Oracle News from KOMTAR in Penang

Just popped into an internet cafe in the KOMTAR, Penang, so it's a good opportunity to update the blog with a couple of news items...

Chuck Phillips, who along with Safra Catz is one of the new Co-presidents at Oracle, is speaking at the next Peoplesoft User Group regional conference in San Diego, according to this report at CNet news.com. This one should be interesting, as Oracle plan to outline their takeover plans during the meeting, and the user group recently fell out with Peoplesoft, who have refused to send any speakers or delegates to the meeting. Should be good.

More news from VNUNet.com on the new Customer Data Hub, and the opening up of the e-Business Suite, through a series of public APIs, to allow integration with other 'best of breed' or legacy applications. It's interesting how commentators have taken this new development to be a complete about turn for Oracle; what's actually happened is that the central data model (the 'TCA', or Trading Community Architecture) is being made available as a central customer integration point for third-party applications - all the data will still be held in Oracle, with the same central benefit of the e-Business Suite of a single database instance holding a central view of the business. What we won't be going back to is a suitation where individual elements of the e-Business suite are patched in to 'best of breed' solutions - Oracle tried that before, back in the Ray Lane days, and the failure of that approach (it never worked, and the cost to the client became astronomical) directly lead to the e-Business Suite being launched.

News from CRN.net on a change of heart at Oracle with regard to the way they work with partners. According to the article, Rauline Ochs at Oracle is working to publish new channel guidelines and rules in an attempt to foster cooperation with channel partners and ISVs. Previous to this, Oracle opened up larger accounts to partners, raising the revenue limit from US$200M in revenue to US$1B.

Lastly, news from IDG.com that seven new Oracle customers in India are using Linux as their server operating system, and Linux is now the second-most popular development platform in the country. According to the article:

"More than 180,000 developers from India are registered on the Oracle Technology Network, the online platform where Oracle developers interact with each other and Oracle experts. Windows continues to be the most popular operating system platform among Oracle developers in India, according to the company. But the fact that developers and users are embracing Linux is a sign that the operating system is challenging Unix -- a traditional platform for corporate enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications -- and making inroads against Windows.".

I've always felt that India and China are going to be the places where Linux overtakes Windows, both on the server and desktop, and here's hoping the move gathers momentum over the next year.