Featured Speakers

Join Oracle executive Cliff Godwin as he discusses how Oracle Applications Unlimited such as Oracle E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, Siebel etc. can help optimise every function across both service- and product-based industries and hence improve all aspects of your business. Cliff will also discuss the value delivered by the current release of Oracle E-Business Suite applications, the momentum, and how Oracle E-Business Suite applications integrate into Oracle's overall applications strategy.

Cliff Godwin is responsible for the Oracle E-Business Suite and Higher Education businesses. Mr. Godwin has been a member of the senior management team of Oracle's Applications business for most of his 18 years at Oracle.

Today there are many ways to do the same thing-sometimes it seems there are an infinite number of ways to accomplish something via software. Oracle's "Ask Tom" technology expert, columnist, and author takes a look at "The Best Way" - best practices, rules of thumb, and frameworks and discusses their promise and their shortcomings. Gain insights on what developers have done in the past and how that forms the basis for how they will do things going forward-which is both good and bad.

Tom will also present "Things You Know". Many developers and DBAs (not all, but many) approach the database with little or no understanding of how it actually works. Developers approach Oracle assuming it must work just like SQL Server or even worse with the frame of mind that says, "It doesn't matter how it works, I'm using a layer of abstraction to protect me." DBAs approach the server sometimes with a cursory knowledge of how things work, leading them to do things like, "We can skip backing up undo data-it isn't our stuff, we don't need it" or erasing archives because they ran out of space. This presentation will present some of these foibles and explain how not understanding how the database actually works will lead to disaster. Some examples of things you just might not know about yourself will be explored. Oracle is big and it is a moving target. Understanding it is an ongoing process that we need to continually do. This is a "keynote" type of presentation, not extremely technical, but more introspective about the "things you just know..."

Tom Kyte is a Senior Technical Architect in Oracle's Server Technology Division. Before starting at Oracle, Tom worked as a systems integrator building large-scale, heterogeneous databases and applications, mostly for military and government customers.

The Tom Kyte Blog

Attendees will enjoy Steven's interactive session "PL/SQL Developer Quiz Thyself Contest". Steven will also present a session "Golden Rules for Developers". This session offers a set of "golden rules" that we all can agree on and will definitely improve our code - and then offers some practical advice to help you follow them. He will deliver a third session "PL/SQL and the Oracle Database". The database has for a number of years been associated with the storage of PL/SQL and Steven will give an insight into the optimum use of PL/SQL at the Oracle Database level.

Steven Feuerstein is an author and software developer. He is considered one of the world's leading experts on the Oracle PL/SQL language, having written ten books on PL/SQL (all published by O'Reilly Media), including Oracle PL/SQL Programming.

Author page
PL/SQL Blog
Oracle Magazine columns
ODTUG "Confessions of a Quick and Dirty Programmer"
Feuerthoughts Blog

In its 2009 budget, the Australian Government allocated funding of $100m to a commercial-scale Smart Grid demonstration project, marking a change in emphasis from an earlier focus on so-called "Smart Meters". What's behind the relatively sudden emergence of this new term - and what's the difference between smart grids and smart meters? Why are they the essential underpinning of our energy future and how will they affect the way we live, work and play? In this presentation, Robin will discuss the major wave of modernisation that is looming for the electricity industry as they grapple with the challenges posed by rising energy demands and environmental concerns over an industry that generates a third of Australia's greenhouse gas emissions. Are there implications for data collection and storage?

Robin is widely acknowledged as a pioneer in the Australian broadband industry, having led the establishment of TransACT's $250m fibre-to-the-kerb network in Canberra 10 years before the National Broadband Network was conceived. Since retiring as TransACT's Chief Architect in 2003, Robin has been working around Australia on fibre-to-the-home projects around Australia, and it is his interest in communications as a vital foundation for the next generation of electricity network that has driven his involvement with Smart Grids in Australia. He is an Adjunct Professor at the University of Canberra and Vice President of Smart Grid Australia (representing the CURRENT Group).

Andy Rowsell-Jones is a vice president and research director in Gartner's CIO & Executive Leadership Research Team, with interests in business and technology strategy, management, organization, and profit and cost improvement programs. His recent work has focused on Lean in IT, performance metrics, portfolio management, green IT, IT cost reduction, linking IT investment to stock market value, stakeholder management and defining the management agendas for CIOs.

Come hear about some of the "common sense" and "practical steps" that can be done today to increase the value of your Oracle Applications and to be ready for Oracle Fusion Applications. Come hear how you too can energize your Oracle Applications Unlimited (Oracle E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, Siebel and JD Edwards EnterpriseOne) by leveraging future-proof solutions and technologies today, and how you can build your IT and operational skills for the next generation applications.

Nadia will also provide a comprehensive overview of Oracle's product strategy for Oracle E-Business Suite technology, the capabilities and associated business benefits of recent releases, as well as a review of capabilities on the product roadmap. This is the cornerstone session for the Oracle E-Business Suite technology stack. Come hear about the latest new usability enhancements to the user interface, systems administration and configuration management tools, security-related updates, and tools and options for extending, customizing, and integrating the Oracle E-Business Suite with other applications.

Nadia's main objective is to help customers understand the value that technology brings to Enterprise Applications. Nadia's sessions will cover some of the common sense and practical steps that can be done today to increase the value of your Oracle applications (Oracle E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, Siebel and JD Edwards EnterpriseOne) by using Oracle futureproof solutions and technologies today.

Oracle Senior Vice President Dick Faris will discuss what it takes to get the most from your Oracle Primavera investment. He will also share his technology vision for Primavera solutions to support your unique business processes and Oracle's continued investment in delivering complete, open and integrated PPM capabilities

Dick is Senior Vice President - Product Development for Oracle's Primavera Global Business Unit. The business unit was formed when Oracle acquired Primavera Systems, Inc. in November 2008, and focuses on enterprise project portfolio management solutions for project-intensive industries. As co-founder and executive vice president of Primavera, Dick led product development at Primavera for more than 25 years. His technical and product vision enabled Primavera to keep pace with innovations in computer hardware and software by developing and shipping more than 60 releases of twelve distinct project portfolio management products.

Gary's Update on JD Edwards Strategy and Roadmap will bring our customers and partners up-to-date on recent accomplishments and plans from JD Edwards Business Unit headquarters in Denver, Colorado.

Gary will also cover how to Maximize your JD Edwards EnterpriseOne investment with Tools and Technologies. The JD Edwards EnterpriseOne toolset can be upgraded independently from your application release. This enables your organisation to take advantage of the innovations, additional platform options, and tools to lower your operating costs with minimal impact to your end users.

Lastly, Gary will present JD Edwards World A9.2 Update 1 and Planning your Upgrade. In this session, Gary will discuss how customers on Releases A9.1 and A9.2 can take advantage of a new User Activity Report. He also will talk about Electronic Document Distribution, and tools and resources to help plan and justify your upgrade.

Gary is responsible for all technological aspects of the JD Edwards EnterpriseOne and World products, including the areas of lifecycle management, service oriented architecture, system infrastructure, and reporting.

Mogens will present "Real Application Testing - I love it" - a session which will look at the features of the database option - RAT or Real Application Testing. What is the cool stuff in RAT and how can you use it? Real Application Testing makes it feasible to do Shock Upgrades (Trade Mark pending) of Oracle installations.

Mogens will also talk about "Licensing - tales from the trenches and other thoughts on Oracle", from the Father of "We do not use" and "Why you don't need RAC". Mogens will bring his unique experience and humour to this PowerPoint-Free talk to wrap up the day.

A third session "Oracle Business Accelerators - Fact or Fiction" will cover why a technical Oracle partner would move into E-Business Suite, and why a Systems Implementer with 100+ developers would adopt a policy of always using Oracle Business Accelerators. Learn how this methodology gives you an EBS footprint tailored to your industry quickly and without scope creep risk. This ensures that your budget and project do not overrun and if you do have bigger needs, this approach for a conference room pilot means you are working on an instance that suits you, with your setup and data and not just some generic demo system.

Mogens is a charismatic figure in the Oracle World. He started his company Miracle in 2000 along with a childhood friend, after over 10 years with Oracle. He is a co-founder of www.oaktable.net and an Oracle ACE Director. In 2008 he appeared in the popular TV series 'The Secret Millionaire' in his native Denmark.

His presentation style is sometimes contentious, often hilarious and always challenges you to think about what you think you know, teaching you more.

When he isn't making us laugh he is busy with his other project, their own Miracle micro brewery.

Last year at InSync09 Debra Lilley presented a paper "Thinking of Supporting or Extending Fusion Applications" to a packed session with excellent feedback. As Oracle gets ready with its first suite of Fusion applications Debra is proud to have had several sneak previews and been involved in the validation. Debra liked what she saw and at a high level, can talk about the concepts. What blew her away was the vision, all of the technology is here today and she could identify with it all, so if it is available today, could she build it? If you had the resources, the investment, and above all the vision could you? Oracle has moved on a lot in the last twelve months, so Debra's presentation will be a recap and an update of new information.

Debra will also present a session "Applications Unlimited and Fusion Applications - The Next Five Years" designed to help Oracle users align Oracle to their business needs through a better understanding of the Oracle Application Strategy and where the products are likely to go and how they will work separately, together side by side or as a reimplementation.

Debra is Fusion Champion for Fujitsu and has over 15 years experience with Oracle Applications and technology. She has been a director of the UKOUG for 10 years and is currently deputy chairman. She also leads the global usergroups' input into Oracle's Next Generation or Fusion Applications, a role that led to her being awarded the 2008 Oracle Magazine award for User Group Evangelist of the Year. Debra is an ACE Director for Applications, the only one outside the US.

Come to Edward's session and find out how an EPM Center of Excellence is within your reach. In this one hour presentation, you will learn the steps to begin creating one. Edward will also share with you some of what the Essbase developers know about the underlying Essbase storage, calculation, and retrieval engines.

As an Oracle ACE Director, Edward travels worldwide evangelizing everything Hyperion. Edward is continuously recruited to host various Hyperion presentations at user groups nationwide and offer his 15+ years of expertise in the Hyperion arena while providing insight on the future of Hyperion within Oracle.

Keeping JDEdwards EnterpriseOne environments under control with constant change requires strict code management. A long time JDE customer will share with you how to use OMW, package and web generation practices to deal with modifications, custom code and software updates. Presentation will assume some CNC knowledge. The principles to be shared are applicable for releases Xe to 9.0.

Sue's second session will focus on how you come up with a 5 year ERP Strategy? How do you get all areas of the business to agree on next steps? A JDE customer who just recently went through this activity will share with you how they went about building a roadmap and what worked well and what didn't work so well.

Sue Shaw is the immediate past president for Quest International Users Group. In her day job, Sue is responsible for maintaining a multi-year vision (people, process, and architecture) to support the ERP Solutions area at Cenovus Energy. This is a new opportunity for Sue which began early in 2010 after spending 20 years with Shell Canada. Her expertise is with JD Edwards software, in particular EnterpriseOne.

Attend this session "Excel as a window to your Oracle Finance data" and find out why Parliament of Victoria transitioned away from FSG reporting and why MS Excel has helped simplify the Oracle Finance function including reporting, budget variance analysis, ad hoc enquiries and costing. For Parliament of Victoria the implementation of Oracle EBS almost 12 years ago also meant the finance department was now responsible for the creation of all FSG reports. Given the constantly changing requirements and resource constraints inherit to a small department the satisfaction with Oracle as an easy to use solution was at a low. A chance encounter would soon change that. 3 years ago and in order to better service its many customers including Members of parliament, special committees and internal departments, Parliament of Victoria added an Excel integration tool to the landscape. Come to this session to learn more about the journey and to see a live demo.

John has over 20 years of experience in managing accounting and finance departments. His experience includes statutory reporting, management reporting, audit, taxation and treasury functions. During his career John has improved financial processes in various organisations while ensuring that the organisational culture and context was taken into consideration.

Jeff has spent his career working with enterprise applications in dozens of prominent corporations, universities and public sector entities in the USA, the UK and Canada. He spent six years at Oracle Corporation in the USA as a Senior Practice Director and Solution Manager. Today Jeff leads international sales for EIS Technologies, and has introduced the EIS eXpress e-Business Reporting Solution to American, Australian, British, Canadian and European Oracle clients.

A five year program of targeted acquisitions and accelerated product development has given Oracle the most complete portfolio of software and hardware assets available from any single vendor. Roland Slee, VP of Product Management for the Oracle Database, will describe how Oracle is leveraging this expanded portfolio, including the acquired Sun assets, to progress its long-standing vision of enhanced information management and a simplified, standardised I.T. infrastructure.

Roland is regularly featured as a keynote speaker at industry events and is widely respected in the Oracle community. He represents Oracle's database development organisation in the region and is responsible for articulating Oracle's product strategy and roadmap, gathering customer requirements, driving adoption of innovative features and ensuring customer referencability.

Learn how in a few simple steps you can break down a complex SQL statement into an easy to understand visual diagram which will enable you to quickly identify a good candidate for the best plan of execution. Once you have a good plan of execution you will see how to make Oracle use it and how to test your results verses the default optimization done by Oracle.The knowledge of how to quickly analyze and tune a query is essential and powerful when it comes to handling queries that for whatever reason, Oracle doesn't correctly optimize by default.

Kyle Hailey joined Embarcadero with a goal of producing the easiest, most powerful tools for database performance tuning in the industry. Prior to Embarcadero, Kyle worked on a complete redesign of the Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g performance pages. His input shifted the screens away from confusing clutter to simple-yet-powerful graphics based on session load and wait bottlenecks, and this design continues to be the foundation of OEM 11g. Kyle has a long and distinguished career in the database world, having also worked for Oracle, Quest and other organizations on database performance tuning and optimization. He has designed tools to improve high-end performance monitoring, such as direct memory attach to bypass SQL and interactive graphic displays of performance data. Kyle presents regularly at industry conferences and teaches database performance tuning classes around the world.