Rubicon Red wins an Oracle Oscar

I recently attended an Oracle Customer event in Adelaide looking back at Oracle Open World 2010 and revisiting some of the more valuable experiences. Apart from being an excellent opportunity to understand what customers thought of the event, we were also very excited to receive our first Oracle Fusion Middleware Innovation Award alongside our customer Premium Wine Brands (a.k.a. Pernod Ricard Pacific).

It was a real honour to be nominated with Premium Wine Brands in the Oracle Fusion Middlware with Applications category. It was a partner/customer combination for using Oracle's middleware products with packaged apps to extend the business value of those applications. Winning the award is validation from Oracle and their judges that the journey we’ve undertaken with Pernod Ricard is innovative and is making a real difference.

A special thank you to Ryan, Steve and the team at PWB who have the vision and understanding of the value that SOA brings to an organization. We are looking forward to many more successes to come.

From the Left, John Deeb from Rubicon Red along with Ryan Klose, CIO and Steve Cutbush, Enterprise Architect from Premium Wine Brands.

Franco Ucci, who leads the Oracle Fusion Middleware Sales Consulting team in ANZ was at the event to share his experiences too. Franco identified three key messages from the event which seemed to focus quite a bit on Middleware.

Franco's key takeaways were:

Exalogic - Oracle's follow up to the hugely successful Exadata appliances. These boxes are all about getting faster time to market of your infrastructure. There is no doubt customers are seeing the value in getting up and running out of the box (literally).

BPM 11g - Our favorite topic. Franco reinforced the message of closing the Business/IT gap by providing more business centric tools in the middleware platform. He highlighted a number of key use cases, specifically around Collaboration within the organization

Fusion Applications - how the next generation of Applications from Oracle is building from the middle up... as opposed to most legacy applications which either built from the database up or from the UI down.

Data Integration - specifically Golden Gate technology working together with ODI to create a single platform for Data Transformation and Movement.

It was an excellent event with a lot of involvement from Oracle's customers.

OTN Podcast

About a month ago Antony Reynolds and myself were interviewed for ArchBeat which provides an online forum for the Oracle Technology Network (OTN) Architecture Community. The interview was carried out by Bob Rhubart around our latest book the Oracle SOA Suite 11gR1 by Bob Rhubart.

The interview not only covers the book, but takes an opportunity to examine how things have changed in SOA since we released our original book covering the 10g platform. In addition to covering what we believe are the key changes in the Oracle SOA Suite, we also give our views on how SOA has matured as an approach as well as its adoption by customers.

The first part of this interview, has now been released as a pod cast and can be found here. Have a listen see what you think, and see whether you agree with Antony and myself!

SOA Suite 11gR1 Developer’s Guide Published!

Well I'm both delighted (and relieved) to announce the publication of the 11gR1 version of the SOA Suite Developer’s Guide. As with the original version, this was jointly written by Antony Reynolds and myself; in fact in many ways this is the book that Antony and I originally intended to write, when we first put pen to paper (or finger to keypad) back in May 2007. At this point the 11gR1 version of the Oracle SOA Suite was still in the initial stages of development, with the ‘goal’ being to time the publication of the book with the release of 11gR1.

Then in early 2008 Oracle announced the acquisition of BEA, which it finalized in July; at this point future timings around the release of 11gR1 were very much up in the air. So we re-focused the book on 10gR3, of course no sooner had this been published and Oracle released 11gR1! So after a brief pause to catch our breath and restore our sanity, Anthony and I pulled out the original manuscripts and started again.

As with most books, there is a huge amount of support and effort behind the scenes. We had a great team of reviewers who provided invaluable feedback and encouragement:

• John Deeb
• Hans Forbrich
• Bill Hicks
• Marc Kelderman
• Manoj Neelapu
• ShuXuan Nie
• Hajo Normann

In addition we had great support from the SOA product management team at Oracle, and the editorial team at Packt Publishing who played a key role in keeping us on schedule!

The new book contains approximately 40% new content and is slightly larger than the original. But we made a very conscious effort to try and stop the book from getting to big, so as we introduced new content, we tried to condense (and in some cases remove) material in other areas. We hope we have the balance right, and that readers will get as much (or more) benefit from this version as they did the last.

New Hire Orientation Day @ Rubicon Red

We are very excited to welcome Ansuman Roy to Rubicon Red. Ansuman brings a wealth of experience in J2EE/Java and some much needed Oracle ADF skills to the Australian market. 

Ansuman joins us from the Oracle Fusion Middleware development team in India. Among other things, Ansuman led the user interface development (using ADF) of a number of modules of Oracle ECM. 

You can learn more about Ansuman at his linked in profile:

http://au.linkedin.com/in/ansumanroy