Most of the expected elements were in place at Oracle OpenWorld, the company's annual user conference, held in San Francisco from October 22 through 26.
There was a record crowd, estimated by Oracle at 41,000. There were enough technical sessions to bring even the heartiest DBA or system administrator to his knees. There were goofy keynote moments, including live penguins representing the Linux operating environment sharing the stage with CEO Larry Ellison. And, yes, there was the requisite vendor-sponsored party featuring the 1970s rock icon Elton John.
But there was also something conspicuously absent from the grand event: any hint of a major strategy statement or important new product direction relating to Oracle's enterprise applications and their manufacturing users. Oracle may be hip-deep in an enterprise applications market-share battle with archrival SAP, but you wouldn't know it from the proceedings at OpenWorld, where the bulk of semi-important news revolved around Oracle's middleware products and its determination to stimulate enterprise support for the Linux operating environment.
Oracle, for example, announced plans to provide support services directly to customers of Red Hat Inc., a Linux operating system vendor. Oracle also announced additions to its Fusion Middleware product line such as Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition 10g release 3, including technology acquired from Siebel Systems. The Fusion Middleware additions also included WebCenter Suite, a new group of Web-centric development tools that, Oracle said, will eventually work with its next-generation Fusion applications.
But manufacturing users of Oracle applications such as E-Business Suite and the Peoplesoft, JD Edwards, and Siebel enterprise systems had to be satisfied with Elton John. There were no official, important new application releases. No major application partnerships. And no substantial updates on Fusion applications.
For the most part, Oracle's message to applications customers was that nothing much has changed. The company is still working on Fusion apps and expects to ship them in 2008. In the meantime, Oracle repeated, it will continue indefinitely to extend and support existing applications such as Peoplesoft Enterprise, JD Edwards EnterpriseOne, and World and E-Business Suite (EBS). Planned new releases include EBS 12, EnterpriseOne 8.12, and World release A9.1, said Cliff Godwin, senior vice president for applications. Oracle officials also said the company is working on a new release of Siebel CRM -- 8.0 -- which will be services-enabled and include a new, task-based user interface.
Oracle had been expected by some analysts to officially unveil EBS 12 at Open World. No such luck. While the company did "preview" the next major EBS release, it officially provided few details on new features and no information on availability.
Oracle had considered launching EBS 12 at Open World, said senior vice president Jesper Andersen. But, he said, the company backed off in deference to regulations governing pre-announcement of new products.
Scott Malcolm, director of product strategy for the Advanced Planning Suite, said the company has decided to engage in extra rounds of testing in order to avoid the kind of reliability problems EBS customers have experienced in the past.
"It's been delayed a bit so we can do expanded testing," Malcolm said. "We don't want a repeat of what we put users through with 11i."
Interested OpenWorld attendees, however, were able to see demonstrations of EBS 12 code as it currently exists. EBS 12 beta code suggests the new release will include long-awaited manufacturing execution system (MES) functionality. The MES features, mainly targeting process manufacturers in pharmaceuticals, chemicals, and food and beverage industries, will support limited shop-floor device integration as well as the presentation of detailed operator instructions, said John Danese, product strategy director for life sciences at Oracle.
Following the release of EBS 12, Danese said, Oracle plans to provide integrations with non-Oracle MES implementations using standards such as S95 and B2MML.
EBS 12 will also be integrated with Oracle's secure search technology, allowing users to search for information such as production schedules from EBS's manufacturing module. And EBS 12 will include new supply chain planning functionality for distribution-oriented businesses and support for lot- and serial number-controlled manufacturing. EBS 12 will also include a new user interface -- the result of a project code-named Swan -- which will make it easier for users to personalize their screens.
Despite such features, at least one EBS user won't be waiting for release 12. Agilent Technologies Inc.'s Electronics Measurements Group is now upgrading its current EBS 11.5.7 implementation to release 11.5.10 in order to avoid planned support discontinuation, said Arturo Albanesi, supply chain engineer. "We couldn't wait any longer because of the support issues," Albanesi said. "Plus, we don't want to be the first on 12 out of the gate."
This article originally appeared in the December 2006 issue of Managing Automation.