Search Results

Search found 2506 results on 101 pages for 'siebel marketing'.

Page 96/101 | < Previous Page | 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101  | Next Page >

• Oracle Announces New Oracle Exastack Program for ISV Partners

  - by pfolgado

  Oracle Exastack Program Enables ISV Partners to Leverage a Scalable, Integrated Infrastructure to Deliver Their Applications Tuned and Optimized for High-Performance News Facts Enabling Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) and other members of Oracle Partner Network (OPN) to rapidly build and deliver faster, more reliable applications to end customers, Oracle today introduced Oracle Exastack Ready, available now, and Oracle Exastack Optimized, available in fall 2011 through OPN. The Oracle Exastack Program focuses on helping ISVs run their solutions on Oracle Exadata Database Machine and Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud -- integrated systems in which the software and hardware are engineered to work together. These products provide partners with a lower cost and high performance infrastructure for database and application workloads across on-premise and cloud based environments. Leveraging the new Oracle Exastack Program in which applications can qualify as Oracle Exastack Ready or Oracle Exastack Optimized, partners can use available OPN resources to optimize their applications to run faster and more reliably -- providing increased performance to their end users. By deploying their applications on Oracle Exadata Database Machine and Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud, ISVs can reduce the cost, time and support complexities typically associated with building and maintaining a disparate application infrastructure -- enabling them to focus more on their core competencies, accelerating innovation and delivering superior value to customers. After qualifying their applications as Oracle Exastack Ready, partners can note to customers that their applications run on and support Oracle Exadata Database Machine and Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud component products including Oracle Solaris, Oracle Linux, Oracle Database and Oracle WebLogic Server. Customers can be confident when choosing a partner's Oracle Exastack Optimized application, knowing it has been tuned by the OPN member on Oracle Exadata Database Machine or Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud with a goal of delivering optimum speed, scalability and reliability. Partners participating in the Oracle Exastack Program can also leverage their Oracle Exastack Ready and Oracle Exastack Optimized applications to advance to Platinum or Diamond level in OPN. Oracle Exastack Programs Provide ISVs a Reliable, High-Performance Application Infrastructure With the Oracle Exastack Program ISVs have several options to qualify and tune their applications with Oracle Exastack, including: Oracle Exastack Ready: Oracle Exastack Ready provides qualifying partners with specific branding and promotional benefits based on their adoption of Oracle products. If a partner application supports the latest major release of one of these products, the partner may use the corresponding logo with their product marketing materials: Oracle Solaris Ready, Oracle Linux Ready, Oracle Database Ready, and Oracle WebLogic Ready. Oracle Exastack Ready is available to OPN members at the Gold level or above. Additionally, OPN members participating in the program can leverage their Oracle Exastack Ready applications toward advancement to the Platinum or Diamond levels in the OPN Specialized program and toward achieving Oracle Exastack Optimized status. Oracle Exastack Optimized: When available, for OPN members at the Gold level or above, Oracle Exastack Optimized will provide direct access to Oracle technical resources and dedicated Oracle Exastack lab environments so OPN members can test and tune their applications to deliver optimal performance and scalability on Oracle Exadata Database Machine or Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud. Oracle Exastack Optimized will provide OPN members with specific branding and promotional benefits including the use of the Oracle Exastack Optimized logo. OPN members participating in the program will also be able to leverage their Oracle Exastack Optimized applications toward advancement to Platinum or Diamond level in the OPN Specialized program. Oracle Exastack Labs and ISV Enablement: Dedicated Oracle Exastack lab environments and related technical enablement resources (including Guided Learning Paths and Boot Camps) will be available through OPN for OPN members to further their knowledge of Oracle Exastack offerings, and qualify their applications for Oracle Exastack Optimized or Oracle Exastack Ready. Oracle Exastack labs will be available to qualifying OPN members at the Gold level or above. Partners are eligible to participate in the Oracle Exastack Ready program immediately, which will help them meet the requirements to attain Oracle Exastack Optimized status in the future. Guidelines for Oracle Exastack Optimized, as well as Oracle Exastack Labs will be available in fall 2011. Supporting Quotes "In order to effectively differentiate their software applications in the marketplace, ISVs need to rapidly deliver new capabilities and performance improvements," said Judson Althoff, Oracle senior vice president of Worldwide Alliances and Channels and Embedded Sales. "With Oracle Exastack, ISVs have the ability to optimize and deploy their applications with a complete, integrated and cloud-ready infrastructure that will help them accelerate innovation, unlock new features and functionality, and deliver superior value to customers." "We view performance as absolutely critical and a key differentiator," said Tom Stock, SVP of Product Management, GoldenSource. "As a leading provider of enterprise data management solutions for securities and investment management firms, with Oracle Exadata Database Machine, we see an opportunity to notably improve data processing performance -- providing high quality 'golden copy' data in a reduced timeframe. Achieving Oracle Exastack Optimized status will be a stamp of approval that our solution will provide the performance and scalability that our customers demand." "As a leading provider of Revenue Intelligence solutions for telecommunications, media and entertainment service providers, our customers continually demand more readily accessible, enriched and pre-analyzed information to minimize their financial risks and maximize their margins," said Alon Aginsky, President and CEO of cVidya Networks. "Oracle Exastack enables our solutions to deliver the power, infrastructure, and innovation required to transform our customers' business operations and stay ahead of the game." Supporting Resources Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN) Oracle Exastack Oracle Exastack Datasheet Judson Althoff blog Connect with the Oracle Partner community at OPN on Facebook, OPN on LinkedIn, OPN on YouTube, or OPN on Twitter

  Read the article

• XNA Notes 007

  - by George Clingerman

  Every week I keep wondering if there’s going to be enough activity in the community to keep doing these notes on a weekly basis and every week I’m reminded of just how awesome and active the XNA community is. There’s engines being made, tutorials being created, games being crafted. There’s information being shared, questions being answered and then there’s another whole community around the Xbox LIVE Indie Games themselves. It’s really incredibly to just watch all that’s going on and I’m glad I’m playing a small part in all of this. So here’s what I noticed happening in the XNA community last week. If there’s things I’m missing, always feel free to let me know. I love learning about new corners of the XNA community that I wasn’t aware of or just have been missing! XNA Developers: Uditha Bandara held an XNA Game Development Workshops at Singapore Universities http://uditha.wordpress.com/2011/02/18/xna-game-development-workshops-at-singapore-universities-event-update/ Binary Tweed gives his talks about Indie City and gives his opinion on the false promise of digital distribution http://www.develop-online.net/news/37053/OPINION-The-false-promise-of-digital-distribution Kris Steele posts his Trivia or Die postmortem http://www.krissteele.net/blogdetails.aspx?id=246 @MadNinjaSkills (James Johnston) posts his feelings on testing for XBLIG http://www.ezmuze.co.uk/101 Simon (@DDReaper) posts hints and tips for XNA developers to help get the size of their projects down http://twitter.com/#!/DDReaper/status/38279440924545024 http://xna-uk.net/blogs/darkgenesis/archive/2011/02/17/look-at-the-size-of-that-thing.aspx Michael B. McLaughlin proving why he should be an XNA MVP posts the list of commonly used value types in XNA games http://geekswithblogs.net/mikebmcl/archive/2011/02/17/list-of-commonly-used-value-types-in-xna-games.aspx http://twitter.com/#!/mikebmcl/status/38166541354811392 Paul Powell (@ITSligoPaul) posts about a common sprite batch as a game service http://itspaulsblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/xna-common-sprite-batch-as-game-service.html @SigilXNA (John Defenbaugh) posts his new level editor video for the sequel to Opac’s Journey http://twitter.com/SigilXNA/statuses/36548174373982209 http://twitter.com/#!/SigilXNA/status/36548174373982209 http://youtu.be/QHbmxB_2AW8 @jwatte updates kW Animation for XNA 4.0 http://www.enchantedage.com/xna-animation @DSebJ posts Blender to SunBurn http://twitter.com/#!/DSebJ/status/36564920224976896 http://dsebj.evolvingsoftware.com/?p=187 Ads and WP7 Games - @mechaghost shares his revenue data for his ad based games http://www.occasionalgamer.com/2011/02/09/ads-and-wp7-games/ Xbox LIVE Indie Games (XBLIG): Steven Hurdle posts day 100 of his quest to find a fantastic XBLIG purchase every day http://writingsofmassdeduction.com/2011/02/17/day-100-radiangames-ballistic/ Xbox 360 Indie Game Buying Guide - 12 games for $60 including several Xbox LIVE Indie games! (although if the XNA community was asked we could have recommended 60 games for $60...) http://www.indiegamemag.com/xbox360-indie-games-buying-guide/ The best selling Xbox LIVE Indie games of 2010 http://www.1up.com/news/xbox-live-most-popular-games I’d buy that for a dollar! - the California Literary Review points out a few gems on the XBLIG marketplace (and other places) where you can game on the cheap. http://calitreview.com/14125 Armless Octopus Episode 39 - The Indie Gem Octocast http://www.armlessoctopus.com/2011/02/17/armless-octocast-episode-39-the-indie-gem-octocast/ Ska Studios posts a plethora of updates http://www.ska-studios.com/2011/02/11/good-morning-gato-49/ http://www.ska-studios.com/2011/02/14/vampire-smile-valentines/ http://www.ska-studios.com/2011/02/16/the-dishwasher-vs-finds-a-home/ Kotaku posts about the Xbox LIVE Indie Game that makes you go Pew Pew Pew Pew Pew Pew http://kotaku.com/#!5760632/the-game-that-makes-you-go-pew-pew-pew-pew-pew-pew-pew GameMarx continues to be active and doing a ton for the XBLIG community reviews and Top 5 indie games of the week 2/4-2/10 http://www.gamemarx.com/video/the-show/22/ep-9-february-11-2010.aspx a new podcast Xbox Indie New Releases http://twitter.com/#!/gamemarx/status/36888849107910656 http://www.gamemarx.com/news/2011/02/13/a-new-podcast-xbox-indie-new-releases.aspx @MasterBlud uploads Indocalypse XBLIG Collections #2 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzCZSv075mc&feature=youtu.be&a http://twitter.com/#!/MasterBlud/status/37100029697064960 Just Press Start interviews Michael Hicks from MichaelArts, 18 year old creator of Honor in Vengeance http://justpressstart.net/?p=465 Achievement Locked interviews Kris Steele of FunInfused Games http://xboxindies.wordpress.com/2011/02/11/interview-fun-infused-games/ XNA Game Development: XNA -UK launches their XAP test service to help the XNA community http://xna-uk.net/blogs/news/archive/2011/02/18/xna-uk-xap-test-service-now-live.aspx Transmute shows off a video of the standard character editor http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqH6gErG948&feature=youtu.be Microsoft Tech Student introduces their first tech student of the month.  Meet Daniel Van Tassel from the University of Utah and learn how he created an Xbox LIVE Indie Game using XNA Studio http://blogs.msdn.com/b/techstudent/archive/2010/12/22/introducing-our-first-tech-student-of-the-month-daniel-van-tassel.aspx XNA for Silverlight Developers Part 3 - Animation (transforms) http://www.silverlightshow.net/items/XNA-for-Silverlight-developers-Part-3-Animation-transforms.aspx XNA for Silverlight Developers Part 4 - Animation (frame based) http://www.silverlightshow.net/items/XNA-for-Silverlight-developers-Part-4-Animation-frame-based.aspx @suhinini tweets about an XNA Sprite Font generation tool http://twitter.com/#!/suhinini/status/36841370131890176 http://www.nubik.com/SpriteFont/ XNATouch 1.5 is out and in it’s words is faster, simpler, more reliable and has the XNA 4.0 API http://monogame.codeplex.com/releases/view/60815 IndieCity is hosting marketing workshops for Indie Developers (UK and US) http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/p/75197/457654.aspx#457654 New York Students - Learn XNA and Silverlight for Xbox 360 and Windows Phone 7 http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/p/72753/456964.aspx#456964 http://blogs.msdn.com/b/andrewparsons/archive/2011/01/13/learn-to-build-your-own-games-for-xbox-360-and-windows-phone-7.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/andrewparsons/archive/2011/01/13/build-a-game-in-48-hours-win-a-kinect-or-windows-phone-7.aspx Extra Credits: Videogame Music http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/extra-credits/2019-Videogame-Music Steve Pavlina posts an article with useful information for all XNA/XBLIG developers http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2011/02/completion-vs-perfection/

  Read the article

• The ASP.NET Daily Community Spotlight - How posts get there, and how to make it your Visual Studio Start Page

  - by Jon Galloway

  One really cool part of my job is selecting the articles for the Daily Community Spotlight, on the home page of the ASP.NET website. The spotlight highlights a new post about ASP.NET development every day from a member of the ASP.NET community. You can find it on the home page of the ASP.NET site, at http://asp.net These posts aren't automatically drawn from a pool of RSS feeds or anything - I pick a new post for each day of the year. How I pick the posts I have a few important selection criteria: Interesting to well rounded ASP.NET developers The ASP.NET website has a lot of material for all skill and experience levels, from download / get started to advanced. I try to select community spotlight posts to round that out with fresh and timely information that working ASP.NET developers can really use. Posts highlight solutions to common problems, clever projects and code that helps you leverage ASP.NET, and important announcements about things you can use today. As part of that, I try to mix between ASP.NET MVC, Web Forms, and Web Pages (a.k.a. WebMatrix). As a professional developer, I want to keep on top of all of my options for ASP.NET development, and the common platform base they all share generally means that good ASP.NET code is good ASP.NET code. Exposing new and non-Microsoft community members as much as possible The exercise of selecting good ASP.NET community posts every day of the year has made me think about what the community is. Given the choice, I'll always favor non-Microsoft employees, but since Microsoft often hires ASP.NET community members and MVP's (myself included), I really think that the ASP.NET community includes developers who are using and writing about ASP.NET, both inside and outside of Microsoft. I'm especially excited about the opportunity to highlight new and lesser known bloggers. Usually being featured on the ASP.NET Community Spotlight gives a pretty good traffic bump, and I love being able to both provide great content to the community and encourage lesser known community members by giving them some (much deserved) attention. Announcements only when they're useful to working developers - not marketing Some of the posts are announcements about new releases, such as Scott Hanselman's post on ASP.NET Universal Providers for Session, Memebership, and Roles. I include those when I think they're interesting and of immediate use to you on projects. I occasionally get asked to link to new content from a team at Microsoft; if it's useful and timely content I'll ask them to point me to a blog post by an actual person rather than a faceless team. How the posts are managed This feed used to be managed by an internal spreadsheet on a Sharepoint site, which was painful for a lot of reasons. I took a cue from Jon Udell, who uses of a public Delicious feed feed for his Elm City project, and we moved the management of these posts over to a Delicious feed as well. You can hear more about Jon's use of Delicious in Elm City in our Herding Code interview - still one of my favorite interviews. We ended up with a simpler scenario, but Note: I watched the Yahoo/Delicious news over the past year and was happy to see that Delicious was recently acquired by the founders of YouTube. I investigated several other Delicious competitors, but am happy with Delicious for now. My Delicious feed here: http://www.delicious.com/jon_galloway You can also browse through this past year's ASP.NET Community Spotlight posts using the (pretty cool) Delicious Browse Bar Submitting articles I'm always on the lookout for new articles to feature. The best way to get them to me is to share them via Delicious. It's pretty easy - sign up for an account, then you can add a post and share it to me. Alternatively, you can send them to me via Twitter (@jongalloway) or e-mail (). If you do e-mail me, it helps to include a short description and your full name so I can credit you. Way too many developer blogs don't include names and pictures; if I can't find them I can't feature the post. Subscribing to the Community Spotlight feed The Community Spotlight is available as an RSS feed, so you might want to subscribe to it: http://www.asp.net/rss/spotlight Setting the ASP.NET Community Spotlight feed as your Visual Studio start page If you're an ASP.NET developer, you might consider setting the ASP.NET Community Spotlight as the content for your Visual Studio Start Page. It's really easy - here's how to do it in Visual Studio 2010: Display the Visual Studio Start Page if it's not already showing (View / Start Page) Click on the Latest News tab and enter the following RSS URL: http://www.asp.net/rss/spotlight If you didn't previously have RSS feeds enabled for your start page, click the Enable RSS Feed button Now, every time you start up Visual Studio you'll see great content from members of the ASP.NET community: You can also configure - and disable, if you'd like - the Visual Studio start page in the Tools / Options / Environment / Startup dialog. Credits I'll do a follow-up highlighting some places I commonly find great content for the feed, but I'd like to specifically point out two of them: Elijah Manor posts a lot of great content, which is available in his Twitter feed at @elijahmanor, on his Delicious feed, and on a dedicated website - Web Dev Tweets Chris Alcock's The Morning Brew is a must-read blog which highlights each day's best blog posts across the .NET community. He's an absolute machine, and no matter how obscure the post I find, I can guarantee he'll find it as well if he hasn't already. Did I say must read?

  Read the article

• Interview with Tomas Ulin at the MySQL Innovation Day

  - by Monica Kumar

  MySQL Innovation Day held on June 5, 2012 was a great event for the MySQL engineers, users and customers to gather, share and network. I was able to get a few minutes with Tomas Ulin, Vice President of MySQL Engineering at Oracle, to ask him some questions. Here are the highlights of my interview with Tomas. Monica: This was the first MySQL Innovation Day, correct?  Why now, what was the strategy behind hosting this kind of event? Tomas: In the last year, we have rolled out an incredible number of MySQL events worldwide – some targeted at developers that are new to MySQL and others for the MySQL savvy. At the MySQL Innovation Day, our first event of this kind,, we had a number of our key engineers presenting lightning talks delivering previews of key new features as well as discussing roadmap. Our goal is to keep an open dialogue with the MySQL community. In fact, we are hosting a two-day conference, another first, for the MySQL community called MySQL Connect on Sept. 29-30 in San Francisco. If you attended the MySQL Innovation Day and liked what we did, you are going to love MySQL Connect. We’ll have a lot more of our engineers and many users and community members presenting hour long sessions and hands on labs. Our engineers will be presenting new MySQL features as well offer previews of upcoming enhancements. Monica: What's the big take-away from today's MySQL Innovation Day? Tomas: I hope the most important takeaway for attendees was to see that Oracle has been driving, and continues to drive MySQL innovation with a steady stream of new great GA and Development Milestone releases. Monica: What were attendees most interested in? What feedback did they have? Tomas: Feedback from attendees was incredibly positive and encouraging. In particular, they liked the interaction with the MySQL engineers and were also excited about the new early access features in MySQL 5.6 and MySQL Cluster 7.3. In addition, sessions delivered by MySQL users like Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter were very well received. For example, Pinterest talked about using MySQL to scale from 0 to billions of page views/month, Twitter talked about “Scaling twitter with MySQL” and Facebook discussed the many options to implement MySQL master failover solutions. The presentations are already available for download while some of the session videos will be made available on the MySQL Innovation Day web page shortly. Monica: How would you distinguish the use of MySQL vs. Oracle Database? What key factors should customers consider? Tomas: MySQL and Oracle Database complement each other. They are very different products, best suited to different use cases. Customers can choose world-class solutions from Oracle to fulfill a variety of needs. MySQL is a great choice for enterprise web-based, custom and embedded apps. Oracle Database is the leading choice for enterprise packaged applications such as ERP, CRM as well as high-end data warehousing and business intelligence applications. Monica: What are the highlights of the current MySQL 5.6 Development Milestone Release and early access features for MySQL Cluster 7.3? Tomas: MySQL 5.6 development milestone release builds on MySQL 5.5 by improving: Optimizer for better Performance, Scalability Performance Schema for better instrumentation InnoDB for better transactional throughput Replication for higher availability, data integrity NoSQL options for more flexibility We announced some new early access features in MySQL 5.6, including binary log group commit. We also announced early access features in MySQL Cluster 7.3 including support for foreign key constraints. Monica: How do people get these releases? Tomas: You can access development milestone releases by going to: http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysqlThen select the “Development Release” tab. The MySQL Cluster 7.3 and other early access features can be downloaded at: http://labs.mysql.com Monica: What's coming up next for MySQL? Tomas: Our development team is working in overdrive, cranking out new features with community feedback. Don’t miss the MySQL Connect conference being held in San Francisco on Sept. 29 and 30th. My team and I will be there. I hope you can join us! Monica: Thank you for your time, Tomas. I look forward to seeing you at the MySQL Connect conference. To our followers, I hope you found this interview informative. I welcome your comments. Please stay tuned here for more updates on MySQL. Note: Monica Kumar is Senior Director of product marketing for Linux, Virtualization and MySQL at Oracle.

  Read the article

• Feedback on "market manipulation", a peripheral game mechanic for a satirical MMO

  - by BerndBrot

  This question asks for feedback on a specific game-mechanic. Since there is not one right feedback on a game mechanic, I tried to provide enough context and guidelines to still make it possible for users to rate answers and to accept an answer as the best answer (following these criteria from Writer.SE's meta website). Please comment if you have any suggestions on how I could improve the question in that regard. So, let's begin with the game itself and some of its elements which are relevant for this question. Context I'm working on a satirical, text-based multiplayer adventure and role-playing game set in modern-day London. The game resolves around the concept of sin and features a myriad of (venomous) allusions to all the things that go wrong in this world. Players can choose between character classes like bullshit artist (consultant), bankster, lawyer, mobster, celebrity, politician, etc. In order to complete the game, the player has to live so sinfully with regard to any of the seven deadly sins that a demon is willing to offer them a contract of sponsorship. On their quest to live a sinful live, characters explore more and more locations of modern-day London (on a GoogleMap), fight "monsters" like insurance sales agents or Jehovah's Witnesses, and complete quests, like building a PowerPoint presentation out of marketing buzz words or keeping up a number of substance abuse effects in order to progress on the gluttony path. Battles are turn based with both combatants having a deck of cards, with which they try to make their enemy give in to temptations of all sorts. Tempted enemies sometimes become contacts (an item drop mechanic), which can be exploited for various benefits, depending on their area of influence (finance, underworld, bureaucracy, etc.), level of influence, and kind of sway that the player has over them (bribed, seduced, threatened, etc.) Once a contract has been exploited, the player loses that contact. Most actions require turns. Turns are limited, but refill each day. Criteria A number of peripheral game mechanics are supposed to represent real world abuses and mischief in a humorous way integrate real world data and events to strengthen the feeling of relevance of the game's humor with regard to real world problems add fun ways of interacting with other players add ways for players to express themselves through game-play Market manipulation is one such peripheral game mechanic and should fulfill all of these goals. Market manipulation This is my initial design of the mechanic: Players can enter the London Stock Exchange (LSE) (without paying a turn) LSE displays the stock prices of a number of companies in industries like weapons or tobacco as well as some derivatives based on wheat and corn. The stock prices are calculated based on the actual stock prices of these companies and derivatives (in real time) any market manipulations that were conducted by the players any market corrections of the system Players can buy and sell shares with cash, a resource in the game, at current in-game market value (without paying a turn). Players can manipulate the market, i.e. let the price of a share either rise or fall, by some amount, over a certain period of time. Manipulating the market requires 1 turn A contact in the financial sector (see above). The higher the level of influence of the contact, the stronger the effect of the manipulation on the stock price, and/or the shorter it takes for the manipulation to manifest itself. Market manipulation also adds a crime to the player's record. (There are a multitude of ways to take care of that, but it is still another "cost" of market manipulations.) The system continuously corrects market manipulations by letting the in-game prices converge towards their real world counterparts at a rate of 2% of the difference between the two per hour. Because of this market correction mechanism, pushing up prices (and screwing down prices) becomes increasingly difficult the higher (lower) the price already is. Whenever food prices reach a certain level, in-game stories are posted about hunger catastrophes happening somewhere far, far away (maybe with links to real world news stories). Whenever a player sells a certain number of shares with a sufficiently high margin, they are mentioned in that day's in-game financial news. Since the number of stock options is very limited, players will inevitably collide in their efforts to manipulate the market in their favor. Hopefully, it will also be a fun side-arena for guilds and covenants to fight each other. Question(s) What do you think of this mechanism given the criteria for peripheral game mechanics that I specified for my game? Do you have any ideas how the mechanic could be improved with regard to these criteria (or otherwise)? Could it be improved to allow for more expressive game-play, or involve an allusion to some other real world madness (like short selling, leveraging, or some other banking magic)? Are there any game-theoretic problems with this mechanic, like maybe certain dominant individual strategies that, collectively, lead to every player profiting and thus eliminating the idea of market manipulation PVP? Also, if you like (or dislike) this question, feel free to participate in the discussion on GDSE meta: "Should we be more lax with regard to SE's question/answer format to make game design questions possible?"

  Read the article

• SQLAuthority News – Community Tech Days – A SQL Legends in Ahmedabad – December 11, 2010

  - by pinaldave

  Ahmedabad is going to be fortunate city again on December 11. We are going to have SQL Server Legends present at the prestigious event of Community Tech Days in Ahmedabad. The venue details are as following: H K Hall, H K College Campus, Near Handloom House, Opp. Natraj Cinema, Ashram Road, Ahmedabad – 380009 Click here to Registration for the event. Agenda of the event is as following. 10:15am – 10:30am     Welcome – Pinal Dave 10:30am – 11:15am     SQL Tips and Tricks for .NET Developers by Jacob Sebastian 11:15am – 11:30am     Tea Break 11:30am – 12:15pm     Best Database Practice for SharePoint Server by Pinal Dave 12:15pm – 01:00pm     Self Service Business Intelligence by Rushabh Mehta 01:00pm – 02:00pm     Lunch 02:00pm – 02:45pm     Managing your future, Managing your time by Vinod Kumar 02:45pm – 03:30pm     Windows Azure News and Introducing Storage Services by Mahesh Devjibhai Dhola 03:30pm – 03:45pm     Tea Break 03:45pm – 04:30pm     Improve Silverlight application with Threads and MEF by Prabhjot Singh Bakshi 04:30pm – 04:45pm     Thank you – Mahesh Devjibhai Dhola Ahmedabad considers itself extremely fortunate when there are SQL Legends presenting on various subjects in front of community. Here is brief introduction about them in my own words. (Their names are in order of the agenda). 1) Jacob Sebastian (SQL Server MVP) – This person needs no introduction. Every developer and programmer in Ahmedabad and India knows him. He is the one man who is founder of various community-related ideas like SQL Challenges, SQL Quiz and BeyondRelational. He works with me on all the community-related activities; we are extremely good friends. 2) Rushabh Mehta (SQL Server MVP) – If you use SQL Server – you know this man. He is the President of SQL Server of Professional Association (PASS) and one of the leading Business Intelligence (BI) Experts renowned in the world. He has blessed Ahmedabad once before and now doing once again this year. 3) Vinod Kumar (Microsoft Evangelist – SQL Server & BI) – Ahmedabad remembers him very well. During his last visit to Ahmedabad, a fight had almost broke outside the hall amidst the rush to listen him. There were more people standing and listening to him than those who were seated. This is one man Ahmedabad will never forget. 4) and Myself. I will not rate myself in the league of abovementioned experts, but I must say that I am fortunate to have friends like those above. We also have two strong .NET presenters – Mahesh and Prabhjot. During this event, there will be plenty of giveaways, lots of fun, demos and pure technical talk, specifically no marketing and promotion – just pure technical talk. The most interesting part is that all the SQL Legends – Jacob, Rushabh and Vinod are for sure presenting on SQL Server but with a twist. Jacob – He is going to talk about .NET and SQL – Optimization Techniques Rushabh – He is going to talk about SQL and BI – Self Service BI Vinod – He is going to talk about professional development of developers – Managing Time Pinal – Best Practices for SharePoint Database Administrators – SharePoint DBA – I have presented this session earlier. I promise this event is going to be one of the best events held ever. You can read about the earlier event over here. ?Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: About Me, MVP, Pinal Dave, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLAuthority News, T SQL, Technology

  Read the article

• &ldquo;My life at Oracle&rdquo;

  - by cristian.condurache(at)oracle.com

  Hello everybody! My name is Eva and I currently work in Oracle Italy as Sales Programs Manager for the Technology Sales organization. Since 2009, I also proudly represent the Oracle Education Foundation within my country as the Ambassador for Italy. My career path in this amazing company began 5 years ago as a fresh graduate: after various years studying abroad, in Germany and Ireland mainly, I was looking for a valuable and concrete opportunity which could fulfill my energetic spirit. I wanted to develop myself inside a stimulating and “fast” business environment.. and here came Oracle and I really couldn’t ask for anything better!  THE PARTNER EXPERIENCE The first department I had the chance to work into was the Alliances and Channels organization, where I had the opportunity to join a brilliant team of great and visionary guys. I began having the responsibility to analyze and rationalize the portfolio of Oracle business partners and to identify potential cross-area solutions, which had to be highlighted both on the local market and internationally: this ended up with the implementation of the “Partner Community” model, a business environment of selected Oracle partners, specialized on the different technology focus areas. This new concept was then recognized as an EMEA Best Practice and replicated internationally. Having the opportunity to strengthen day after day strategic relationships with several business partners and study the market positioning of their technology solutions, I was given the role to develop the “Oracle Partner Network Innovation Award” in Italy: the EMEA competition encouraging and rewarding proven and successful technology innovations, creating high value for our common customers and generating new business potential. Several Italian partner solutions won different prizes and I decided that it was worth collecting all those valuable projects, winners and short-listed, inside two specific books in order also to provide them an international market visibility: OPN Innovation Award Booklet 2007 and OPN Innovation Award Booklet 2008 Inside the Alliances and Channels department I really had the opportunity to do    amazing things, like for example working side-by-side with one of the most exceptional teams in Oracle I have ever worked with: the EMEA Recruitment Team. Together, in fact, we conceived a brand new business initiative for our partners, called “Oracle Campus Joint Program”. This program was awarded as an EMEA Best Practice and acknowledged by both Italian public institutions and press media. Italy   is currently running its 5th edition.   Briefly, the “Oracle Campus Joint Program” aims at facing the growing issue of lack of  technology competences and skills on the market. By identifying a specific technology area and developing an intensive 4-6 week Oracle University training course and by collaborating with important academic institutes, international “gurus” and professionals, our business partners are able to benefit from a pool of brilliant top talented young consultants and offer them a significant career opportunity. BUSINESS BUT NOT ONLY: THE NO-PROFIT EXPERIENCE OF ORACLE Currently my mission in Oracle is to continue driving the implementation of strategic business development and sales programs for the entire Oracle Technology stack, involving both partners and the end-customers. But as a completely distinguished role from the day-today business, I’m also honored to represent in Italy the charity global organization founded by Oracle - the Oracle Education Foundation - and drive its corporate citizenship and marketing programs. Oracle Education Foundation is an independent charitable organization funded by Oracle and is dedicated to helping students develop 21st century skills through project learning and the use of technology. It provides “ThinkQuest” as a free program to primary and secondary (K12) schools. Just some significant numbers: today 548,000 students/teachers in 47 countries use ThinkQuest and the Oracle Education Foundation partners with 40+ no-profit or government organizations globally. ABOUT MYSELF AND MY INTERESTS About myself…I’m very enthusiastic and positive, trying always to transform difficult issues in challenging opportunities. My day usually begins very early in the morning with running, swimming or when I need to collect some “zen” energies with a yoga session or better with a long walk with my dog. I definitely love animals and generally speaking I’m very keen on environmental issues and try, as much as I can, to carry out a healthy and “planet respectful” lifestyle. My thirst for knowledge pushed me some time ago to begin a new personal challenge: I decided to enroll, dedicating a good part of my free time, for a second university degree: I chose “Neuroeconomics”, an innovative academic path which combines psychology, economics, and neuroscience and studies how people make decisions and the role of the brain when people evaluate these decisions, categorizing risks and rewards and generally interacting with each other. I’ve been very glad to talk about my experience in this article, as working for Oracle is something very stimulating. This company ensures you the opportunity to face new challenges, work with highly talented people and be professionally highlighted also globally. Motivation, good results and innovation is always pursued, recognized and fully supported. Thanks and wish you all an amazing career! If you have any question please contact [email protected]. For our job opportunities, please look at http://campus.oracle.com.   Technorati Tags: EMEA,Oracle Partners,Oracle Campus,Oracle Education,experience,EMEA Recruitment Team

  Read the article

• Building a Distributed Commerce Infrastructure in the Cloud using Azure and Commerce Server

  - by Lewis Benge

  One of the biggest questions I routinely get asked is how scalable Commerce Server is. Of course the text book answer is the product has been around for 10 years, powers some of the largest e-Commerce websites in the world, so it scales horizontally extremely well. One argument however though is what if you can't predict the growth of demand required of your Commerce Platform, or need the ability to scale up during busy seasons such as Christmas for a retail environment but are hesitant on maintaining the infrastructure on a year-round basis? The obvious answer is to utilise the many elasticated cloud infrastructure providers that are establishing themselves in the ever-growing market, the problem however is Commerce Server is still product which has a legacy tightly coupled dependency on Windows and IIS components. Commerce Server 2009 codename "R2" however introduced to the concept of an n-tier deployment of Microsoft Commerce Server, meaning you are no longer tied to core objects API but instead have serializable Commerce Entity objects, and business logic allowing for Commerce Server to now be built into a WCF-based SOA architecture. Presentation layers no-longer now need to remain on the same physical machine as the application server, meaning you can now build the user experience into multiple-technologies and host them in multiple places – leveraging the transport benefits that a WCF service may bring, such as message queuing, security, and multiple end-points. All of this logic will still need to remain in your internal infrastructure, for two reasons. Firstly cloud based computing infrastructure does not support PCI security requirements, and secondly even though many of the legacy Commerce Server dependencies have been abstracted away within this version of the application, it is still not a fully supported to be deployed exclusively into the cloud. If you do wish to benefit from the scalability of the cloud however, you can still achieve a great Commerce Server and Azure setup by utilising both the Azure App Fabric in terms of the service bus, and authentication services and Windows Azure to host any online presence you may require. The architecture would be something similar to this: This setup would allow you to construct your Commerce Services as part of your on-site infrastructure. These services would contain all of the channels custom business logic, and provide the overall interface back into the underlying Commerce Server components. It would be recommended that services are constructed around the specific business domain of the application, which based on your business model would usually consist of separate services around Catalogue, Orders, Search, Profiles, and Marketing. The App Fabric service bus is then used to abstract and aggregate further the services, making them available to the cloud and subsequently secured by App Fabrics authentication services. These services are now available for consumption by any client, using any supported technology – not just .NET. Thus meaning you are now able to construct apps for IPhone, integrate with Java based POS Devices, and any many other potential uses. This aggregation is useful, and forms the basis of the further strategy around diversifying and enhancing the e-Commerce experience, but also provides the foundation for the scalability we want to gain from utilising a cloud-based application platform. The Windows Azure application platform is Microsoft solution to benefiting from the true economies of scale in terms of the elasticity of the cloud. Just before the launch of the Azure Platform – Domino's pizza actually managed to run their whole SuperBowl operation from the scalability of Windows Azure, and simply switching back to their traditional operation the next day with no residual infrastructure costs. The platform also natively can subscribe to services and messages exposed within the AppFabric service bus, making it an ideal solution to build and deploy a presentation layer which will need to support of scalable infrastructure – such as a high demand public facing e-Commerce portal, or a promotion element of a brand. Windows Azure has excellent support for ASP.NET, including its own caching providers meaning expensive operations such as catalogue queries can persist in memory on the application server, reducing the demand on internal infrastructure and prioritising it for more business critical operations such as receiving orders and processing payments. Windows Azure also supports other languages too, meaning utilising this approach you can technically build a Commerce Server presentation layer in Java, PHP, or Ruby – or equally in ASP.NET or Silverlight without having to change any of the underlying business or Commerce Server implementation. This SOA-style architecture is one of the primary differentiators for Commerce Server as a product in the e-Commerce market, and now with the introduction of a WCF capability in Commerce Server 2009/2009 R2 the opportunities for extensibility of the both the user experience, and integration into third parties, are drastically increased, all with no effect to the underlying channel logic. So if you are looking at deployment options for your e-Commerce application to help support demand in a cost effective way. I would highly recommend you consider looking at Windows Azure, and if you have any questions in-particular about this style of deployment, please feel free to get in touch!

  Read the article

• OPN Oracle ECM 10g R3 Implementation Boot Camp - (12-14/Abr/10)

  - by Claudia Costa

  É com entusiasmo que lhe anunciamos o bootcamp de Oracle ECM 10g R3 Implementation que irá realizar nos dias 12-14 de Abril  que abordará os tópicos abaixo descritos. Com o objectivo de ajudar os parceiros a desenvolver competências, a Oracle University e a Oracle Alliances&Channel, desenharam este bootcamp, compactando os conteúdos e reduzindo assim os custos. Preço por participante (3 dias) - 1.250 Eur + Iva  Oracle offers the most unified, usable enterprise content management platform in today's market. With centralized control across single or multiple repositories, common core functionality, and easily scalable content management capabilities, Oracle provides content management solutions for many content types and users-wherever they work in the enterprise.   The Oracle Enterprise Content Management (ECM) Implementation Boot Camp examines the fundamental concepts, techniques, and architecture of Oracle's ECM technologies. Join this training to learn how you can manage and maintain unstructured content   Target Audience:  The Oracle ECM Implementation Boot Camp is designed for architects, technical consultants, team/project leaders and functional consultants of our system integrator partners who want to ramp-up on ECM technology.   Contents:  The ECM Implementation Boot Camp is a three-day hands-on workshop, designed for Oracle Partners who are new to ECM, and will provide implementation instruction on the ECM technology offered by Oracle. The boot camp will: • Provide hands-on experience in implementing Oracle's truly unified, open and standard base ECM technology • Provide the strategic direction about Oracle's Fusion Middleware/Enterprise 2.0 and its role in composite application development • Expose broad set of Oracle's ECM technologies.   Objectives: The Oracle ECM Implementation Boot Camp is primarily focused on the Oracle's ECM offering to manage and maintain unstructured content and covers Universal Content Management (UCM), Image and Process Management (IPM), Universal Records Management (URM), and Information Rights Management (IRM):   Topics Covered • Introduction to Oracle UCM o UCM Overview o UCM Architecture Overview • Content Server and Document Management basics o Installation and Administration Skills § User and Security Admin § Configuration (metadata, DCLs, profiles, rules, etc.) § Workflow Admin § System Properties and Component Manager § Managing Subscriptions o Contributing Content § Browser form § WebDAV folder § Desktop Integration o Searching • Web Content Management o Site Studio • Universal Records Management • Information Right Management (IRM) • Image & Process Management (IPM) • Oracle Document Capture • Oracle eMail Archive Service. Labs • Content Server Installation • Use and Administration of Content Server • Introduction to Site Studio • Use and Administration of Records Manager Demo: The R&D Group and the New Patent Focus: Information Rights Management, Knowledge Management, Accounts Payable Image Automation, Imaging and Process Management Case Study Use Case 1: Enable City of Xalco to streamline internal processes by empowering city employees to quickly and efficiently manage and publish information on their employee intranet and eventually public Web site. Use Case 2: Help Acme & Co in archiving its goal is to become "paperless" by managing all of their company's business content in a central, Web-based repository. Acme's business content ranges from policies and procedures to Employee listings and marketing materials.   Agenda: Day 1 ·         ECM Overview & Content Server ·         ECM Overview ·         ECM Architecture and Installation ·         UCM and Digital Asset Management DEMO ·         Lab 1 - Content Server Installation ·         Lab 2 - Use and Administration of Content Server   Day 2 ·         Web Content Management ·         Lab 2 - Use and Administration of Content ·         Server (continued) ·         Introduction to Web Content Management ·         Lab 3 - Site Studio   Day 3 ·         URM/IRM/IPM ·         Introduction to Universal Records Management ·         Lab 4 - URM ·         Introduction to Information Rights Management ·         Information Rights Management DEMO ·         Introduction to Image and Process Management ·         Image and Process Management Demo ·         Oracle Document Capture ·         Oracle eMail Archive   Material needed for Bootcamp: This Boot camp requires attendees to provide their own laptops for this class. Attendee laptops must meet the following minimum hardware/software requirements: Hardware • RAM: 2GB RM minimum (1 GB RAM is not enough) • HDD: 15 GB free HDD space   Pre requistes: To ensure a valuable learning experience, participation in this boot camp requires completing the prerequisite courses and successfully passing the prerequisite assessment test that is mapped into the Oracle Enterprise Content Management Implementation Boot Camp guided learning path. At a minimum, participants with equivalent skills and background should review the guided learning path and successfully pass the prerequisite assessment test to ensure they possess the background necessary to benefit from participation in the boot Camp.   ---------------------------------------------------------------------   Para mais informações/inscrições, contacte: Mónica Pires  21 423 51 44 Horário e Local 9:30h - 12:30h e 14:00h - 17:00 ( 6 horas/dia )Oracle, Porto Salvo - Oeiras.

  Read the article

• Unique Business Value vs. Unique IT

  - by barry.perkins

  When the age of computing started, technology was new, exciting, full of potential and had a long way to grow. Vendor architectures were proprietary, and limited in function at first, growing in capability and complexity over time. There were few if any "standards", let alone "open standards" and the concepts of "open systems", and "open architectures" were far in the future. Companies employed intelligent, talented and creative people to implement the best possible solutions for their company. At first, those solutions were "unique" to each company. As time progressed, standards emerged, companies shared knowledge, business capability supplied by technology grew, and companies continued to expand their use of technology. Taking advantage of change required companies to struggle through periodic "revolutionary" change cycles, struggling through costly changes that were fraught with risk, resulted in solutions with an increasingly shorter half-life, and frequently required altering existing business processes and retraining employees and partner businesses. The pace of technological invention and implementation grew at an ever increasing rate, making the "revolutionary" approach based upon "proprietary" or "closed" architectures or technologies no longer viable. Concurrent with the advancement of technology, the rate of change in business increased, leading us to the incredibly fast paced, highly charged, and competitive global economy that we have today, where the most successful companies are companies that are good at implementing, leveraging and exploiting change. Fast forward to today, a world where dramatic changes in business and technology happen continually, a world where "evolutionary" change is crucial. Companies can no longer afford to build "unique IT", nor can they afford regular intervals of "revolutionary" change, with the associated costs and risks. Human ingenuity was once again up to the task, turning technology into a platform supporting business through evolutionary change, by employing "open": open standards; open systems; open architectures; and open solutions. Employing "open", enables companies to implement systems based upon technology, capability and standards that will evolve over time, providing a solid platform upon which a company can drive business needs, requirements, functions, and processes down into the technology, rather than exposing technology to the business, allowing companies to focus on providing "unique business value" rather than "unique IT". The big question! Does moving from "older" technology that no longer meets the needs of today's business, to new "open" technology require yet another "revolutionary change"? A "revolutionary" change with a short half-life, camouflaging reality with great marketing? The answer is "perhaps". With the endless options available to choose from, it is entirely possible to implement a solution that may work well today, but in 5 years time will become yet another albatross for the company to bear. Some solutions may look good today, solving a budget challenge by reducing cost, or solving a specific tactical challenge, but result in highly complex environments, that may be difficult to manage and maintain and limit the future potential of your business. Put differently, some solutions might push today's challenge into the future, resulting in a more complex and expensive solution. There is no such thing as a "1 size fits all" IT solution for business. If all companies implemented business solutions based upon technology that required, or forced the same business processes across all businesses in an industry, it would be extremely difficult to show competitive advantage through "unique business value". It would be equally difficult to "evolve" to meet or exceed business needs and keep up with today's rapid pace of change. How does one ensure that they do not jump from one trap directly into another? Or to put it positively, there are solutions available today that can address these challenges and issues. How does one ensure that the buying decision of today will serve the business well for years into the future? Intelligent & Informed decisions - "buying right" In a previous blog entry, we discussed the value of linking tactical to strategic The key is driving the focus to what is best for your business, handling today's tactical issues while also aligning with a roadmap/strategy that is tightly aligned with your strategic business objectives. When considering the plethora of possible options that provide various approaches to solving today's complex business problems, it is extremely important to ensure that vendors supplying those options, focus on what is best for your business, supplying sufficient information, providing adequate answers to questions, addressing challenges, issues, concerns and objections honestly and openly, and focus on supplying solutions that are tailored for, and deliver the most business value possible for your business. Here are a few questions to consider relative to the proposed options that should help ensure that today's solution doesn't become tomorrow's problem. Do the proposed solutions: Solve the problem(s) you are trying to address? Provide a solid foundation upon which to grow/enhance your business? Provide tactical gains that align with and enable your strategic business goals/objectives? Provide an infrastructure that can be leveraged with subsequent projects? Solve problems for the business overall, the lines of business, or just IT? Simplify your current environment Provide the basis for business: Efficiency Agility Clarity governance, risk, compliance real time business visibility and trend analysis Does your IT staff have the knowledge/experience to successfully manage the proposed systems once they are deployed in production? Done well, you will be presented with options tailored to your business, that enable you to drive the "unique business value" necessary to help your business stand out from others, creating a distinct competitive advantage, delivering what your customers need, when they need it, so you can attract new customers, new business, and grow top line revenue, all at a cost that provides a strong Return on Investment/Return on Assets. The net result is growth with managed cost providing significantly improved profit margin and shareholder value.

  Read the article

• World Record Oracle Business Intelligence Benchmark on SPARC T4-4

  - by Brian

  Oracle's SPARC T4-4 server configured with four SPARC T4 3.0 GHz processors delivered the first and best performance of 25,000 concurrent users on Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (BI EE) 11g benchmark using Oracle Database 11g Release 2 running on Oracle Solaris 10. A SPARC T4-4 server running Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition 11g achieved 25,000 concurrent users with an average response time of 0.36 seconds with Oracle BI server cache set to ON. The benchmark data clearly shows that the underlying hardware, SPARC T4 server, and the Oracle BI EE 11g (11.1.1.6.0 64-bit) platform scales within a single system supporting 25,000 concurrent users while executing 415 transactions/sec. The benchmark demonstrated the scalability of Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition 11g 11.1.1.6.0, which was deployed in a vertical scale-out fashion on a single SPARC T4-4 server. Oracle Internet Directory configured on SPARC T4 server provided authentication for the 25,000 Oracle BI EE users with sub-second response time. A SPARC T4-4 with internal Solid State Drive (SSD) using the ZFS file system showed significant I/O performance improvement over traditional disk for the Web Catalog activity. In addition, ZFS helped get past the UFS limitation of 32767 sub-directories in a Web Catalog directory. The multi-threaded 64-bit Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition 11g and SPARC T4-4 server proved to be a successful combination by providing sub-second response times for the end user transactions, consuming only half of the available CPU resources at 25,000 concurrent users, leaving plenty of head room for increased load. The Oracle Business Intelligence on SPARC T4-4 server benchmark results demonstrate that comprehensive BI functionality built on a unified infrastructure with a unified business model yields best-in-class scalability, reliability and performance. Oracle BI EE 11g is a newer version of Business Intelligence Suite with richer and superior functionality. Results produced with Oracle BI EE 11g benchmark are not comparable to results with Oracle BI EE 10g benchmark. Oracle BI EE 11g is a more difficult benchmark to run, exercising more features of Oracle BI. Performance Landscape Results for the Oracle BI EE 11g version of the benchmark. Results are not comparable to the Oracle BI EE 10g version of the benchmark. Oracle BI EE 11g Benchmark System Number of Users Response Time (sec) 1 x SPARC T4-4 (4 x SPARC T4 3.0 GHz) 25,000 0.36 Results for the Oracle BI EE 10g version of the benchmark. Results are not comparable to the Oracle BI EE 11g version of the benchmark. Oracle BI EE 10g Benchmark System Number of Users 2 x SPARC T5440 (4 x SPARC T2+ 1.6 GHz) 50,000 1 x SPARC T5440 (4 x SPARC T2+ 1.6 GHz) 28,000 Configuration Summary Hardware Configuration: SPARC T4-4 server 4 x SPARC T4-4 processors, 3.0 GHz 128 GB memory 4 x 300 GB internal SSD Storage Configuration: "> Sun ZFS Storage 7120 16 x 146 GB disks Software Configuration: Oracle Solaris 10 8/11 Oracle Solaris Studio 12.1 Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition 11g (11.1.1.6.0) Oracle WebLogic Server 10.3.5 Oracle Internet Directory 11.1.1.6.0 Oracle Database 11g Release 2 Benchmark Description Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (Oracle BI EE) delivers a robust set of reporting, ad-hoc query and analysis, OLAP, dashboard, and scorecard functionality with a rich end-user experience that includes visualization, collaboration, and more. The Oracle BI EE benchmark test used five different business user roles - Marketing Executive, Sales Representative, Sales Manager, Sales Vice-President, and Service Manager. These roles included a maximum of 5 different pre-built dashboards. Each dashboard page had an average of 5 reports in the form of a mix of charts, tables and pivot tables, returning anywhere from 50 rows to approximately 500 rows of aggregated data. The test scenario also included drill-down into multiple levels from a table or chart within a dashboard. The benchmark test scenario uses a typical business user sequence of dashboard navigation, report viewing, and drill down. For example, a Service Manager logs into the system and navigates to his own set of dashboards using Service Manager. The BI user selects the Service Effectiveness dashboard, which shows him four distinct reports, Service Request Trend, First Time Fix Rate, Activity Problem Areas, and Cost Per Completed Service Call spanning 2002 to 2005. The user then proceeds to view the Customer Satisfaction dashboard, which also contains a set of 4 related reports, drills down on some of the reports to see the detail data. The BI user continues to view more dashboards – Customer Satisfaction and Service Request Overview, for example. After navigating through those dashboards, the user logs out of the application. The benchmark test is executed against a full production version of the Oracle Business Intelligence 11g Applications with a fully populated underlying database schema. The business processes in the test scenario closely represent a real world customer scenario. See Also SPARC T4-4 Server oracle.com OTN Oracle Business Intelligence oracle.com OTN Oracle Database 11g Release 2 Enterprise Edition oracle.com OTN WebLogic Suite oracle.com OTN Oracle Solaris oracle.com OTN Disclosure Statement Copyright 2012, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Oracle and Java are registered trademarks of Oracle and/or its affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners. Results as of 30 September 2012.

  Read the article

• The Year 2010, The Year of Change

  As I look back on the year of 2010, I could have never predicted the wonderful changes that have occurred for my wife and me. The beginning of this year started out as the 9th year that we lived in South Florida, and my fourth year working for DentalPlans.com as a software engineer/network admin. About 3 months in to the year I was given an excellent opportunity to work for MovieTickets.com in the software engineering department. This opportunity allowed me to gain experience with jQuery due to one of my projects was to reengineering MovieTickets.com existing Marketing Panel System. About 3 months after working at MovieTickets.com, my wife and I were offered an opportunity of a life time. I was offered a Job in a large background\information security company located in Nashville, TN as software engineer II.  I must note that after living in South Florida for 9 years, my wife and I really had a strong distaste for the South Florida life style and the general attitude/culture of the area. Even though we shared a strong dislike for the area in which we lived I must admit that it was a tough decision to leave MovieTickets.com because I was really doing well and I made some great new friends like Chris Catto, and Tyson Nero.  In fact, they introduced me to Local Microsoft User Groups, and software development podcast like DotNetRocks.com and Hanselminutes.com.  In addition, we also went to my first Microsoft launch down in Miami for Visual Studios 2010. I must admit it was a cool experience.  I truly hope to keep in touch with them to see how their careers grow, and I know they will. I must admit I was nervous and excited to start the next chapter in our live as I started up the 26 foot U-Haul truck and got on the road for Nashville from Boca Raton. I knew that the change was going to lead to new adventures and new opportunities that I could never imagine.  As we pulled in to the long driveway of our rental house, we knew that this was the right place for my wife and I. Natalie, my wife had actually come up to Nashville and within one week of my job offer had set up a nice rental home for us to restart our lives in TN.  I must admit that the wonderful southern hospitality took a bit to get use to due to the type of people we were used to dealing with on a regular basis. Our first 2 months seemed like we were living a dream because of our new area and the wonderful people we live around. So far my new job is going really well and I really like the people on my team and department. In fact after 6 months I am now in charge of all application builds for our new deployment process. I am also leading up a push for setting up of continuous integration within our new build process.  In addition to starting my new job, I was also offered a position as an adjust instructor at ITT Tech teaching course like VB.net, Java Script, Ajax, and database development. So far I have really like teaching at the college level.  Information technology has really been great for my life so I am really glad to be able to give back. That is actually why I started DotNetBlocks. This site allows me to document things I have learned as I work with technology, and allows others to borrow from my experiences.  I hope that this site can help others as others have helped me get where I am. Finally, I am glade to report that I only have 4 classes left for my master’s degree at Capella University. I am proud to announce that I am still on track to graduate with 3.91 GPA.  This last class was really a test because I had a crazy idea that I could work full time as a software engineer, teach two college courses as a first time teacher and also take an advanced masters class in application architecture. I have no idea how I actually survived, but I am really surprised how well I actually did. I was invited back to reach again at ITT Tech, and I passed my masters class with an “A”.  I have decided to take this next term off from my master’s program so that I do not get burned out.  Also, so that my new current employer will pay for more of my education, tuition reimbursement is an awesome benefit. This was my year 2010, how was yours?

  Read the article

• BPM Suite 11gR1 Released

  - by Manoj Das

  This morning (April 27th, 2010), Oracle BPM Suite 11gR1 became available for download from OTN and eDelivery. If you have been following our plans in this area, you know that this is the release unifying BEA ALBPM product, which became Oracle BPM10gR3, with the Oracle stack. Some of the highlights of this release are: BPMN 2.0 modeling and simulation Web based Process Composer for BPMN and Rules authoring Zero-code environment with full access to Oracle SOA Suite’s rich set of application and other adapters Process Spaces – Out-of-box integration with Web Center Suite Process Analytics – Native process cubes as well as integration with Oracle BAM You can learn more about this release from the documentation. Notes about downloading and installing Please note that Oracle BPM Suite 11gR1 is delivered and installed as part of SOA 11.1.1.3.0, which is a sparse release (only incremental patch). To install: Download and install SOA 11.1.1.2.0, which is a full release (you can find the bits at the above location) Download and install SOA 11.1.1.3.0 During configure step (using the Fusion Middleware configuration wizard), use the Oracle Business Process Management template supplied with the SOA Suite11g (11.1.1.3.0) If you plan to use Process Spaces, also install Web Center 11.1.1.3.0, which also is delivered as a sparse release and needs to be installed on top of Web Center 11.1.1.2.0 Some early feedback We have been receiving very encouraging feedback on this release. Some quotes from partners are included below: “I just attended a preview workshop on BPM Studio, Oracle's BPMN 2.0 tool, held by Clemens Utschig Utschig from Oracle HQ. The usability and ease to get started are impressive. In the business view analysts can intuitively start modeling, then developers refine in their own, more technical view. The BPM Studio sets itself apart from pure play BPMN 2.0 tools by being seamlessly integrated inside a holistic SOA / BPM toolset: BPMN models are placed in SCA-Composites in SOA Suite 11g. This allows to abstract away the complexities of SOA integration aspects from business process aspects. For UIs in BPMN tasks, you have the richness of ADF 11g based Frontends. With BPM Studio we architects have a new modeling and development IDE that gives us interesting design challenges to grasp and elaborate, since many things BPMN 2.0 are different from good ol' BPEL. For example, for simple transformations, you don't use BPEL "assign" any more, but add the transformation directly to the service call. There is much less XPath involved. And, there is no translation from model to BPEL code anymore, so the awkward process model to BPEL roundtrip, which never really worked as well as it looked on marketing slides, is obsolete: With BPMN 2.0 "the model is the code". Now, these are great times to start the journey into BPM! Some tips: Start Projects smoothly, with initial processes being not overly complex and not using the more esoteric areas of BPMN, to manage the learning path and to stay successful with each iteration. Verify non functional requirements by conducting performance and load tests early. As mentioned above, separate all technical integration logic into SOA Suite or Oracle Service Bus. And - share your experience!” Hajo Normann, SOA Architect - Oracle ACE Director - Co-Leader DOAG SIG SOA   "Reuse of components across the Oracle 11G Fusion Middleware stack, like for instance a Database Adapter, is essential. It improves stability and predictability of the solution. BPM just is one of the components plugging into the stack and reuses all other components." Mr. Leon Smiers, Oracle Solution Architect, Capgemini   “I had the opportunity to follow a hands-on workshop held by Clemens for Oracle partners and I was really impressed of the overall offering of BPM11g. BPM11g allows the execution of BPMN 2.0 processes, without having to transform/translate them first to BPEL in order to be executable. The fact that BPMN uses the same underlying service infrastructure of SOA Suite 11g has a lot of benefits for us already familiar with SOA Suite 11g. BPMN is just another SCA component within a SCA composite and can (re)use all the existing components like Rules, Human Workflow, Adapters and Mediator. I also like the fact that BPMN runs on the same service engine as BPEL. By that all known best practices for making a BPEL  process reliable are valid for BPMN processes as well. Last but not least, BPMN is integrated into the superior end-to-end tracing of SOA Suite 11g. With BPM11g, Oracle offers a very competitive product which will have a big effect on the IT market. Clemens and Jürgen: Thanks for the great workshop! I’m really looking forward to my first project using Oracle BPM11g!” Guido Schmutz, Technology Manager / Oracle ACE Director for Fusion Middleware and SOA, Company:  Trivadis Some earlier feedback were summarized in this post.

  Read the article

• JavaOne Afterglow by Simon Ritter

  - by JuergenKress

  Last week was the eighteenth JavaOne conference and I thought it would be a good idea to write up my thoughts about how things went. Firstly thanks to Yoshio Terada for the photos, I didn't bother bringing a camera with me so it's good to have some pictures to add to the words. Things kicked off full-throttle on Sunday.  We had the Java Champions and JUG leaders breakfast, which was a great way to meet up with a lot of familiar faces and start talking all things Java.  At midday the show really started with the Strategy and Technical Keynotes.  This was always going to be tougher job than some years because there was no big shiny ball to reveal to the audience.  With the Java EE 7 spec being finalised a few months ago and Java SE 8, Java ME 8 and JDK8 not due until the start of next year there was not going to be any big announcement.  I thought both keynotes worked really well each focusing on the things most important to Java developers: Strategy One of the things that is becoming more and more prominent in many companies marketing is the Internet of Things (IoT).  We've moved from the conventional desktop/laptop environment to much more mobile connected computing with smart phones and tablets.  The next wave of the internet is not just billions of people connected, but 10s or 100s of billions of devices connected to the network, all generating data and providing much more precise control of almost any process you can imagine.  This ties into the ideas of Big Data and Cloud Computing, but implementation is certainly not without its challenges.  As Peter Utzschneider explained it's about three Vs: Volume, Velocity and Value.  All these devices will create huge volumes of data at very high speed; to avoid being overloaded these devices will need some sort of processing capabilities that can filter the useful data from the redundant.  The raw data then needs to be turned into useful information that has value.  To make this happen will require applications on devices, at gateways and on the back-end servers, all very tightly integrated.  This is where Java plays a pivotal role, write once, run everywhere becomes essential, having nine million developers fluent in the language makes it the defacto lingua franca of IoT.  There will be lots more information on how this will become a reality, so watch this space. Technical How do we make the IoT a reality, technically?  Using the game of chess Mark Reinhold, with the help of people like John Ceccarelli, Jasper Potts and Richard Bair, showed what you could do.  Using Java EE on the back end, Java SE and JavaFX on the desktop and Java ME Embedded and JavaFX on devices they showed a complete end-to-end demo. This was really impressive, using 3D features from JavaFX 8 (that's included with JDK8) to make a 3D animated Duke chess board.  Jasper also unveiled the "DukePad" a home made tablet using a Raspberry Pi, touch screen and accelerometer. Although the Raspberry Pi doesn't have earth shattering CPU performance (about the same level as a mid 1990s Pentium), it does have really quite good GPU performance so the GUI works really well.  The plans are all open sourced and available here.  One small, but very significant announcement was that Java SE will now be included with the NOOB and Raspbian Linux distros provided by the Raspberry Pi foundation (these can be found here).  No more hassle having to download and install the JDK after you've flashed your SD card OS image.  The finale was the Raspberry Pi powered chess playing robot.  Really very, very cool.  I talked to Jasper about this and he told me each of the chess pieces had been 3D printed and then he had to use acetone to give them a glossy finish (not sure what his wife thought of him spending hours in the kitchen in a gas mask!)  The way the robot arm worked was very impressive as it did not have any positioning data (like a potentiometer connected to each motor), but relied purely on carefully calibrated timings to get the arm to the right place.  Having done things like this myself in the past I know how easy it is to find a small error gets magnified into very big mistakes. Here's some pictures from the keynote: The "Dukepad" architecture Nice clear perspex case so you can see the innards. The very nice 3D chess set.  Maya's obviously a great tool. Read the full article here. WebLogic Partner Community For regular information become a member in the WebLogic Partner Community please visit: http://www.oracle.com/partners/goto/wls-emea ( OPN account required). If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center. Blog Twitter LinkedIn Mix Forum Wiki Technorati Tags: Simon Ritter,Java One,OOW,Oracle OpenWorld,WebLogic,WebLogic Community,Oracle,OPN,Jürgen Kress

  Read the article

• XNA Notes 005

  - by George Clingerman

  Another week and another crazy amount of activity going on in the XNA community. I’m fairly certain I missed over half of it. In fact, if I am missing things, make sure to email me and I’ll try and make sure I catch it next week! ([email protected]). Also, if you’ve got any advice, things you like/don’t like about the way these XNA Notes are going let me know. I always appreciate feedback (currently spammers are leaving me the nicest comments so you guys have work to do!) Without further ado, here’s this week’s notes! Time Critical XNA News The XNA Team Blob reminds us that February 7th is the last day to submit XNA 3.1 games to peer review! http://blogs.msdn.com/b/xna/archive/2011/01/31/7-days-left-to-submit-xna-gs-3-1-games-on-app-hub.aspx XNA MVPS Chris Williams kicks off the marketing campaign for our book http://geekswithblogs.net/cwilliams/archive/2011/01/28/143680.aspx Catalin Zima posts the comparison cheat sheet for why Angry Birds is different than Chickens Can’t Fly http://www.amusedsloth.com/2011/02/comparison-cheat-sheet-for-chickens-cant-fly-and-angry-birds/ Jim Perry congratulates the developers selected by Game Developer Magazine for Best Xbox LIVE Indie Games of 2010 http://machxgames.com/blog/?p=24 @NemoKrad posts his XNAKUUG talks for all to enjoy http://twitter.com/NemoKrad/statuses/33142362502864896 http://xna-uk.net/blogs/randomchaos/archive/2011/02/03/xblig-uk-2011-january-amp-february-talk.aspx George  (that’s me!) preps for his XNA talk coming up on the 8th http://twitter.com/clingermangw/statuses/32669550554124288 http://www.portlandsilverlight.net/Meetings/Details/15 XNA Developers FireFly posts the last tutorial in his XNA Tower Defense tutorial series http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/p/26442/451460.aspx#451460 http://xnatd.blogspot.com/2011/01/tutorial-14-polishing-game.html @fredericmy posts the main difference when porting a game from Windows Phone 7 to Xbox 360 http://fairyengine.blogspot.com/2011/01/main-differences-when-porting-game-from.html @ElementCy creates a pretty rad video of a MineCraft type terrain created using XNA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Waw1f7wnl9I Andrew Russel gets the first XNA badge on gamedev.stackexchange http://twitter.com/_AndrewRussell/statuses/32322877004972032 http://gamedev.stackexchange.com/badges?tab=tags And his funding for ExEn has passed $7000 only $3000 to go http://twitter.com/_AndrewRussell/statuses/33042412804771840 Subodh Pushpak blogs about his Windows Phone 7 XNA talk http://geekswithblogs.net/subodhnpushpak/archive/2011/02/01/windows-phone-7-silverlight--xna-development-talk.aspx Slyprid releases the latest version of Transmute and needs more people to test http://twitter.com/slyprid/statuses/32452488418299904 http://forgottenstarstudios.com/ SpynDoctorGames celebrates the 1 year anniversary of Your Doodles Are Bugged! Congrats! http://twitter.com/SpynDoctorGames/statuses/32511689068908544 Noogy (creator of Dust the Elysian Tail) prepares his conversion to XNA 4.0 http://twitter.com/NoogyTweet/statuses/32522008449253376 @philippedasilva posts about the Indiefreaks Game Framework v0.2.0.0 Input management system http://twitter.com/philippedasilva/statuses/32763393957957632 http://indiefreaks.com/2011/02/02/behind-smart-input-system-feature/ Mommy’s Best Games debates what to do about High Scores with their new update http://mommysbest.blogspot.com/2011/02/high-score-shake-up.html @BinaryTweedDeej want to know if there’s anything the community needs to make XNA games for the PC. Give him some feedback! http://twitter.com/BinaryTweedDeej/status/32895453863354368 @mikebmcl promises to write us all a book (I can’t wait to read it!) http://twitter.com/mikebmcl/statuses/33206499102687233 @werezompire is going to live, LIVE, thanks to all the generosity and support from the community! http://twitter.com/werezompire/statuses/32840147644977153 Xbox LIVE Indie Games (XBLIG) Making money in Xbox 360 indie game development. Is it possible? http://www.bitmob.com/articles/making-money-in-xbox-360-indie-game-development-is-it-possible @AlejandroDaJ posts some thoughts abut the bitmob article http://twitter.com/AlejandroDaJ/statuses/31068552165330944 http://www.apathyworks.com/blog/view.php?id=00215 Kobun gets my respect as an XBLIG champion. I’m not sure who Kobun is, but if you’ve every read through the comment sections any time Kotaku writes about XBLIGs you’ll see a lot of confusion, disinformation in there. Kobun has been waging a secret war battling that lack of knowledge and he does it well. Also he’s running a pretty kick ass site for Xbox LIVE Indie Game reviews http://xboxindies.teamkobun.com/ @radiangames releases his last Xbox LIVE Indie Game...for now http://bit.ly/gMK6lE Playing Avaglide with the Kinect controller http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UqAYbHww53o http://www.joystiq.com/2011/01/30/kinect-hacks-take-to-the-skies-with-avaglide/ Luke Schneider of Radiangames interviewed in Edge magazine http://www.next-gen.biz/features/radiangames-venture Digital Quarters posts thoughts on why XBLIG’s online requirement kills certain genres http://digitalquarters.blogspot.com/2011/02/thoughts-why-xbligs-online-requirement.html Mommy’s Best Games shares the news that several XBLIGs were featured in the March 2011 issue of Famitsu 360 http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/p/33455/451487.aspx#451487 NaviFairy continues with his Indie-Game-A-Day http://gaygamer.net/2011/02/indie_game_a_day_epic_dungeon.html http://gaygamer.net/2011/02/indie_game_a_day_break_limit_r.html and more every day...that’s kind of the point! Keep your eye on this series! VVGTV continues with it’s awesome reviews/promotions for XBLIGs http://vvgtv.com/ http://vvgtv.com/2011/02/03/iredia-atrams-secret-xblig-review-2/ http://vvgtv.com/2011/02/02/poopocalypse-coming-soon-to-xblig/ ….and even more, you get the point. Magicka is an Indie Game doing really well on Steam AND it’s made using XNA http://www.magickagame.com/ http://twitter.com/Magickagame/statuses/32712762580799488 GameMarx reviews Antipole http://www.gamemarx.com/reviews/73/antipole-is-vvvvvvery-good.aspx Armless Octopus review Alpha Squad http://www.armlessoctopus.com/2011/01/28/xbox-indie-review-alpha-squad/ An interesting article about Kodu that Jim Perry found http://twitter.com/MachXGames/statuses/32848044105924608 http://www.develop-online.net/news/36915/10-year-old-Jordan-makes-games-The-UK-needs-more-like-her XNA Game Development Sgt. Conker posts about the Natur beta, a new book and whether you can make money with XBLIG http://www.sgtconker.com/ http://www.sgtconker.com/2011/01/a-new-book-on-the-block-and-a-new-natur-beta/ http://www.sgtconker.com/2011/01/making-money-in-xbox-360-indie-game-development-is-it-possible/ Tips for setting up SVN http://bit.ly/fKxgFh @bsimser found tons of royalty free music and soundfx for your XNA Games http://twitter.com/bsimser/statuses/31426632933711872 Post on the new features in the next Sunburn Editor http://www.synapsegaming.com/blogs/fivesidedbarrel/archive/2011/01/28/new-editor-features-prefabs-components-and-more.aspx @jasons_novaleaf posts source code for light pre-pass optimizations for #xna http://twitter.com/jasons_novaleaf/statuses/33348855403642880 http://jcoluna.wordpress.com/2011/02/01/xna-4-0-light-pre-pass-optimization-round-one/ I’ve been learning about doing an A.I. for turn based games and this article was a great resource. http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/1535/designing_ai_algorithms_for_.php?print=1

  Read the article

• Oracle’s Web Experience Management

  - by Christie Flanagan

  Today’s guest post on Oracle’s Web Experience Management comes from a member of our WebCenter Evangelist team, Noël Jaffré, a Principal Technologist based in France.Oracle’s Web Experience Management (WEM) solution enables organizations to optimize the online channel for driving marketing and customer experience management success. It empowers business users to manage the web presence and create rich and engaging online experiences for customers and prospects. Oracle's WEM platform provides a framework to simplify the integration of Oracle, third-party and custom-built applications. This framework essentially allows the creation and integration of applications using one single business interface called the WEM interface. It includes the following: Single sign-on access control for all integrated applications using the Central Authentication Service (CAS) component. A single centralized administration window for user, role, and native applications management including site management. Community server management, gadget server management as well as management for partner integrated technologies. A Representational State Transfer (REST) API for accessing WebCenter Sites data. REST services are supported on both Oracle WebCenter Sites and Oracle WebCenter Sites Satellite Server to leverage the satellite server cache. All REST requests are cached for web consuming applications as well for the high performance delivery of native applications on the mobile channel. Oracle WebCenter Sites’ Web Experience Management environment enables organizations to deliver a compelling online experience to customers by simplifying the deployment and management of sophisticated and engaging websites. The WebCenter Sites platform automates the entire process of managing web content including: Authoring:  Business users can easily contribute and manage web content in real-time, with intuitive interfaces and drag-and-drop content authoring and layout capabilities designed for the non-technical user. Contextual Content Targeting: Marketers are empowered to create and manage targeted campaigns with relevant recommendations and promotions based on the context of the session of the visitor such as his or her navigation history, user profile, language, location or other information shared during the visitor session. Content Publishing and Deployment: It offers advanced multi-site management capabilities for departmental or regional sites, as well as strong multi-lingual and multi-locale content management. The remote satellite server caching infrastructure provides high-performance, distributed caching, tuned to deliver high-volume, targeted and multi-lingual sites. Analytics and Optimization: Business users and marketers have the ability to measure the effectiveness of their online content and campaigns at a granular level. Editors and marketers can immediately determine whether a given article or promotion is relevant to a particular customer segment. User-generated Content: Marketers can enable blogs, comments, rating and reviews on the website.  All comments and reviews posted to the website can be moderated from the administrator interface either manually or automatically using filters, whitelists, blacklists or community based moderation. Personalized Gadget Dashboards:  Site managers can deploy gadgets, small applications using web content, individually or as part of dashboards containing multiple gadgets.  These gadget dashboards enable site visitors to create their own “MyPage” on a given site where they can select and customize the gadgets that the site administrator has made available.  Any gadget that conforms to the iGoogle/OpenSocial standard can be made available to site visitors, or they can be created within the WEM interface. Oracle's WEM platform also provides a unique environment for the delivery of a rich, multichannel online experience for site visitors through its advanced management modules for mobile. With Oracle’s WEM solution, it’s easy to control branding and deliver a consistent message while repurposing web content for publication to mobile devices, kiosks and much more. This distinctive approach provides: HTML5 Delivery: HTML5 delivery which includes native support for adaptive design that responds to the user’s computer screen resolution and orientation. The approach is less driven by the particular hardware and more driven by the user’s interactions with the device. In other words, this approach takes both the screen interactions (either cursor or touch) and screen sizes and orientation into consideration. A Unique Native Mobile Extension Environment for Contributors: From the WEM interface, a contributor can directly manage their mobile channel, using the tooling already in place for driving the traditional web presence. This includes the mobile presentation, as well as mobile insite editing, drag and drop page layout, and in-context recommendations and personalization. Optimized REST APIs for High Performance Content Delivery on Native Mobile Device Applications: WebCenter Sites’ REST API uses the underlying HTTP methods (GET, POST, PUT, DELETE) to interact with resources. Resources support two types of input and output formats -- XML and JSON. REST calls are customizable to optimize the interactions between the content repositories and the client applications. Caching is essential to decrease network loads and improve overall reliability and usability of the applications and user interactions. REST results are cached through the highly efficient Oracle WebCenter Sites caching architecture.

  Read the article

• Calling All Agile Customers-Share Your Stories at the Upcoming PLM Summit

  - by Terri Hiskey

  Now that we've closed the door on another Oracle OpenWorld, planning is in full swing for the next PLM Summit, taking place February 4-6, 2013 in San Francisco, in conjunction with the Oracle Value Chain Summit. This event is a must-attend for all Agile PLM customers. We will be holding five tracks with over forty Agile PLM-focused sessions covering a range of topics and industries. If you'd like to be notified once registration is live for this event, be sure to sign up at www.oracle.com/goto/vcs. CALL FOR PRESENTATIONS: We are looking for some fresh, new customer stories to share with attendees. Read below for descriptions of the five tracks, and the suggested topics that we'd like to hear from customers. If you are interested in presenting at the PLM Summit (and getting a FREE pass to attend if your presentation is accepted!) send me an email at terri.hiskey-AT-oracle.com with: Your proposed session title and the track your session fits into 3-5 bullets of takeaways that attendees will get from your presentation Your complete contact information including name, title, company, telephone number and email The deadline for this call for presentations is Thursday, November 15, so get your submission in soon! PLM Track #1:  Product Insights and Best Practices This track will provide executive attendees and line of business managers with an overview of how Agile PLM has been deployed and used at customers to enable and manage critical product-related business processes including enterprise quality and supplier management, compliance, product cost management, portfolio management, commercialization and software lifecycle management. These sessions will also provide details around how to manage the development and rollout of the solutions and how to achieve and track value. Possible session topics: Software Lifecycle Management Enterprise Quality Management New Product Development Integrated Business Planning ECO effectivity planning Rapid Commercialization             Manage the Design to Release Process for Complex Configured Products PLM for Life Sciences Companies I (Compliant Data Set) PLM for Life Sciences Companies II (eMDR, UDI) Discrete CPG – Private Label Mgmt Cost Management and Strategic Sourcing IP Mgmt in the Semiconductor Industry Implementing the Enterprise Training Record using Agile PLM PLM Track #2: Product Deep Dives & Demos This track is aimed at line of business  and IT managers who would like to understand the benefits of expanding their PLM footprint. The sessions in this track will provide attendees with an up-close and in-depth look Agile PLM’s newer and exciting applications, including analytics and innovation management, and will detail features and functionality that are available in the latest version of Agile PLM Possible session topics: Oracle Product Lifecycle Analytics Integrating PLM with Engineering and Supply Chain Systems Streamline PLM Design to Manufacturing Processes with AutoVue Visualization Solutions         Achieve Environmental Compliance (REACH and ROHS) with Agile Product Governance & Compliance PIM Deep Dive Achieving Integrated Change Control with Agile PLM and E-Business Suite Deploying PLM at Small and Midsize Enterprises Enhancing Oracle PQM w/APQP and 8D functionality Advanced Roles and Privileges – Enabling ITAR Model Unit Effectivity Implementing REACH with 9.3.2 Deploying Job Functions, Functional Teams in 9.3.2 to Improve Your Approval Matrix PLM Track #3: Administration & Integrations This track will provide sessions for Agile administrators, managers and daily Agile PLM users who are preparing to upgrade or looking to extend the use of their current PLM implementation through AIA and process extensions. It will include deeper conversation about Agile PLM features and best practices on managing an Agile PLM infrastructure. Possible session topics: Expand the Value of your Agile Investment with Innovative Process Extension Ideas Ensuring Implementation & Upgrade Success Ensure the Integrity and Accuracy of Product Data Across the Enterprise              Maximize the Benefits of an Integrated Architecture with AIA Integrating your PLM Implementation with ERP               Infrastructure Optimization Expanding Your PLM Implementation PLM Administrator Open Forum Q&A/Discussion FDA Validation Best Practices Best Practices for Managing a large Agile Deployment: Clustering, Load Balancing and Firewalls PLM Track #4: Agile PLM for Process This track is aimed at attendees interested in or currently using Agile PLM for Process. The sessions in this track will go over new features and functionality available in the newest version of PLM for Process and will give attendees an overview on how PLM for Process is being used to manage critical business processes such as formulation, recipe and specification management Possible session topics: PLM for Process Strategy, Roadmap and Update New Product Development and Introduction Effective Product Supplier Collaboration             Leverage Agile Formulation and Compliance to Manage Cost, Compliance, Quality, Labeling and Nutrition Menu Management Innovation Data Management Food Safety/ Introduction of P4P Quality Mgmt PLM Track #5: Agile PLM and Innovation Management This track consists of five sessions, and is for attendees interested in learning more about Oracle’s Agile Innovation Management, an exciting new addition to the Agile PLM application family that redefines the industry’s scope of product lifecycle management. Oracle’s innovation solutions enable companies to collaborate in a focused way among various functional groups (marketing, sales, operations, engineering/R&D and sourcing), combining insights of customer needs/requirements, competition, available technologies, alternate design scenarios and portfolio constraints to deliver what customers truly value. The results are better products, higher margins, greater efficiencies, more satisfied customers and the increased ability to continuously innovate. Possible session topics: Product Innovation Management Solution Overview Product Requirements & Ideation Management Concept Design Management Product Lifecycle Portfolio Management Innovation as a Competitive Differentiator

  Read the article

• Create a Social Community of Trust Along With Your Federal Digital Services Governance

  - by TedMcLaughlan

  The Digital Services Governance Recommendations were recently released, supporting the US Federal Government's Digital Government Strategy Milestone Action #4.2 to establish agency-wide governance structures for developing and delivering digital services. Figure 1 - From: "Digital Services Governance Recommendations" While extremely important from a policy and procedure perspective within an Agency's information management and communications enterprise, these recommendations only very lightly reference perhaps the most important success enabler - the "Trusted Community" required for ultimate usefulness of the services delivered. By "ultimate usefulness", I mean the collection of public, transparent properties around government information and digital services that include social trust and validation, social reach, expert respect, and comparative, standard measures of relative value. In other words, do the digital services meet expectations of the public, social media ecosystem (people AND machines)? A rigid governance framework, controlling by rules, policies and roles the creation and dissemination of digital services may meet the expectations of direct end-users and most stakeholders - including the agency information stewards and security officers. All others who may share comments about the services, write about them, swap or review extracts, repackage, visualize or otherwise repurpose the output for use in entirely unanticipated, social ways - these "stakeholders" will not be governed, but may observe guidance generated by a "Trusted Community". As recognized members of the trusted community, these stakeholders may ultimately define the right scope and detail of governance that all other users might observe, promoting and refining the usefulness of the government product as the social ecosystem expects. So, as part of an agency-centric governance framework, it's advised that a flexible governance model be created for stewarding a "Community of Trust" around the digital services. The first steps follow the approach outlined in the Recommendations: Step 1: Gather a Core Team In addition to the roles and responsibilities described, perhaps a set of characteristics and responsibilities can be developed for the "Trusted Community Steward/Advocate" - i.e. a person or team who (a) are entirely cognizant of and respected within the external social media communities, and (b) are trusted both within the agency and outside as practical, responsible, non-partisan communicators of useful information. The may seem like a standard Agency PR/Outreach team role - but often an agency or stakeholder subject matter expert with a public, active social persona works even better. Step 2: Assess What You Have In addition to existing, agency or stakeholder decision-making bodies and assets, it's important to take a PR/Marketing view of the social ecosystem. How visible are the services across the social channels utilized by current or desired constituents of your agency? What's the online reputation of your agency and perhaps the service(s)? Is Search Engine Optimization (SEO) a facet of external communications/publishing lifecycles? Who are the public champions, instigators, value-adders for the digital services, or perhaps just influential "communicators" (i.e. with no stake in the game)? You're essentially assessing your market and social presence, and identifying the actors (including your own agency employees) in the existing community of trust. Step 3: Determine What You Want The evolving Community of Trust will most readily absorb, support and provide feedback regarding "Core Principles" (Element B of the "six essential elements of a digital services governance structure") shared by your Agency, and obviously play a large, though probably very unstructured part in Element D "Stakeholder Input and Participation". Plan for this, and seek input from the social media community with respect to performance metrics - these should be geared around the outcome and growth of the trusted communities actions. How big and active is this community? What's the influential reach of this community with respect to particular messaging or campaigns generated by the Agency? What's the referral rate TO your digital services, FROM channels owned or operated by members of this community? (this requires governance with respect to content generation inclusive of "markers" or "tags"). At this point, while your Agency proceeds with steps 4 ("Build/Validate the Governance Structure") and 5 ("Share, Review, Upgrade"), the Community of Trust might as well just get going, and start adding value and usefulness to the existing conversations, existing data services - loosely though directionally-stewarded by your trusted advocate(s). Why is this an "Enterprise Architecture" topic? Because it's increasingly apparent that a Public Service "Enterprise" is not wholly contained within Agency facilities, firewalls and job titles - it's also manifested in actual, perceived or representative forms outside the walls, on the social Internet. An Agency's EA model and resulting investments both facilitate and are impacted by the "Social Enterprise". At Oracle, we're very active both within our Enterprise and outside, helping foster social architectures that enable truly useful public services, digital or otherwise.

  Read the article

• Oracle Social Network Developer Challenge Winners

  - by kellsey.ruppel

  Originally posted by Jake Kuramoto on The Apps Lab blog. Now that OpenWorld 2012 has wrapped, I have time to tell you all about what happened. Maybe you recall that Noel (@noelportugal) and I were running a modified hackathon during the show, the Oracle Social Network Developer Challenge. Without further ado, congratulations to Dimitri Gielis (@dgielis) and Martin Giffy D’Souza (@martindsouza) on their winning entry, an integration between Oracle APEX and Oracle Social Network that integrates feedback and bug submission with Oracle Social Network Conversations, allowing developers, end-users and project leaders to view and discuss the feedback on their APEX applications from within Oracle Social Network. Update: Bob Rhubart of OTN (@brhubart) interviewed Dimitri and Martin right after their big win. Money quote from Dimitri when asked what he’d buy with the $500 in Amazon gift cards, “Oracle Social Network.” Nice one. In their own words: In the developers perspective it’s important to get feedback soon, so after a first iteration and end-users start to test, they can give feedback of the application. Previously it stopped there, and it was up to the developer to communicate further with email, phone etc. With OSN every feedback and communication gets logged and other people can see the discussion immediately as well. For the end users perspective he can now communicate in a more efficient way to not only the developers, but also between themselves. Maybe many end-users (in different locations) would like to change some behaviour, by using OSN they can see the entry somebody put in with a screenshot and they can just start to chat about it. Some key technical end users can have lighten the tasks of the development team by looking at the feedback first and start to communicate with their peers. For the project manager he has now the ability to really see what communication has taken place in certain areas and can make decisions on that. Later, if things come up again, he can always go back in OSN and see what was said at that moment in time. Integrating OSN in the APEX applications enhances the user experience, makes the lives of the developers easier and gives a better overview to project managers. Incidentally, you may already know Dimitri and Martin, since both are Oracle Ace Directors. I ran into Martin at the Ace Director briefings Friday before the conference started, and at that point, he wasn’t sure he’d have time to enter the Challenge. After some coaxing, he and Dimitri agreed to give it a go and banged out their entry on Tuesday night, or more accurately, very early Wednesday morning, the day of the Challenge judging. I think they said it took them about four hours of hardcore coding to get it done, very much like a traditional hackathon, which is essentially a code sprint from idea to finished product. Here are some screenshots of the workflow they built. #gallery-1 { margin: auto; } #gallery-1 .gallery-item { float: left; margin-top: 10px; text-align: center; width: 33%; } #gallery-1 img { border: 2px solid #cfcfcf; } #gallery-1 .gallery-caption { margin-left: 0; } I love this idea, i.e. closing the loop between web developers and users, a very common pain point, and so did our judges. Speaking of, special thanks to our panel of three judges: Reggie Bradford (@reggiebradford), serial entrepreneur, founder of Vitrue and SVP of Cloud Product Development at Oracle Robert Hipps (@roberthipps), VP of Development for Oracle Social Network and my former boss Roland Smart (@rsmartx), VP of Social Marketing and the brains behind the Oracle Social Developer Community Finally, thanks to everyone who made this possible, including: The three other teams from HarQen (@harqen), TEAM Informatics (@teaminformatics) and Fishbowl Solutions (@fishbowle20) featuring Friend of the ‘Lab John Sim (@jrsim_uix), who finished and presented entries. I’ll be posting the details of their work this week. The one guy who finished an entry, but couldn’t make the judging, Bex Huff (@bex). Bex rallied from a hospitalization due to an allergic reaction during the show; he’s fine, don’t worry. I’ll post details of his work next week, too. The 40-plus people who registered to compete in the Challenge. Noel for all his hard work, sample code, and flying monkey target, more on that to come. The Oracle Social Network development team for supporting this event. Everyone in legal and the beta program office for their help. And finally, the Oracle Technology Network (@oracletechnet) for hosting the event and providing countless hours of operational and moral support. Sorry if I’ve missed some people, since this was a huge team effort. This event was a big success, and we plan to do similar events in the future. Stay tuned to this channel for more. 

  Read the article

• Surface and the Uphill Battle to Win Over iPad Users (Namely: Me)

  - by D'Arcy Lussier

  I went away this past weekend and decided to bring along the Windows 8 tablet from the Build conference last year – y’know, to give Windows 8 a try in a typical scenario. I also brought our iPad 2 along since I figured my wife would want to use that. I’d love to tell you how I found using my Windows 8 tablet but I can’t – I used the iPad exclusively the entire weekend. It was during this that I realized what Microsoft needs to do to win me over as an iPad user. As you’ll see, I’m left wondering what it is that Surface is meant to compete with: iPad and other tablets, or thin laptops like the MacBook Air or Ultrabooks. Device Size I really like the size of the iPad compared with the Build tablet. It’s not as long and the thinness/weight of the device makes it feel more like you’re holding a magazine than a computer. I’m pleased that Microsoft will be matching the thinness of the iPad with Surface, but I’m suspect as to what that actually means. The iPad’s edges slant inwards where the Surface has a thicker boxish look (similar to the iPhone 4S). So while they may have the same depth at the deepest part of both devices, I bet the iPad will come off feeling thinner. However, its not lost on me the number of external port options the Surface’s design provides over the iPad (Usb, etc.). With that said, I haven’t missed having a USB slot on my iPad. I’m not a fan of lengthening the Surface screen size to almost a full inch over the iPad, mainly because… Vertical Orientation Experience Did you notice at the announce event, in the images of the devices that have been released, and in any marketing for it, that the surface is always displayed in horizontal orientation. This is a huge beef I have with my Build tablet and why I prefer the iPad. Yes the iPad can do the wide-screenish mode, but the iPad is oriented to be vertical by nature. Don’t agree? Look at the button and camera placement – both on the shorter sides of the device. Compare that with the Surface, where the orientation for the button and camera is on the longer sides. To be fair, Blackberry and the horde of Android tablets out there haven’t gotten this either – since most monitors are widescreen nowadays tablets should be too right? Wrong. Widescreen is great for certain things, but tasks such as reading is not one of them – hence why monitor companies like Dell provide stands that allow you to flip your widescreen monitor to a vertical orientation. That Microsoft has chosen a horizontal orientation by default for Windows 8 is disappointing – hopefully hardware manufacturers will be given the option of a default vertical orientation. Fast Startup Time I like that I can turn off/turn on the iPad very quickly. Even from a true “off” mode and not just sleeping, the iPad boots up very quickly. Windows RT needs to have that same quick response. If I start finding that I’m waiting for the device to boot up for more than 30 seconds that could be a show stopper. No Heat I really hate that the Build tablet has fans that kick in to cool the procs, but its basically a slate computer and I get its part of that prototype build. For Surface, it needs to be the same type of experience as the iPad – no heat! I know Surface doesn’t have fans and uses some cool new vent system or something like that, but even then – I want to sit and read a book on my Surface without having to feel any heat coming from the device, which is the experience I have with the iPad now. What About Apps?! I am definitely not the target client when it comes to app stores. On my iPad I use: Safari Kindle Reader Twitter App Settlers of Catan TSN’s App And that’s it. So really, while its nice that some version of Office might be available, I’m not planning on utilizing a Surface for creating a PowerPoint or working on a Word document – that’s what my laptop is for. I want my tablet to be for information snacking or as an e-reader and occasionally an entertainment device. Surface vs iPad or Surface vs Air? The more that I read up on Surface, the more I wonder if it won’t be a touch-enabled MacBook Air competitor more than an iPad one. Also, I really question if Microsoft gets tablets – when one of your main selling features is a built-in physical keyboard it speaks more to a traditional laptop experience than a tablet one that’s entirely reliant on touch. Still, I really love the Windows Phone interface – way more than iOS – so I’m still very optimistic that the Metro experience on the tablet will be fantastic. I just worry that Microsoft has interpreted a tablet as a computer with a removable keyboard and a touch screen, and that’s not what tablet computing is about at all.

  Read the article

• IBM "per core" comparisons for SPECjEnterprise2010

  - by jhenning

  I recently stumbled upon a blog entry from Roman Kharkovski (an IBM employee) comparing some SPECjEnterprise2010 results for IBM vs. Oracle. Mr. Kharkovski's blog claims that SPARC delivers half the transactions per core vs. POWER7. Prior to any argument, I should say that my predisposition is to like Mr. Kharkovski, because he says that his blog is intended to be factual; that the intent is to try to avoid marketing hype and FUD tactic; and mostly because he features a picture of himself wearing a bike helmet (me too). Therefore, in a spirit of technical argument, rather than FUD fight, there are a few areas in his comparison that should be discussed. Scaling is not free For any benchmark, if a small system scores 13k using quantity R1 of some resource, and a big system scores 57k using quantity R2 of that resource, then, sure, it's tempting to divide: is  13k/R1 > 57k/R2 ? It is tempting, but not necessarily educational. The problem is that scaling is not free. Building big systems is harder than building small systems. Scoring  13k/R1  on a little system provides no guarantee whatsoever that one can sustain that ratio when attempting to handle more than 4 times as many users. Choosing the denominator radically changes the picture When ratios are used, one can vastly manipulate appearances by the choice of denominator. In this case, lots of choices are available for the resource to be compared (R1 and R2 above). IBM chooses to put cores in the denominator. Mr. Kharkovski provides some reasons for that choice in his blog entry. And yet, it should be noted that the very concept of a core is: arbitrary: not necessarily comparable across vendors; fluid: modern chips shift chip resources in response to load; and invisible: unless you have a microscope, you can't see it. By contrast, one can actually see processor chips with the naked eye, and they are a bit easier to count. If we put chips in the denominator instead of cores, we get: 13161.07 EjOPS / 4 chips = 3290 EjOPS per chip for IBM vs 57422.17 EjOPS / 16 chips = 3588 EjOPS per chip for Oracle The choice of denominator makes all the difference in the appearance. Speaking for myself, dividing by chips just seems to make more sense, because: I can see chips and count them; and I can accurately compare the number of chips in my system to the count in some other vendor's system; and Tthe probability of being able to continue to accurately count them over the next 10 years of microprocessor development seems higher than the probability of being able to accurately and comparably count "cores". SPEC Fair use requirements Speaking as an individual, not speaking for SPEC and not speaking for my employer, I wonder whether Mr. Kharkovski's blog article, taken as a whole, meets the requirements of the SPEC Fair Use rule www.spec.org/fairuse.html section I.D.2. For example, Mr. Kharkovski's footnote (1) begins Results from http://www.spec.org as of 04/04/2013 Oracle SUN SPARC T5-8 449 EjOPS/core SPECjEnterprise2010 (Oracle's WLS best SPECjEnterprise2010 EjOPS/core result on SPARC). IBM Power730 823 EjOPS/core (World Record SPECjEnterprise2010 EJOPS/core result) The questionable tactic, from a Fair Use point of view, is that there is no such metric at the designated location. At www.spec.org, You can find the SPEC metric 57422.17 SPECjEnterprise2010 EjOPS for Oracle and You can also find the SPEC metric 13161.07 SPECjEnterprise2010 EjOPS for IBM. Despite the implication of the footnote, you will not find any mention of 449 nor anything that says 823. SPEC says that you can, under its fair use rule, derive your own values; but it emphasizes: "The context must not give the appearance that SPEC has created or endorsed the derived value." Substantiation and transparency Although SPEC disclaims responsibility for non-SPEC information (section I.E), it says that non-SPEC data and methods should be accurate, should be explained, should be substantiated. Unfortunately, it is difficult or impossible for the reader to independently verify the pricing: Were like units compared to like (e.g. list price to list price)? Were all components (hw, sw, support) included? Were all fees included? Note that when tpc.org shows IBM pricing, there are often items such as "PROCESSOR ACTIVATION" and "MEMORY ACTIVATION". Without the transparency of a detailed breakdown, the pricing claims are questionable. T5 claim for "Fastest Processor" Mr. Kharkovski several times questions Oracle's claim for fastest processor, writing You see, when you publish industry benchmarks, people may actually compare your results to other vendor's results. Well, as we performance people always say, "it depends". If you believe in performance-per-core as the primary way of looking at the world, then yes, the POWER7+ is impressive, spending its chip resources to support up to 32 threads (8 cores x 4 threads). Or, it just might be useful to consider performance-per-chip. Each SPARC T5 chip allows 128 hardware threads to be simultaneously executing (16 cores x 8 threads). The Industry Standard Benchmark that focuses specifically on processor chip performance is SPEC CPU2006. For this very well known and popular benchmark, SPARC T5: provides better performance than both POWER7 and POWER7+, for 1 chip vs. 1 chip, for 8 chip vs. 8 chip, for integer (SPECint_rate2006) and floating point (SPECfp_rate2006), for Peak tuning and for Base tuning. For example, at the 8-chip level, integer throughput (SPECint_rate2006) is: 3750 for SPARC 2170 for POWER7+. You can find the details at the March 2013 BestPerf CPU2006 page SPEC is a trademark of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation, www.spec.org. The two specific results quoted for SPECjEnterprise2010 are posted at the URLs linked from the discussion. Results for SPEC CPU2006 were verified at spec.org 1 July 2013, and can be rechecked here.

  Read the article

• Whoosh: PASS Board Year 1, Q4

  - by Denise McInerney

  "Whoosh". That's the sound the last quarter of 2012 made as it rushed by. My first year on the PASS Board is complete, and the last three months of it were probably the busiest. PASS Summit 2012 Much of October was devoted to preparing for Summit. Every Board  member, HQ staffer and dozens of volunteers were busy in the run-up to our flagship event. It takes a lot of work to put on the Summit. The community meetings,  first-timers program, keynotes, sessions and that fabulous Community Appreciation party are the result of many hours of preparation. Virtual Chapters at the Summit With a lot of help from Karla Landrum, Michelle Nalliah, Lana Montgomery and others at HQ the VCs had a good presence at Summit. We started the week with a VC leaders meeting. I shared some information about the activities and growth during the first part of the year.   From January - September 2012: The number of VCs increased from 14 to 20 VC membership  grew from 55,200 to 80,100 Total attendance at VC meetings increased from 1,480 to 2,198 Been part of PASS Global Growth with language-based VC- including Chinese, Spanish and Portuguese. We also heard from some VC leaders and volunteers. Ryan Adams (Performance VC) shared his tips for successful marketing of VC events. Amy Lewis (Business Intelligence VC) described how the BI chapter has expanded to support PASS' global growth by finding volunteers to organize events at times that are convenient for people in Europe and Australia. Felipe Ferreira (Portuguese language VC) described the experience of building a user group first in Brazil, then expanding to work with Portuguese-speaking data professionals around the world. Virtual Chapter leaders and volunteers were in evidence throughout Summit, beginning with the Welcome Reception. For the past several years VCs have had an organized presence at this event, signing up new members and advertising their meetings. Many VC leaders also spent time at the Community Zone. This new addition to the Summit proved to be a vibrant spot were new members and volunteers could network with others and find out how to start a chapter or host a SQL Saturday. Women In Technology 2012 was the 10th WIT Luncheon to be held at Summit. I was honored to be asked to be on the panel to discuss the topic "Where Have We Been and Where are We Going?" The PASS community has come a long way in our understanding of issues facing women in tech and our support of women in the organization. It was great to hear from panelists Stefanie Higgins and Kevin Kline who were there at the beginning as well as Kendra Little and Jen Stirrup who are part of the progress being made by women in our community today. Bylaw Changes The Board spent a good deal of time in 2012 discussing how to move our global growth initiatives forward. An important component of this is a proposed change to how the Board is elected with some seats representing geographic regions. At the end of December we voted on these proposed bylaw changes which have been published for review. The member review and feedback is open until February 8. I encourage all members to review these changes and send any feedback to [email protected]  In addition to reading the bylaws, I recommend reading Bill Graziano's blog post on the subject. Business Analytics Conference At Summit we announced a new event: the PASS Business Analytics Conference. The inaugural event will be April 10-12, 2013 in Chicago. The world of data is changing rapidly. More and more businesses want to extract value and insight from their data. Data professionals who provide these insights or enable others to do so are in demand. The BA Conference offers expert content on predictive analytics, data exploration and visualization, content delivery strategies and more. By holding this new event PASS is participating in important discussions happening in our industry, offering our members more educational value and reaching out to data professionals who are not currently part of our organization. New Year, New Portfolio In addition to my work with the Virtual Chapters I am also now responsible for the 24 Hours of PASS portfolio. Since the first 24HOP of 2013 is scheduled for January 30 we started the transition of the portfolio work from Rob Farley to me right after Summit. Work immediately started to secure speakers for the January event. We have also been evaluating webinar platforms that can be used for 24HOP as well as the Virtual Chapters. Next Up 24 Hours of PASS: Business Analytics Edition will be held on January 30. I'll be there and will moderate one or two sessions. The 24HOP topics are a sneak peek into the type of content that will be offered at the Business Analytics Conference. I hope to see some of you there. The Virtual Chapters have hit the ground running in 2013; many of them have events scheduled. The Application Development VC is getting restarted  and a new Business Analytics VC will be starting soon. Check out the lineup and join the VCs that interest you. And watch the Events page and Connector for announcements of upcoming meetings. At the end of January I will be attending a Board meeting in Seattle, and February 23 I will be at SQL Saturday #177 in Silicon Valley.

  Read the article

• 5 Things I Learned About the IT Labor Shortage

  - by Oracle Accelerate for Midsize Companies

  by Jim Lein | Sr. Principal Product Marketing Director | Oracle Midsize Programs | @JimLein Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} 5 Things I Learned About the IT Labor Shortage A gentle autumn breeze is nudging the last golden leaves off the aspen trees. It’s time to wrap up the series that I started back in April, “The Growing IT Labor Shortage: Are You Feeling It?” Even in a time of relatively high unemployment, labor shortages exist depending on many factors, including location, industry, IT requirements, and company size. According to Manpower Groups 2013 Talent Shortage Survey, 35% of hiring managers globally are having difficulty filling jobs. Their top three challenges in filling jobs are: 1. lack of technical competencies (hard skills) 2. Lack of available applicants 3. Lack of experience The same report listed Technicians as the most difficult position to fill in the United States For most companies, Human Capital and Talent Management have never been more strategic and they are striving for ways streamline processes, reduce turnover, and lower costs (see this Oracle whitepaper, “ Simplify Workforce Management and Increase Global Agility”). Everyone I spoke to—partner, customer, and Oracle experts—agreed that it can be extremely challenging to hire and retain IT talent in today’s labor market. And they generally agreed on the causes: a. IT is so pervasive that there are myriad moving parts requiring support and expertise, b. thus, it’s hard for university graduates to step in and contribute immediately without experience and specialization, c. big IT companies generally aren’t the talent incubators that they were in the freewheeling 90’s due to bottom line pressures that require hiring talent that can hit the ground running, and d. it’s often too expensive for resource-strapped midsize companies to invest the time and money required to get graduates up to speed. Here are my top lessons learned from my conversations with the experts. 1. A Better Title Would Have Been, “The Challenges of Finding and Retaining IT Talent That Matches Your Requirements” There are more applicants than jobs but it’s getting tougher and tougher to find individuals that perfectly fit each and every role. Top performing companies are increasingly looking to hire the “almost ready”, striving to keep their existing talent more engaged, and leveraging their employee’s social and professional networks to quickly narrow down candidate searches (here’s another whitepaper, “A Strategic Approach to Talent Management”). 2. Size Matters—But So Does Location Midsize companies must strive to build cultures that compete favorably with what large enterprises can offer, especially when they aren’t within commuting distance of IT talent strongholds. They can’t always match the compensation and benefits offered by large enterprises so it's paramount to offer candidates high quality of life and opportunities to build their resumes in alignment with their long term career aspirations. 3. Get By With a Little Help From Your Friends It doesn’t always make sense to invest time and money in training an employee on a task they will not perform frequently. Or get in a bidding war for talent with skills that are rare and in high demand. Many midsize companies are finding that it makes good economic sense to contract with partners for remote support rather than trying to divvy up each and every role amongst their lean staff. Internal staff can be assigned to roles that will have the highest positive impact on achieving organizational goals. 4. It’s Actually Both “What You Know” AND “Who You Know” If I was hiring someone today I would absolutely leverage the social and professional networks of my co-workers. Period. Most research shows that hiring in this manner is less expensive and time consuming AND produces better results. There is also some evidence that suggests new hires from employees’ networks have higher job performance and retention rates. 5. I Have New Respect for Recruiters and Hiring Managers My hats off to them—it’s not easy hiring and retaining top talent with today’s challenges. Check out the infographic, “A New Day: Taking HR from Chaos to Control”, on Oracle’s Human Capital Management solutions home page. You can also explore all of Oracle’s HCM solutions from that page based on your role. You can read all the posts in this series by clicking on the links in the right sidebar. Stay tuned…we’ll continue to post thought leadership on HCM and Talent Management topics.

  Read the article

• JavaOne 2011: Content review process and Tips for submissions

  - by arungupta

  The Technical Sessions, Birds of Feather, Panels, and Hands-on labs (basically all the content delivered at JavaOne) forms the backbone of the conference. At this year's JavaOne conference you'll have access to the rock star speakers, the ability to engage with luminaries in the hallways, and have beer (or 2) with community peers in designated areas. Even though the conference is Oct 2-6, 2011, and will be bigger and better than last year's conference, the Call for Paper submission and review/selection evaluation started much earlier.In previous years, I've participated in the review process and this year I was honored to serve as co-lead for the "Enterprise Service Architecture and Cloud" track with Ludovic Champenois. We had a stellar review team with an equal mix of Oracle and external community reviewers. The review process is very overwhelming with the reviewers going through multiple voting iterations on each submission in order to ensure that the selected content is the BEST of the submitted lot. Our ultimate goal was to ensure that the content best represented the track, and most importantly would draw interest and excitement from attendees. As always, the number and quality of submissions were just superb, making for a truly challenging (and rewarding) experience for the reviewers. As co-lead I tried to ensure that I applied a fair and balanced process in the evaluation of content in my track. . Here are some key steps followed by all track leads: Vote on sessions - Each reviewer is required to vote on the sessions on a scale of 1-5 - and also provide a justifying comment. Create buckets - Divide the submissions into different buckets to ensure a fair representation of different topics within a track. This ensures that if a particular bucket got higher votes then the track is not exclusively skewed towards it. Top 7 - The review committee provides a list of the top 7 talks that can be used in the promotional material by the JavaOne team. Generally these talks are easy to identify and a consensus is reached upon them fairly quickly. First cut - Each track is allocated a total number of sessions (including panels), BoFs, and Hands-on labs that can be approved. The track leads then start creating the first cut of the approvals using the casted votes coupled with their prior experience in the subject matter. In our case, Ludo and I have been attending/speaking at JavaOne (and other popular Java-focused conferences) for double digit years. The Grind - The first cut is then refined and refined and refined using multiple selection criteria such as sorting on the bucket, speaker quality, topic popularity, cumulative vote total, and individual vote scale. The sessions that don't make the cut are reviewed again as well to ensure if they need to replace one of the selected one as a potential alternate. I would like to thank the entire Java community for all the submissions and many thanks to the reviewers who spent countless hours reading each abstract, voting on them, and helping us refine the list. I think approximately 3-4 hours cumulative were spent on each submission to reach an evaluation, specifically the border line cases. We gave our recommendations to the JavaOne Program Committee Chairperson (Sharat Chander) and accept/decline notifications should show up in submitter inboxes in the next few weeks. Here are some points to keep in mind when submitting a session to JavaOne next time: JavaOne is a technology-focused conference so any product, marketing or seemingly marketish talk are put at the bottom of the list.Oracle Open World and Oracle Develop are better options for submitting product specific talks. Make your title catchy. Remember the attendees are more likely to read the abstract if they like the title. We try our best to recategorize the talk to a different track if it needs to but please ensure that you are filing in the right track to have all the right eyeballs looking at it. Also, it does not hurt marking an alternate track if your talk meets the criteria. Make sure to coordinate within your team before the submission - multiple sessions from the same team or company does not ensure that the best speaker is picked. In such case we rely upon your "google presence" and/or review committee's prior knowledge of the speaker. The reviewers may not know you or your product at all and you get 750 characters to pitch your idea. Make sure to use all of them, to the last 750th character. Make sure to read your abstract multiple times to ensure that you are giving all the relevant information ? Think through your presentation and see if you are leaving out any important aspects.Also look if the abstract has any redundant information that will not required by the reviewers. There are additional sections that allow you to share information about the speaker and the presentation summary. Use them to blow the horn about yourself and any other relevant details. Please don't say "call me at xxx-xxx-xxxx to find out the details" :-) The review committee enjoyed reviewing the submissions and we certainly hope you'll have a great time attending them. Happy JavaOne!

  Read the article

• JavaOne 2011: Content review process and Tips for submissions

  - by arungupta

  The Technical Sessions, Birds of Feather, Panels, and Hands-on labs (basically all the content delivered at JavaOne) forms the backbone of the conference. At this year's JavaOne conference you'll have access to the rock star speakers, the ability to engage with luminaries in the hallways, and have beer (or 2) with community peers in designated areas. Even though the conference is Oct 2-6, 2011, and will be bigger and better than last year's conference, the Call for Paper submission and review/selection evaluation started much earlier.In previous years, I've participated in the review process and this year I was honored to serve as co-lead for the "Enterprise Service Architecture and Cloud" track with Ludovic Champenois. We had a stellar review team with an equal mix of Oracle and external community reviewers. The review process is very overwhelming with the reviewers going through multiple voting iterations on each submission in order to ensure that the selected content is the BEST of the submitted lot. Our ultimate goal was to ensure that the content best represented the track, and most importantly would draw interest and excitement from attendees. As always, the number and quality of submissions were just superb, making for a truly challenging (and rewarding) experience for the reviewers. As co-lead I tried to ensure that I applied a fair and balanced process in the evaluation of content in my track. . Here are some key steps followed by all track leads: Vote on sessions - Each reviewer is required to vote on the sessions on a scale of 1-5 - and also provide a justifying comment. Create buckets - Divide the submissions into different buckets to ensure a fair representation of different topics within a track. This ensures that if a particular bucket got higher votes then the track is not exclusively skewed towards it. Top 7 - The review committee provides a list of the top 7 talks that can be used in the promotional material by the JavaOne team. Generally these talks are easy to identify and a consensus is reached upon them fairly quickly. First cut - Each track is allocated a total number of sessions (including panels), BoFs, and Hands-on labs that can be approved. The track leads then start creating the first cut of the approvals using the casted votes coupled with their prior experience in the subject matter. In our case, Ludo and I have been attending/speaking at JavaOne (and other popular Java-focused conferences) for double digit years. The Grind - The first cut is then refined and refined and refined using multiple selection criteria such as sorting on the bucket, speaker quality, topic popularity, cumulative vote total, and individual vote scale. The sessions that don't make the cut are reviewed again as well to ensure if they need to replace one of the selected one as a potential alternate. I would like to thank the entire Java community for all the submissions and many thanks to the reviewers who spent countless hours reading each abstract, voting on them, and helping us refine the list. I think approximately 3-4 hours cumulative were spent on each submission to reach an evaluation, specifically the border line cases. We gave our recommendations to the JavaOne Program Committee Chairperson (Sharat Chander) and accept/decline notifications should show up in submitter inboxes in the next few weeks. Here are some points to keep in mind when submitting a session to JavaOne next time: JavaOne is a technology-focused conference so any product, marketing or seemingly marketish talk are put at the bottom of the list.Oracle Open World and Oracle Develop are better options for submitting product specific talks. Make your title catchy. Remember the attendees are more likely to read the abstract if they like the title. We try our best to recategorize the talk to a different track if it needs to but please ensure that you are filing in the right track to have all the right eyeballs looking at it. Also, it does not hurt marking an alternate track if your talk meets the criteria. Make sure to coordinate within your team before the submission - multiple sessions from the same team or company does not ensure that the best speaker is picked. In such case we rely upon your "google presence" and/or review committee's prior knowledge of the speaker. The reviewers may not know you or your product at all and you get 750 characters to pitch your idea. Make sure to use all of them, to the last 750th character. Make sure to read your abstract multiple times to ensure that you are giving all the relevant information ? Think through your presentation and see if you are leaving out any important aspects.Also look if the abstract has any redundant information that will not required by the reviewers. There are additional sections that allow you to share information about the speaker and the presentation summary. Use them to blow the horn about yourself and any other relevant details. Please don't say "call me at xxx-xxx-xxxx to find out the details" :-) The review committee enjoyed reviewing the submissions and we certainly hope you'll have a great time attending them. Happy JavaOne!

  Read the article

< Previous Page | 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101  | Next Page >