Oracle Mobile Day: It’s a Mobile Revolution and ODTUG’s Leading the Charge
Dec. 2, 2014 marked the first ODTUG Oracle Mobile Day, hosted at Oracle Headquarters in Reston, VA. This is a format we hope to replicate in different cities across the US and in Europe in the future. We were really excited to have with us Suhas Uliyar, Oracle’s VP of Mobile Strategy and Product Management, and the visionary behind Oracle mobility. I had the honor of introducing him to the group for the opening keynote.
His keynote was very interesting as he spoke about the mobile disruption and how if everyone in the world was still trying to perfect the wheel, we wouldn’t have things like airplanes or soon to be rockets. His point with this was that a huge part of going mobile and getting connected is thinking out of the box. A great example Suhas gave was the London cab monopoly.
London cab began with a horse and buggy system and it advanced to fancier and fancier cars and they thought they were being innovative in their methodologies. Then, all of a sudden, out pops Uber, which turned the cab system on its head and revolutionized it by using a simple mobile application and the existing technologies of online payment and GPS. The whole business plan was so simple and yet they are setting up all over the world and putting cab companies out of business. Suhas was saying if you are thinking about mobile you can be innovative like this but if you aren’t thinking about mobile then someone else is about to move into your business.
After the opening keynote the event, we split into three tracks: mobile for developers (which featured both ADF and APEX sessions), the infrastructure and security track, and a BI track, talking about things like BI Designer and Hyperion and it was really interesting to have such a diverse group of users in one event. But that is really what ODTUG is all about: bringing together various development communities under one event. And if you don’t believe me, you should join us at Kscope15!
My first session on legacy to mobile innovation was a full house of people who haven’t begun their mobile journey (I know I was surprised too). Of the group only two people had some sort of mobile development in their organization and when I asked what technology they were developing in they both said, “Oh we don’t know, we have a company that does it.” It just goes to show that even the companies that are starting to go mobile feel very out of their league and they outsource the whole project. I discussed the challenges of going mobile and showed a cool demo of mobilizing and Oracle Forms system using Webservices with AuraPlayer. You can download the full presentation here and view the demo here.
Another happy and surprising development was the number of ADF developers I had in the room. There were not many Forms developers but over half of the participants in the room were doing development in ADF. I was happy to learn this because finally I’m seeing a trend where more and more people are beginning to develop in Java and it’s a very easy entry to go from developing in ADF to get to Oracle Mobile Framework – MAF. I felt like the group was very committed to going mobile and ripe with the necessary skills to do so easily.
There were several really interesting sessions throughout the day that I wish I could have partaken in more, but I guess one of the drawbacks to managing an event is that it’s difficult to squeeze everything in.
My final session presented some customer stories of different enterprises who have begun their mobile journey. The session highlighted two different types of mobile journeys. The first was a hybrid example where the customer wanted to deploy their Oracle Forms based system to an Android app to run their surgery scheduling system to mobile devices. They needed a fast time to market and had a fixed budget for the project. They were not looking to rip and replace the existing system but to have the same system available from mobile devices. AuraPlayer helped them deploy their Oracle Forms as Webservices as the backend for a Mobile Framework front end. The full app took only 7 days to develop and goes to show that mobile projects don’t have to take months or be risky and costly endeavors. You can read the full customer story here.
The second customer story, presented by 3Di Systems highlighted an end-to-end mobilization of the City of LA’s services. You can view the details here. These two customer experiences showed two different ways to go mobile and prove that you don’t have to revolutionize your whole system to get to mobile quickly and that you can start small and leverage existing investment with new user experiences and interfaces followed by a longer term strategy to conduct a full system revolution if desired. You can download the presentation here.
