We are blogging from the Oracle Open World Conference being held in San Francisco this week. Oracle President Mark Hurd announced total attendance of this event as being close to 60,000, and judging from the logistics and attached photo of trying to 
traverse among the various venues, visit a restroom or secure transportation, we believe it.
The principle theme of the Monday keynotes were all focused on Oracle’s product announcements in the area of database, including a newly announced in-memory switch with accelerated row and column processing that can dramatically increase analytics applications. Enterprise blogger and friend Vinnie Mirchandani characterized the announcement as a potential “game changer”. The longer-term implication of this announcement for supply chain procurement and manufacturing professionals will be more opportunities to deploy faster and more efficient predictive analytics or remote sensor capabilities addressing supply chain related challenges. Oracle is obviously responding to SAP’s efforts in HANA powered applications, and together, functional and IT teams will benefit from broader and faster options in analyzing large amounts of data and generating either simulation based and what-if planning and execution capabilities.
In-between keynotes and interviews, this author was able to sit in on product strategy and roadmap sessions addressing Oracle Advanced Procurement and Oracle Fusion Supply Chain Management, the cloud-based deployment of oracle’s supply chain suite. We will feature more detailed commentaries regarding Oracle’s ongoing efforts in supporting supply chain, online fulfillment and B2B process needs in subsequent postings. One humorous aspect of Oracle’s roadmap focused presentations is how little time a presenter utilizes to speak to the longer-term development strategy. That in our view is a lost opportunity to engage customers and prospects in feedback.
Our summary of Monday’s sessions was that Oracle elected a focus on two strategic areas in its major keynotes, namely database and engineered systems. Applications related sessions are focused on the latest 12.2 Release of Oracle E-Business Suite. More on that aspect later.
