Collab 12 Highlights

So I'm sitting here in my Salt Lake office, diligently working away, when the power goes out. Seems the power has gone done for most of the southwestern edge of the county this afternoon. No juice, no wifi, no nothing. Power company says we won't see power before 8 pm. Not too worried about keeping things going around the household (we've socked away hurricane lanterns, candles, and I have the mother of all generators to keep the fridge cold). So, sitting in the peace and quiet, it seems like a good time to update the blog. It's been some time since my last post, Collab 12 happened last week, and I have some very strong throughts about Collab this year...so, here we are.

There are plenty of travelogues of "I did this and I attended that and we ate here" regarding Collab. They're all over the Web. So I won't regurgitate a detailed blow-by-blow here. But let's hit the highlights:

Up until this year, Collab has been very much a software-oriented event. So it was exciting to see an Exadata box on the demo floor. Very much in line with Oracle's strategy of moving into fully integrated systems. Pricing and strategies aside, I have to admit that the Exadata box really called out to my inner geek. Have to figure out how to get my hands of one of those things for a bit.

Seems like EBS 12.2 is close...I mean really close. The big changes? Moving to WebLogic and on-line patching. That latter change will require some pretty sharp DBA support if you're running on-premise. So, if you're thinking 12.2, be sure to get your DBA teams ready for the task.

EBS itself is a pretty funny animal these days. There seems to be a big group of customers determined to hang onto 11i until someone literally storms the castle and takes it away from them. My thought for those folks...I'm not so sure about the long-term upgrade path from 11i to 12.2 and beyond. Ya'all may want to look into that and consider it in your roadmap.

Fusion Apps was a hot topic at Collab. Unfortunately, there were quite a few people talking about the apps who had obvioulsy never worked with them - mostly repurposed slides with no value in the voiceover. Yuk. On the upside, the word definitely started to get out about the supporting software stack and the hardware requirements for an on-premise install. Hopefully, that knowledge will help build momentum for a multi-tenant, metered-service SaaS offering.

Had a few business-analyst people interested in Fusion Apps ask me what pieces of the Apps they should learn first. My response: first learn Oracle Identity Management, then examine the Business Process Model for the pieces of Fusion Apps that interest you, then dive into Functional Setup Manager. I was also asked which of the Apps undergo the largest value-add change in Release 2 (Really - people are already looking for info on R2). That's easy: it will be the Project Portfolio Management suite. As much as I like PPM now, there are some additions of functionality coming in R2 (I think) that will really drive PPM to the top of the project management solution class.

Hey, look, the lights are back on. More thoughts later...



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