Update on Oracle Applications leadership change

Here is the text of the e-mail sent out at Oracle by Chuck Rozwat announcing Ed's departure. This note confirms Ed's departure at the end of the month, and indicates that the "legacy" ("Applications Unlimited") team will report to Chuck after Ed's departure (although it has been widely rumored that the legacy apps will be reporting to Thomas Kurian).

Ed Abbo will be leaving Oracle as of June 30th. He has decided that his next career objectives can be best met outside of Oracle. Ed’s contributions and presence will be missed.

Some of you may not be aware of this, but Ed has had two separate “tours of duty”. He joined Oracle out of graduate school as part of the winter class of '86, and was part of the team that built Oracle's first internal customer support system. He also worked in Oracle Consulting when it was first established and later in the Sales organization as part of the Strategic accounts team.

He joined Siebel Systems in early 1994 where he held a number of positions leading to CTO and head of engineering, where he was at the time of the Siebel acquisition in late 2005. Ed led the effort to secure Oracle’s clear leadership in the CRM market through the Siebel Product Line and the fast growing CRM On Demand business. In 2007, he was asked to take on the additional responsibility to run the Applications Unlimited group. During this time, Ed has been the “face” of Oracle Applications to our customers, analysts and press, delivered on the Applications Unlimited commitment to continued product releases and innovation across Oracle's Application product lines, and established a strong organization and leadership team that will ensure our continued success.

Please join me in thanking Ed for his significant contributions to Oracle, and in wishing him good fortune in his future endeavors.

As of July 1, I will be directly managing the Applications Unlimited Group.

Chuck

Good luck to Ed (and Thomas, and Chuck, and all the team)!

Ed Abbo is leaving Oracle

News has broken that Ed Abbo will be leaving Oracle at the end of this month. The "legacy" applications will be organizationally under Thomas Kurian, who already has the Fusion (and other) Middleware products, BI, Fusion Applications, and Tools, and who will doubtless get some of the pieces acquired from Sun.

Ed was a greatly respected professional, and will surely be missed at Oracle and by Oracle's customers. Obviously, Thomas also is very successful, so it seems likely he will do a great job with his new responsibilities.

Predictions and info for Oracle Fusion Middleware launch, July 1

I saw some interesting tweets and have been hearing other rumors and facts regarding Oracle Fusion Middleware and Applications, and Oracle's upcoming announcement on July 1. Here is what I was able to glean and infer based on this information.

First, my predictions:

• Oracle will explicitly or implicitly reveal its plans (and post-merger org structure) for Java in the post-Sun-acquisition period for Fusion Middleware at the Fusion Middleware (FMW) launch on July 1.
• Oracle will deprecate Eclipse (which they don't control) quickly, trying to move Java developers to JDeveloper (which they control). JDeveloper will have tight links to FMW components as well as generic Java, which Oracle will tout as benefits. My $0.02: this is a futile and silly effort, as Eclipse is so much more than just a Java development environment, with an ecosystem that creates enormous value around it. Oracle should come to some "understanding" with IBM and just adopt Eclipse.
• Oracle will show a lot about how Fusion Apps will adopt FMW on July 1 (especially the Java Platform and WebCenter). This is likely to be a real game-changer. I am not certain that other ERP vendors will be able to deliver anything like the compelling user experience, social capabilities, and productivity which will be available with Oracle's new Fusion Applications. Of course, many application customers will stick with their legacy apps, but new implementations (and license purchases) will likely lean heavily towards Oracle Fusion Applications when they are available for financials/HR, which I predict will be around the end of this year. Incidentally, I heard that something like 1000 applications staff from the "legacy" apps at Oracle had been moved several (6 to 9) months ago to Thomas Kurian's group to work on beefing up the functionality in the Fusion Applications.
• There will be no major pricing changes with the new middleware (as compared to today's pricing). However, customers probably will have to buy new licenses as this will be viewed as new products rather than upgrades.
• There will be a new advanced rules engine included in FMW.
• WebCenter and Portal will be upgraded significantly and well-integrated.
  

Conceptual architecture diagram of Oracle's product offerings (click on it for a larger version):



Presenters at this event:

• Hasan Rizvi: Senior Vice President, Fusion Middleware
• Dave Shaffer: Vice President, Oracle Integration
  
• Duncan Mills: Senior Director, Product Management, Tools
  
• Margaret Lee: Director, Product Management, Tools and Middleware (?)
  
• Ted Farrell: Chief Architect & SVP, Tools & Middleware
• Sue Harper: Senior Principal Product Manager, SQL Developer
• Christina Kolotouros: Director, Product Management, WebCenter and Portal
  
• Forest Yin: Director, Product Management, Identity Management products
• Mike Lehman: Senior Director, Product Management, Java Platform

If you have any additional information or rumors or inferences to share, please twitter me or leave a comment on this blog.

What can we learn from software development job posts?

What can we learn from software development job posts? A lot!

• No one is building apps for the Palm Pre, and not too much for Android
  
• More Blackberry development than iPhone
  
• No more Web 2.0 jobs (AJAX, widgets, etc.)
• Still plenty of demand for legacy/niche products (e.g. mainframe, assembly language programming, PowerBuilder, COBOL, Informix, Peoplesoft, Siebel)
• Unix is still a force, but not much demand for Mac development
  
• Dynamics is falling further behind
• Skills in popular platforms like Oracle, SAP, Java, C++/C#, and Unix/Linux are still in high demand, even in this weak economy
  

I'll post every once in a while on this topic, so please let me know if there are other skills I should track. Obviously, this is not likely to be a statistically valid sampling with a confidence level of +/-5%, and this should be a leading indicator (hiring) rather than a trailing or current indicator (number currently employed or employed in the past), but it is still illuminating data.

Here are some skills/terms, and the number of occurences of those terms (including alternative spellings) in job posts to Dice.com.

DATABASE
SQL	1159
Oracle	1774
SQL Server	415
DB2	127
MySQL	128
Sybase	79
Informix	15
PL/SQL	153
PowerBuilder	34
Applications
SAP	1942
Peoplesoft	575
Siebel	210
Salesforce.com	63
Dynamics	57
BASIS	140
ABAP	77
Languages
Java	2192
C#	829
C++	728
Perl	109
PHP	295
Python	65
Ruby	134
COBOL	91
FORTRAN	7
Assembler	20
Platforms
Windows	487
Linux	531
Unix	686
VMWare	95
Mac	32
Blackberry	45
iPhone	31
Palm	3
Android	25
Facebook	1
AJAX	59
Google	7
Yahoo	0
Widget	2
IBM	84
Mainframe	157
Embedded	240
Azure	0

Venture Capital trends

Fascinating new study out from Fenwick & West on venture financing. According to the study (bear in mind that financing wasn't great a year ago):

• Q1 financings skewed heavily towards late, down rounds, with 42% of financings being series D or later (as compared to about 32% a year ago), and with about 75% of financings down or flat rounds (as compared to about 32% a year ago).
• Financings were much more likely to have >1x liquidation preferences than a year ago.
• Uncapped participation was slightly up compared to a year ago.
• Cumulative dividends provisions were about double compared to a year ago.

Lots more details in the report. Worth a read if you're in the business ...

Download the report here: http://www.fenwick.com/publications/6.12.1.asp?vid=9.

Twitter becoming a real platform ...

Twitter is becoming a real platform. I don't know if it really needs to limit things to 140 characters, but people are certainly using it for some interesting applications. Lately, I've been using TwitterFeed to blast content out from my RSS stream of news, hashtags to make things interesting for readers, TweetSum to check on potential followers, Twitter Grader to check on potential followers, and now Twitter Fountain to animate current tweets. If you'd like to embed a twitter fountain in your own page or blog, try this embed code:



I may be old fashioned (or just old), but what I really want is to be able to create and manage a list of pages/blogs/search terms, and get e-mailed every time there is a change or addition. I'd like a summary of the change in the e-mail, with enough text/image to get the context, and a link back to the original. Maybe even a "diff" function or "history" like with Wikipedia. E-mail is a lot easier for me to organize, search, archive, and transfer than RSS or tweets.

Anyone willing to build such a tool? Anyone know where I can get such a tool? Thanks ...

Where can you follow all the key developments in the enterprise software and solutions market?

Where can you follow all the key developments in the enterprise software and solutions market?

Right here!

You can read this blog online at dbmoore.blogspot.com, or subscribe to this blog via e-mail at http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/emailverifySubmit?feedId=1252427&loc=en_US, or read it on your RSS reader at http://dbmoore.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default, or get the feed with tags and summaries on del.icio.us at http://delicious.com/dennisbmoore (http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/rss/dennisbmoore for the RSS feed), or follow me on twitter at http://twitter.com/dbmoore, or search the twitter hashtag #EnterpriseTweets. Is that enough ways to publish? Fortunately, services like FeedBurner and TwitterFeed and Del.icio.us and Blogspot make all this syndication easy!

Anyone with any other suggestions of ways to publish this news aggregate, feel free to suggest them to me here in the comments ... thanks!