OOW 2012: The Major Themes

As I passed through the various vendor booths and attended sessions there were a few themes emerging from everything. I saw a ton of vendors and products related to, Cloud Computing, Big Data, and Mobile Applications. Honestly none of these concepts are are new if you follow any technology news, but it takes time for Industry to adjust to the market to know they aren't just momentary trends.

Cloud
Cloud Computing, really it's been a hot topic in the general tech industry for a while now, but Oracle wanted to make sure that you, the customer, knew that they had an offering for "cloud". Not only do all do they have it but they offer three different levels of cloud; as Ahmed mentioned in his post the available products are: SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS. From the Keynote I discovered everything would be running on Exa, no real surprise there. As always it allows for great latitudes in flexibility which can be great when starting a project and the actual hardware requirements can't be accurately estimated on the front-end. It can also be useful for testing out some of the newer technologies before going to the process of setting up a full environment, wasting the time of admins. For Oracle's "Private Cloud" the name just irks me, but of course they want it to be one continuous product line. On-premise Hardware Leasing with hybrid Software Licensing just doesn't sound quite as catchy as Private Cloud, so I can't really blame them.

Big Data
Big Data is really just the name, but the hidden suffix to that title is Analytics. Without a way to analyze all the data accumulated by a company's various processes and servers it is about as useful as an encrypted message and no key. You can see the data, but you don't really know what you're looking at. Of course how this data is stored is also important, because otherwise the analysis of this data can take way longer than would make it useful. I attended a few sessions dealing with big data analysis and related technologies including Oracle's Big Data connectors which I will elaborate on in a future post focused around big data and analytics.

Mobile
"Those kids with their iPhones and Androids, wait... business people use them? No that's not possible! Ok quick, let make a mobile offering!" Oracle - 2011

All kidding aside mobile applications have been and are growing as the preferred method to get things accomplished. Wether it's more productive or less is a discuss for another post, maybe even from someone else, like this guy. This year while it was not the top teaming headline , probably just drowned out by all that talk of cloud. Oracle has an add-on for their ADF product which allows native applications to be developed with few specific changes to make it work. Oracle had a recent Beta for the software which has recently ended, all I could find out is that it will be out in FY2013. Once it is available, I will be posting my impressions of the API and any difficulties I run into.


P.S. For the geeks like me this is post 255 on IPN Web's Blog, one more bit please.