ODTUG’s Kscope11

The Oracle Development Tools User Group’s (ODTUG) annual conference Kscope was a huge success attracting a huge gathering of Oracle Experts at one location. It was held this year from June 26 to June 30 2011 in Long Beach, CA.

Joey Asher (Author of Even a Geek Can Speak and president of Speechworks) was the Keynote Speaker covering, “How to Look and Sound Like a Leader”. It set the tone for a truly engaging and memorable 5 days in the Oracle sphere.

The major topic areas were:

• Application Express
• BI and Oracle EPM
• Database Development
• Fusion Middleware

In ODTUG VP Bambi Price’s words:

“KScope11 lived up to and in fact exceeded all my expectations. All my technical requirements were covered from symposiums to individual sessions. The fun side of the conference was the best I have yet experienced. The commitment to the community service day was impressive and ODTUG received many thanks for our generosity. The Queen Mary adventure was unbelievable and a fitting event for such a well organised conference.

Thank you to all who attended for making KScope11 such a success!”

Find out more at the ODTUG channel on Youtube! http://tinyurl.com/3u84px7

Not one to rest on their laurels, the organizing committee has already set their sights on delivering an exceptional experience to attendees in 2012. Kscope 12 abstract submissions are now open. Commence your plans, get writing and don’t miss out! http://tinyurl.com/3sdjyol

 

How would you rank your Social Media usage?

How can organizations leverage social media effectively? How can we foster a spirit of innovation and growth to sustain our businesses into the future?

Social Media – the latest change agent is being used in various ways:

1. To reach out to people internally (employees) as well as externally (clients, partners etc).
2. To develop a community of practice to promote our business strategies, unique solutions and build awareness about our organization’s brand.
3. To organize this community into off-line as well as online efforts to effect change in the industry.

However, explicit guidelines need to be formulated for the proper use of social media tools and applications in order to gain maximum benefit. At the same time, the guidelines must address an ethical code of conduct for employees, appropriate use of computing resources (Not posting offensive material on content sharing websites, revealing confidential company information or publishing defamatory remarks about colleagues or clients on blogs/forums) and the dissemination of current, accurate, relevant and complete information to potential and existing clients and other entities.

IBM’s Social Computing Guidelines makes for an interesting read @ http://www.ibm.com/blogs/zz/en/guidelines.html

The most popular Social Networking tool used by several organizations and global corporate user groups is Twitter. In a recent article, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo provided some startling and groundbreaking statistics:

-          Twitter users average a billion tweets every five days

-          The Twitter website has 400 million monthly uniques, and mobile usage is growing 40 percent every quarter.

-          Users tweet the equivalent of 8,163 copies of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace

By the time we get our head around these figures, several new applications are growing at a rapid pace (in terms of the number of users) with one objective – to aid in the creation and growth of a social media strategy roadmap for an organization.

Cloud Computing: What do you think?

Cloud computing is the new buzzword. A myriad of news reports and articles have been published on the advantages of this new hosting service promising immeasurable benefits to enterprises opting for it. This is even more significant in the wake of the natural disasters which have disrupted organizational operations worldwide in the recent months.

How can we define Cloud Computing?

According to (Jaeger et al. 2008) it is a, “Computing platform residing in a large data centre with the ability to provide necessary computing resources to organizations.”

It can also be described as an “on-demand service” or the option for organizations to “rent” required services and pay for efficient use of resources.

Information Technology service providers are scrambling to host resources remotely and provide access to enterprises over the Internet. Generally speaking, there are 3 components of cloud computing services: (Julisch & Hall, 2010)

• Software as a Service (SaaS): This is application software that is hosted by third parties and provided as a service over the Internet. Examples include Google Docs and Salesforce.com.
• Platform as a Service (PaaS): These are platforms consisting of development tools and a runtime environment. Clients use the development tools to program their own applications against the Application Programming Interface (API) of the runtime environment. Subsequently, the applications are deployed to the runtime environment where they are executed. Examples of PaaS include Microsoft Azure, Force.com, and Google Apps.
• Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): These are low level computing resources such as virtual machines or storage which are provided on-demand over the Internet. Example is Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2).

Cloud Computing, however, is not without its risks. Maintaining the security and privacy of organizational information is of paramount importance. The recent identity theft of Sony’s user data is a classic example. Approximately, 100 million users’ information was compromised when its Cloud based password storage and management vendor LastPass’ servers were hacked (Forbes, 2011)

Additionally, organizations are still hesitant in making use of Cloud Services for running mission critical applications and systems due to issues of performace (i.e. outages) and data integration.

Undoubtedly, cloud computing is here to stay. But it needs to be selected for the right reasons (Cloud solutions at Harvard medical School have reduced infrastructure IT costs, as well as the time spent completing new projects) with IT vendors encouraged to develop stringent controls and/or Service Level Agreements thus maintaining the confidentiality, integrity and availability of information and systems.

1. Jaeger et al 2008, Cloud Computing and Information Policy: Computing in a Policy Cloud? Journal of Information Technology and Politics, Vol. 5(3)
2. Julisch K. & Hall, M. 2010, Security and Control in the Cloud, Information Security Journal: A Global Perspective, 19:299-309