OOW2007: Larry Ellison Keynote

Just sitting in Larry Ellison's keynote in the Moscone Center in San Francisco. It's question time now, a few questions on the Fusion upgrade plans, one now about whether Larry enjoys himself at Oracle more now, or back in the days when it was a five-man startup (answer: now actually, as it's not as stressful as wondering whether you'll make payroll or not)

The main themes of the keynote were the new Oracle VM product, virtualization, and pre-built integration packs between the new Fusion apps and the legacy ERP applications Oracle owns. For me the most interesting announcement was around the first Fusion applications, due in the first half of 2008. Three applications were announced; Sales Prospector, used for identifying sales opportunities; Sales References; and Sales Tools.

These are Web 2.0-style applications that complement the existing Siebel and Oracle sales automation tools, but that include large elements of business intelligence to, for example, data mine the existing customer base and identify prospects with similar characteristics to the customers you've recently sold to.

If anything, these first Fusion applications will be packaged BI applications, for the sales automation market. They take feeds from ERP suites, mine and analyze the data and visualize it using graphs, graphics and so on.

There was also a nod towards the social networking movement, with sales leads, collatoral and so on sharable between other people in your (internal) social network, tagging of documents, messaging, an Apple cover-flow style display of available collatoral and so on. Looks very interesting.

Anyway, off now to Phil Bates' talk on event-based BI and the Action Framework in OBIEE 11g.