Springtime In The Rockies - It's A Wrap

It's a wrap for Collaborate 08. Observations, thoughts and highlights include the following:

• Oracle's announcement extending Premier Support for E-Business 11.5.10 for an additional year is a great relief for most E-Business customers, who should all be grateful to the OAUG Customer Support Council for advocating this change with Oracle execs. I suspect many of those customers will delay any upgrade to R12 or Fusion Applications as a result. The delay also makes Solution Beacon's new book, "The ABCs of Workflow for E-Business Suite Release 11i and Release 12" very relevant for EBS users.
  

• I heard a great number of statements about bugs and rumors of bugs in the Payables module of EBS Release 12. I'm looking forward to the releases of 12.05 and 12.1 to see if those bugs are resolved.
  

• The OAUG Fusion Council would be lost without James Hobbs. In fact, James is driving the council to deliver a surprise or two over the next few months...stay tuned!
  

• After releasing three Fusion CRM applications, the next increment of Fusion Applications will likely be a Fusion Applications GRC module.
  

• While some type of integrated Fusion Applications ERP suite will be released before the end of this calendar year, it likely won't be general available for quite some time thereafter. It will initially be provided only to selected customers with background in leading edge or early adoption; this probably rules out most public sector organizations. In addition, because manufacturing will not be included in the initial release, enterprises based on manufacturing will likely not be on the list of the first Fusion Apps companies.
  

• The user interface for Fusion Applications will bring about a huge improvement in the way people do their work...I can't overstate the impact here.
  

• Building a business process using the SOA Suite is actually much easier than I thought. I've been inspired to investigate the SOA Suite further.
  

• I'm really looking forward to this year's round of Oracle Excellence Awards. The use cases of customers extending Oracle Apps with Fusion Middleware have proven to be a rich source of great ideas for my own shop.
  

• If I made my living as a developer in the Oracle space, I'd make sure my skills were sharp in XML, Java and BPEL.
  

• The extension of Premier Support for EBS 11i gives those users more time to come up to speed with Fusion Middleware tools. It will be interesting to see how many take advantage of the opportunity.
  

• OAUG's Knowledge Factory has the makings of a great tool. I hope we'll see user uptake very quickly. I also hope we'll be able to partner up with the guys at Oracle Mix, with each environment consuming services from the other.
  

• Two days later, I still feel humbled and less than worthy about winning the OAUG President's Award. There are some many smart, dedicated, and hard-working people in OAUG...
  

• The toughest part of attending Collaborate is always heading back to the day job. You spend a week with people who understand the value the technology brings to the enterprise, and you see the incredibly creative things they're doing. By mid-week, you're elated just to be around these people and their ideas. Then the conference ends and it's back to the real world of administrative meetings, funding limitations and organizational hooey. well, Oracle OpenWorld is less than five months away...