The Trip - Day 2

We're not completely done yet for this day, but with diner being the only activity on the program, and an hour before we'll take off for the restaurant, it is the most appropriate time to update on this day. After all, what is there to tell about a fancy diner in a fancy restaurant?

This morning we took a visit to Oracle Headquarters in Redwood Shores.

We were welcomed with a breakfast in the Customer Visit Center, after which we were received three outstanding presentations from Scott Howley, VP of Fusion Middleware, Jeff Davies, Senior Principal Product Manager for SOA and Wim Coekaerts, Senior Vice President for Linux and Virtualization.

All of us

Scott briefed us on Fusion Middleware with a focus on Sun products. With the acquisition of Sun, Oracle's way of working has changed. The slogan is now "Complete, Open, Integrated". Topics of his reading covered the strategies on Java, Integrated Systems (Sun hardware), Exadata, Middleware, Development tools, Application Grid (Glassfish), SOA Suite (Sun Master Index), Portal and Content Management, Identity Management (Sun Directory, OpenDS, Sun Role Manager, Sun Identity Manager), Open Office and Systems Management strategy.

This presentation was followed by Jeff Davies, who told us about SOA for Small Companies. His presentation covered the typical challenges that small companies face, some common misconceptions, and SOA Solutions. He also presented 9 keys to success:

1. SOA is all about Architecture
2. Know the keys to business agility
3. Build abstraction into your enterprise
4. Categorize functionalities
5. Start with a simple taxonomy for governance
6. Know that tools are not architecture
7. Know how to draw SOA
8. Decompose Services
9. Service-enable batch processing

Jeff with his famous quote...

Last in line was Wim Coekaerts. Wim has a very intrigueing personality. Modest, almost shy, not like what you would expect of a Sr. VP. Wim told us about virtualization and high availability, not only with Oracle VM, but also with the Sun Hypervisor. His story was the most interesting to me, but that is mainly because I am especially interested in the infrastructure side of Oracle. The most interesting part of his presentation was about the future of virtualization with Oracle. However, I cannot go into detail about this, because I signed a NDA... but I can tell you that the current development is heading into a very interesting direction:

Sorry! Classified Information...:-)

After the three presentations, we were offered an executive lunch, which also was excellent.

Lunch time

After lunch we were taken on a campus tour, after which we got back to the hotel. The afternoon we visited Alcatraz. This was a very special experience. After all, it is still one of America's most appealing prisons.

Escape to Alcatraz...

And now, we will go to have diner. Another day packed with activity has passed. Tiring, but satisfying. See you tomorrow!