaction processing response times without changes to existing applications.
Oracle announced Oracle Identity Governance, the industry’s first complete identity governance solution. It will help optimize the user identity experience, streamline governance, improve performance and lower total cost of ownership. Oracle Identity Governance is a single governance solution combining provisioning, analytics and privileged account management that can reduce the time to certify accounts by 30 percent when compared with running separate tools.
Finally, Oracle announced that Oracle WebLogic Server, a part of Oracle Fusion Middleware, and the #1 application server across cloud and conventional environments, outperformed the competition to achieve a new world record in a virtualized environment with the industry-standard SPECjEnterprise2010 benchmark.
Oracle Applications and Software as a Service
Continuing the In-Memory theme in his Keynote, Ellison also launched Oracle’s enhanced In-Memory Applications with the new Oracle Database In-Memory option for Oracle Database 12c. This will help customers accelerate database performance for analytics, data warehousing, reporting and online transaction processing (OLTP). Oracle’s In-Memory Applications with Oracle Database In-Memory Option change business dynamics so executives can quickly discover growth opportunities, make smarter decisions, reduce corporate costs and accelerates time consuming workloads in real-time. With runtime no longer an issue, it is now possible to generate complex data crunching analysis in real-time to make sound decisions and solve critical business problems.
Significant enhancements have been made to the world’s most complete cloud-enabled Customer Experience (CX) solution, Oracle CX. The new enhancements support sales, marketing, commerce and service organizations by delivering a more interactive, social and mobile experience. The new and updated functionality across Oracle CX helps drive down the total cost of ownership for Oracle customers and supports key integrations across a comprehensive portfolio of user-friendly, cloud-based solutions.
Enhancements within Oracle ERP Cloud enable organizations to increase productivity, lower costs and improve controls. Available immediately to customers, these new updates mean organizations can now improve insight, to accelerate decision making with real-time information access, to increase productivity through social business objects and to manage controls effortlessly.
In the afternoon of Monday September 23, Mark Hurd, Oracle President, announced updates to Oracle HCM Cloud and Oracle Talent Management Cloud to a packed meeting of international press and bloggers. Both applications will be available immediately to customers in the Oracle Cloud as part of Release 7. The new updates will help manage the complex and evolving role of HR as businesses turn to modern HR technologies as a way to develop an efficient and productive workforce that positively impacts the bottom line.
Tuesday 24th brought additional good news for Oracle Applications with the announcement that the company has developed a wide range of cutting-edge mobile capabilities. This will give organizations a huge choice of out-of-the-box mobile applications, as well as the option of leveraging Oracle’s Mobile platform to develop their own mobile applications, Oracle is empowering the mobile workforce for organizations across the world.
Finally in the Applications area, Oracle Marketing Cloud announced new integrations between Oracle Eloqua and Oracle Social Relationship Management (SRM) that will enable modern marketers to manage their digital interactions from a single platform, helping to reduce complexity and improve marketing effectiveness. The enhanced social analytics, tracking, publishing and custom targeting capabilities will help modern marketers understand, analyze and engage with target audiences to deliver higher quality leads more efficiently.
Oracle Industries
Oracle Billing and Revenue Management Cloud (one of the 10 new Cloud Services announced at the show) is a new Cloud Service that will help enterprises deliver and monetize innovative new product offerings and captures recurring revenue streams. This advanced cloud billing service is suited for multiple industries including financial services, media and communications, and offers sophisticated subscription management and rating using any combination of measurable metrics including usage, time of day, length of use, delivery method, device, medium, volume, etc.
Oracle OpenWorld 2013 also included announcements aimed at specific industries.
- Oracle Communications made two significant announcements, including the release of Oracle Communications Data Model 11.3.2, which enables Communication Service Providers (CSPs) to collect, store and analyze detailed data from across a service provider’s operation in a single database. This new offering extends the product family with two new add-on components: Oracle Communications Billing Analytics offers greater understanding of revenue, customers and billing effectiveness; and Oracle Communications Social Network Analytics helps identify customer communities and the roles customers play in those communities. These help generate more expansive, 360-degree views of a CSP’s customer base and more accurately predict customer churn, propensity to buy and influence on other customers’ choices.
- In addition, Oracle Communications unveiled Oracle Communications WebRTC Session Controller, a new solution that enables CSPs and enterprises to offer WebRTC services – from virtually any device, across virtually any network – with carrier-grade reliability and security. This is the first combined offering following Oracle’s acquisition of Acme Packet
- Finally, Oracle Insurance Policy Administration for Life and Annuity version 10 enables insurers to support nearly any insurance product – group or individual – via a single platform, and features expanded rules reuse capabilities that help speed time-to-market. The new version 10 update for insurers will be generally available on October 4, 2013.
Oracle Partners and the "Internet of Things"
The proliferation of intelligent devices and the rapid growth of the “Internet of Things” (IoT) movement has created a market for entirely new solutions based on Machine-to-Machine (M2M) technology. Partners and customers continue to embrace Oracle platform and Java technologies to power their Internet of Things initiatives, driving innovation and business opportunity. Oracle continues to address these challenges with the latest release of Oracle Java ME Embedded, while also working with its partners to deliver integrated, end-to-end IoT solutions. As a result, customers can create new business opportunities, improve efficiencies, process and analyze in-flight data at lightning speeds, and act on events as quickly as they occur.
Oracle PartnerNetwork Exchange @ OpenWorld consisted of a full week of partner programming, learning and networking for partners. The event welcomed more than 5,000 executives, customer and partners from around the globe. The event offers partner’s unique insight into Oracle’s key priority areas for FY14 and new opportunities to learn and grow with Oracle in the coming year. Oracle President Mark Hurd welcomed the Oracle partner community and outlined key areas for partner expansion and customer growth, including cloud, engineered systems, applications and industries.
At Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN) Exchange @ Oracle OpenWorld today, Oracle welcomed thousands of partners who are growing and differentiating their business with Oracle OPN Specialization, technology and enablement resources. One of the major growth opportunities for partners is the potential in unlocking the value of the cloud, Oracle Cloud breaks down traditional cloud and business process silos by delivering the broadest selection of enterprise-grade cloud solutions, including Oracle Application, Social, Platform and Infrastructure Services, all on a subscription basis.
JavaOne News
Oracle made several announcements at the JavaOne conference which ran in parallel to Oracle OpenWorld 2013 in San Francisco:
- During the JavaOne San Francisco 2013 strategy keynote, the Oracle Java Development team leaders outlined plans for the future of the Java platform and showcased the latest Java technology innovations, including the release of Project Avatar as open source technology.
- Oracle also highlighted its continued work with the Java Community to advance the Java Platform, Standard Edition (Java SE). Developer builds are now available for the upcoming Java Development Kit (JDK) 8, which will include: Project Lambda, a new Date and Time API, Compact Profiles and the Nashorn JavaScript Engine. The OpenJDK Community continues to thrive with contributions from Oracle, as well as other companies, researchers and individuals. Additionally, Oracle confirmed that its work on the Java SE 8 Specification and its official reference implementation, JDK 8, is proceeding as planned with availability expected in March 2014.
- Oracle announced updates to its roadmap for Next Generation Java ME Platform with the Java Platform Micro Edition (Java ME), which is intended to meet the requirements needed for the “Internet of Things” (IOT). This is driving new demands on embedded software in terms of security, interoperability, scalability and faster time-to-market. Jave ME will promote a consistent development environment and provide the ability to “right-size” the Java ME platform for deployment across a wider range of use cases, from very small to more powerful embedded systems.
- Finally, Oracle announced the winners of the 2013 Duke's Choice Awards, which included, among many others, the Dutch Java User Group, and the University of Belgrade's Neuroph project
MySQL News
The second MySQL Connect conference, co-located with Oracle OpenWorld 2013, was the platform for two significant announcements:
- The first was the immediate availability of the latest Development Milestone Release (DMR) for MySQL 5.7. The new release further extends the performance, reliability, scalability, and manageability of the world’s most popular open source database, allowing developers and database administrators to build modern web, cloud-based and embedded applications capable of processing ever increasing volumes of data.
- The second was the availability of MySQL Enterprise Monitor 3.0, a vital component of MySQL Enterprise Edition which addresses challenges associated with database professionals increasing their use of MySQL to power business-critical web, cloud, and embedded applications and continue to look for ways to reduce the risk, cost and time to develop, deploy and manage those applications. This will enable developers and DBAs to more efficiently deliver applications, and part of MySQL Enterprise Edition, MySQL Enterprise Monitor 3.0 features include improved manageability while delivering new real-time monitoring and alerts capabilities, visual analysis tools, and better remote monitoring of MySQL databases in the cloud.
