The Oracle OpenWorld conference is an annual milestone for Oracle Corporation, for AMIS as well as for many others in our community. A moment to reevaluate our IT strategy and realign with peers as well as with Oracle. There is no other time nor place than this fall week in San Francisco that brings together parties with a vested interested in Oracle’s technology and product portfolio.
Oracle product managers participate, eager to share both their latest product releases and their roadmap for the near and farther out future. Eager also to get feedback from customers and partners – to be confirmed in the vision or to be readjusted if necessary. Oracle partners – such as AMIS, a platinum partner – are quite active. Frequently they act as intermediary between Oracle and the customer, mediating and translating between the two and coaching the customer organization. For Oracle’s partners, Oracle OpenWorld is the best opportunity to learn not only the official party line – the one shared in press releases, on the website and in keynotes – as well as the deeper motivations and true stories underneath. Many partners and customers participate at Oracle OpenWorld in advisory boards where specialists from the field meet with product teams from Oracle – to discuss current grievances and joys and jointly brainstorm about future directions. These sessions are also the start or reaffirmation of direct connections with Oracle staff.
Oracle customers have similar objectives for the conference as partners. They may not be as interested in general applications of technology and the deep down underlying story as partners, but it is their money, their investments and their business success that is at stake through Oracle technology. Oracle OpenWorld is their opportunity to by-pass their local sales rep and directly approach the people responsible for their products and hear straight from the horse’s mouth. Very relevant for customers is the opportunity to engage with similar organizations from perhaps very different industries or regions that leverage the same set of Oracle products. Comparing notes and exchanging experiences can be very valuable and is often the start of a longer term collaboration.
Oracle top executives entertain the top customers, engage with press and analysts and make stage appearances in keynote sessions. The keynotes provide the framing for the conference and the messages to take home, as far as Oracle is concerned. In these keynotes – by executives such as Larry Ellison, Thomas Kurian, Mark Hurd and John Fowler- the outline of Oracle’s strategy is stated and the major announcements are made, around products, partnerships and technology evolution. These are frequently accompanied by press releases that further spread the marketing message.
The overarching theme for Oracle OpenWorld 2015 was cloud. Oracle’s key messages around cloud are:
We provide a complete public cloud portfolio at SaaS, PaaS and also IaaS level. We provide best of class at each level and compete with top vendors at each level. Our cloud services are based on the same stack that customers have available on premises; this allows lift and shift of applications and workload, from on premises to cloud and back and this protects current investments in applications and development and administration skills. We allow customers not only to assemble and run a private cloud based on the same technology we use for running our public cloud, we even provide the Oracle Public Cloud-in-a-box on premises, behind the corporate firewall. This public cloud on premises is subscription based and completely managed by Oracle; to all intents and purposes it offers the exact same proposition as the Oracle Public Cloud, only running on the physical premises of the customer and subject to the same regulations as any other system on that premises. Other unique qualities of our cloud offering include the security level (always-on security, end-to-end data encryption, etc.) and the high-end quality and scale at which some offerings are available. Substantial investments are made into improving our platform software – primarily Database, WebLogic and Enterprise Manager – for powering our public cloud [and because of the same stack principle also so any customer’s private cloud].
AMIS attended Oracle OpenWorld 2015 with a team of ten specialists. We presented in conference sessions, participated in advisory boards, hosted the Benelux Welcome Reception, roamed the demo grounds, got access to prototypes in hands on labs, guided our customers through the melee, discussed our findings with peers and soaked up knowledge. Then we sat down to lay down our collective experiences and conclusions. We presented them in our yearly OOW Review session (slides are available at http://www.slideshare.net/AMIS_Services) and then we compiled them into a single document – the 130 page white paper that you can access here.
This document contains a summary of our findings from one October Week in San Francisco, complemented with statements from over thirty community leaders, Oracle ACE Directors and Oracle product managers sharing their insights and key takeaways from this week in San Francisco. A week that showed much realism and substance compared to the same week last year. A cloud story that comes together – and that is changing not only the face but also the body of Oracle. The energy, conviction and spirit we sensed from people working at Oracle Corporation was inspiring and contagious. Hopefully, we are able to convey that feeling in this document – along with details on and insights into announcements and roadmaps, recent and upcoming releases. By reading this document, you should get more than a good appreciation of what that one October week entailed.
Download Report from Oracle OpenWorld 2015.
