User Group Leaders' Summit Day 1 - #oraclesun

I was fortunate enough to be invited to the Oracle User Group Leaders' Summit at Oracle HQ in Redwood City this week.  Once the Oracle-Sun deal was given the go ahead by the EC last week, we were invited to sit in live for the big announcement.  My day started early after about five hours of sleep because my flight was late getting in last night.  I met some of my fellow IOUG Board members for breakfast and ran into many others including Ronan Miles, UKOUG Chairman, who went to Brussels with IOUG President, Ian Abramson, to give the User Group position on the acquisition.  Also ran into ODTUG President, Mike Riley, Quest President, Sue Shaw, and OAUG President, Ray Payne.  That sounds like a lot of name dropping, and it is!

From breakfast, we walked over to the Oracle Conference Center and were ushered into the Auditorium.  You can check out all my tweets from the session, but to sum it up, they are pushing hard on the integrated solution, complete platform for applications.  We heard from Charles Phillips, who hoped we had a less eventful week than he has...  Charles also talked about hiring 2000 people and if the current US Administration is looking for a jobs program, "her we are!"  I won't go into politics here, but these are the kind of of things that should be focused on and learned from.

John Fowler, who is now EVP of Hardware Technologies at Oracle discussed the investments in Solaris and Sun hardware moving forward.  Mike Splain, who seems to be the real techie, outlined the accelerated road maps for UltraSPARC and SPARC64.  Oracle is putting more money into these platforms and they are hiring here too!  My question continues to be how many people are getting laid off at the same time that they are hiring all these new positions.  I'm sure the layoffs will get some money to walk away, but are they really just shifting positions?  That hasn't been asked or answered yet.

The key theme continues to be seamless integrations between existing Oracle technologies and the newly acquired server, storage, and operating system.  Supposedly all this testing has been done for many of the Oracle applications.  Can they get these all working as they are advertising with flash technologies, new storage options, and newer Sun hardware and Solaris all remains to be seen.  They keep selling the fact that they are being built and integrated together and if you have issues, you only have one support organization to deal with. 

I'm still in the Oracle/Sun session and I'm sure there will be further information later.  I also get a tour of the Usability Lab this afternoon which should be pretty interesting.  Tomorrow starts the actual meetings including my first OpenWorld 10 planning meeting.  I really wish we could finish one conference before starting planning for the next.  Speaking of Conferences, don't forget about Collaborate 10! There will be sessions covering some of the new Sun technologies!