Circuit 2009

This past week the Circuit conference in Washington DC was held at the beautiful Gaylord National Center. Soldiers milled around the halls the entire week, using the facility for conferences. Credit is deserved to Quest and OAUG, as well as the Real Estate SIG, for putting together a major regional conference in a downturn economy. These organizations would not have been able to make such a great convention without getting together and doing it regionally and across user groups.

Some of the best content I have heard in a long time was available at the conference. The time has come for business intelligence and social media to come to the core of enterprise applications, and Oracle is poised to capture the market demand for these features.

I spoke on Hyperion EPM Production Reporting, and there was a lot of discussion throughout the week on use of reporting in organizations. The vendors were great as well, including the JDEdwards Play Day which is very popular. I would like to focus however, on what I think is a very significant matter that was discussed in the keynote and subsequently demonstrated in the major “what’s new in the next release” presentations at the end of the week.

All of our applications are going to be changing so that the core of the experience is Business Intelligence and Social Networking centric. Better visualizations, OBIEE, Online Chatting, Comments Posting, URL linking, and Tagging are now a PeopleTools upgrade. There is no requirement to do an applications upgrade. As far as the applications themselves, Oracle will sell Fusion as a new application, or customers can choose to use Application Integration Architecture as the integration solution. These are alternate options for us to choose from, and the key theme is "whatever works best for us." The technology that has been here for many years is finally going to get the uptake it deserves, seamlessly, usable, and according to the value it represents.

This is a big takeway. The uptake of business intelligence and social media embedded in applications is going to be dramatic in the coming years. Integration partners and organizations need to look at how this uptake will be supported.