Dears,
This
year Oracle Open World is bigger than ever with some exciting events,
announcements and of course with Hitachi becoming 11th Oracle
Diamond Partner is an absolute landmark to our Oracle practice. Dinesh
Chandrasekar and Phani Tamarapalli from our HCC GDC office had the opportunity
to be part of this big oracle event and also attended Hitachi’s Oracle Diamond
Partner Celebration @ SFO, United States.
The
process of digesting the announcements, roadmaps and doubts – confirmed or not
– can proceed in full swing. What has become of last year’s plans, what this
year’s plans are (for next year and beyond) and what has materialized in terms
of Oracle’s product portfolio? For everyone, the answers to these questions and
the conclusions will be somewhat different – depending on focus, expectations
and requirements. However, some conclusions will be shared by most who attended
Oracle Open World 2012. Without a doubt, some of the important themes were and
will be: cloud – and at respectable distance – the next generation of database
technology (12c) and of engineered systems (Exadata… X3-v2), mobile
availability of both standard applications (Fusion Applications and other
Oracle Applications products) and custom Portals and applications (through
ADF Mobile on iOS and Android).
Facts and Opinions
The
biggest thing by far for Oracle this year (past, present and future) is
the Cloud. For several reasons, including competition
(defensive) and opportunity (offensive), Oracle wants to be in the cloud as
quickly as possible – with a full stack offering. Its USPs will be the
completeness of the stack (IaaS, PaaS and SaaS including the Social Platform
for the Enterprise) and the ability to move from on premise (Oracle software
running locally) to the cloud and back. Where Oracle’s software is involved
(PaaS on Database, WebLogic and Fusion Middleware) Oracle may be able to
compete on price as well – as the price one charges for software can be quite
flexible. Through the SaaS offering, Oracle makes the difference on
functionality as well as price – since no one else can offers that same
software – Fusion Applications – from their cloud.
One
other innovative offering from Oracle: if you want all the benefits of the
cloud – pay per use model, no upfront investment, fully managed infrastructure
and platform – but you cannot have the data leave your premise, for example
because of regulatory reasons – you can have Oracle bring the cloud to you. The
exact same offering of the Oracle Cloud, managed by Oracle, running within your
firewall on your premise. Given that Oracle has the hardware, the software and
the service organization to manage it all, they can easily extend their Cloud
offering with this service – but that would not be easy for anyone else who
does not have the full stack. Here is a real differentiator for Oracle.
Fusion
Applications have 400 customers. 100 will be
live by end of October. Of these, a substantial percentage (over 65%) run on
the cloud. Note: recent SaaS acquisitions Taleo and RightNow are included in
these numbers. Only a small percentage runs through Oracle on Demand (managed
services with bring your own license) and another small but slightly larger
segment runs Fusion Applications on premise. Fusion Applications R5 will be made available sometime in
October 2012. Integration into Fusion Applications of the Oracle Social Network
is one of the main focus areas right now – as is making parts of the data and
functionality from Fusion Applications available on tablets and mobile devices.
To that end, a REST style API is exposed for the Fusion Applications. Another
major innovation for Fusion Applications is the next generation of User
Experience – the improved, simplified look and feel that runs well on both
tablet and browser-on-desktop.
ADF: Over the last years, Oracle has
adopted ADF – Application Development Framework – as
the technology for virtually all of its products – turning ADF into Advanced
Dog Food as it were. From Fusion Applications to Enterprise Manager and run
time tools such as the SOA Composer and the Golden Gate monitor as well as end
user frontends including WebCenter Portal – everything is built using ADF. One
of the advantages of this approach is that because ADF is embracing HTML 5 and
support for tablets (including multi touch and gestures) – as a result all products
based on ADF are automatically enabled for tablet usage. Furthermore,
application extensions that need to run on mobile devices using native device
capabilities and/or in off-line mode can now be developed using ADF Mobile. An
extension of ADF, developer skills and many existing application artefacts can
be reused for the creation of ADF Mobile applications. With the release of ADF
Mobile imminent, we will quickly see many Oracle products – already based on
ADF – with (partly native) mobile extensions running on Android and iOS.
The
recent release of ADF Essentials allows organizations
to use ADF for design and deployment without license charge – for example on
open source stacks such as Linux, Apache Tomcat, MySQL and ADF Essentials (LAMA
as opposed to the well-known LAMP stack). This may well bring more developers
with an all Java/JEE background (I/O an Oracle history) to the ADF framework
(if only for the somewhat higher rates that ADF developers can charge because
of the higher productivity the framework allows them to achieve).
ADF
applications can be deployed on premise as well as on the Oracle Cloud Java Service that runs WebLogic with the ADF
libraries pre-installed. This Cloud environment allows JDBC connection to the
Oracle Database Cloud. Apart from the support for Tablet and Mobile devices,
the every evolving set of Data Visualizations continues to amaze.
Fast Data – in addition to Big
Data (first brought into the lime light by Oracle at OOW 2011) now
Oracle also coins the term Fast Data. Both Big and Fast Data deal
with large volumes of data. However, Fast Data is meant to describe cases where
near real time conclusions need to be derived from the data – sub seconds to a
few seconds ‘latency’. Fast Data typically deals with events – small,
structured and time stamped packets of data. Complex Event Processing (better
indicated as complex processing of simple events) is the technology that does
Fast Data (analysis). BigData handles equally large or usually even larger
volumes of data that may be quite unstructured – like Tweets – and from which
the urgency of deriving results is not as high – minutes or even longer. For signalling
trends during a presidential debate, Fast Data and CEP are required. For the post-debate
after the commercial type of analysis, BigData is more what we would be looking
for. To surf the wave of Fast Data – Oracle is rebranding the CEP product it
has been shipping as part of the EDA Suite (Event Driven Architecture) and as
component of the SOA Suite under a new name and as a separate SKU (standalone unit
on the price list; it is to be called OEP – Oracle Event Processor).
Fusion
Middleware 12c has not been announced – nor has its intended
release schedule been unveiled. The closest I got to an indication is sometime
in 2013, apparently not very long before OOW 2013. The current 11gR1 line is the
one used by Fusion Applications – for quite some time to come. There will be additional
functionality – perhaps some things that were intended for 12c that now are
back ported to the 11gR1 line in order to make them earlier available to both
external customers as well as to Fusion Applications. Especially for ADF,
WebCenter and BPM there are substantial improvements in PS6 and PS7. Note:
WebLogic Server is at its final release in the 11g line – release 10.3.6 is the
last of its kind, to be supported until 2017. No new development takes place on
this EE5 based container. The 12c release – initially published in December
2011 with support for JEE 6 – is where the action is. WLS 12c is the foundation
for all FMW 12c components.
Already a star a few years back
during JavaOne, REST has finally made it center stage
during Oracle Open World. RESTful services – simple, URL and HTTP based
services, usually with JSON for the payload rather than XML or a binary format
– are important in two main areas. One is the management of the cloud:
(almost?) any API published for accessing and manipulating the Oracle Cloud
environment from outside the cloud is published as a REST-style service. The
second area is Mobile: mobile devices are much better equipped at dealing with
JSON based services for data retrieval and the execution of operations than
with XML services (verbose, expensive processing). ADF Mobile thrives on such
services for example. In addition to the REST ful APIs in Fusion Applications,
WebCenter and many other products, support for both publication and consumption
of RESTful services is added to APEX and ADF as well as Oracle Service Bus and
SOA Suite (in the 12c time frame).
Exadata X3 (X3-2 and X3-8) is
the new generation Exadata machine. The main focus for
this generation is on memory. Up to 26 Tb of memory (largely Flash) can be
supported in the machine – allowing for much faster IO operations. It looks
like after a few years where the I/O speeds could not keep up with the
processor power, we will now see the CPU once again becoming the bottleneck for
queries and other serious operations. F40 flash cards are used, with 1.6TB of
flash per cell. The version of the Exadata storage server software
shipping with the X3 systems will be 11.2.3.2.0, which contains the “flash for
all writes” cache. The X3-2 should now also support Oracle Unbreakable
Enterprise Linux Kernel. The Exadata machine will be available in a 1/8 rack
configuration at $200k. This should bring it well in reach for many smaller
businesses.
Database
12c is around the corner, obviously. Many
sessions during Oracle Open World – from keynotes and general sessions to technical
deep dives and Hands on Labs – described 12c features and themes in detail.
However, the availability of the software itself is not expected before the end
of the calendar year. The key feature of 12c – touted by Larry Ellison himself
– is the notion of the pluggable database: one (root or container) database
with all the generic elements of an Oracle Database that encompasses between 1
and 200 pluggable databases. Shared between all databases are the data
dictionary, the UNDO area and the administration effort. Private to each
pluggable database is the definition of application’s database objects and
obviously the data itself. Through the concept of Pluggable Database,
operations to for example create, clone or upgrade a database have become a lot
easier and very much faster (since these operations only involve the
non-generic parts of an Oracle Database). Because the Pluggable Databases are
really independent database one the one hand that shares a lot of resources on
the other, the number of databases that can run on a single piece of hardware
is much larger than until now. Clearly through this mechanism Oracle will be
able to offer its database cloud service in a much more resource efficient way
(multi-tenant at the platform level rather than the application level) than
otherwise would have been the case. The same thing applies of course to
on-premise infrastructure – i.e. the private cloud.
These
product advancements clearly sets the stage for the partners to move on beyond
the conventional oracle solutions and look forward to do something innovative
and also breeds the need to adopt the new technology inventions. The change is
the only thing that doesn't change; the same is true for Oracle Solutions.
Best Regards
DC*
