OpenWorld 2009 in Retrospect

Oracle OpenWorld is over for another year and the streets of San Francisco will be getting back to normal (even after Tuesday's record rainfall). After attending a number of sessions, demos and meetings during the week its worth asking what the 'take away' is for Life Sciences companies.

The first is the growing move of Oracle into the hardware space and Larry Ellison's clear challenge to IBM. IBM has worked closely with Oracle in the past but Oracle's acquisitions in the hardware space has now created a new competitive dynamic. For those at OpenWorld for the technology the promise of Sun and Oracle getting together and this years announcements around Exadata were creating considerable excitement for companies with large data warehouses. For those Life Sciences companies looking to build clinical data warehouses, sales and marketing analytics data marts etc the promise of improved performance at lower cost appeared to be quite compelling.

In the short term there will be considerable opportunities to leverage this in R&D and the promise of extending this to applications databases is also quite compelling. Once the Sun deal receives final regulatory approval it looks like we'll see the new Oracle changing the landscape here.

The other thing on the technology side was the breadth of technology and middleware now available from one vendor (Oracle's demo grounds seem to get bigger every year). There is still a way to go in terms of integrating all of this but Oracle appears to have made a promising start and a number of clients I spoke to were welcoming the move that Oracle is making in at least some (larger) accounts, to help Enterprise Architects navigate their way through this maze of technology.

From my perspective part of that challenge is to put that technology into an appropriate business context and Oracle will almost certainly continue to struggle to field specialists in both the technology and industry expertise. I've certainly known cases where Oracle's own pre-sales people have been aware of Life Sciences functionality that is embedded in some of the technology products (e.g. DICOM support and BLAST searches in the database) and I suspect that's where the focus on Partner Specialization will come into play and partners like Business & Decision will continue to help client's to understand how to plan and deploy appropriate technologies in support of business requirements (see Sunday's Blog).

On the application side it was a chance to see a number of new applications in the Life Sciences industry. This included a number of acquisitions (e.g. Argus from Relsys for pharmacovigilance, the latest PLM acquisitions for pharmaceuticals) as well as new products from Oracle such as Oracle Pedigree and Serialization Manager and industry specific flavors of broader applications e.g. Siebel CRM for Life Sciences.

Industry focus is clearly one key dimension for Oracle and although there will always be more to do (including development work with Partners) Oracle appears to be extending its lead over traditional rival SAP and relative newcomer Microsoft. While there will continue to be best of breed solutions, Oracles ability to integrate via Fusion Middleware and to continue to acquire will see Oracle expand the functional footprint in Life Sciences and other key industries.

On the application front it appears to be evolution rather than revolution and systems integration via middleware was getting a lot of attention. Life Sciences companies with any sort of Oracle Applications footprint will really need to get up to speed with Fusion Middleware if they are looking to integrate and automate business processes.

In summary, OpenWorld 2009 was perhaps a little quieter than last year but there was even more to see and discuss. Despite financial uncertainty over the past year the I world certainly hasn't stood still and Life Sciences companies looking to move forward with projects would certainly have found it an interesting and useful week.