Interview
OpenWorld for Education
A Q&A with Oracle's Curtiss Barnes
Each fall Oracle OpenWorld, the company’s annual conference, virtually takes over every inch of the Moscone Center in San Francisco plus part of the street outside along with meeting space in several surrounding hotels. Markets within Oracle’s broad user base have their own tracks--they are almost conferences in themselves--including one for the Education and Research Industry. CT met with Oracle Vice President for Education & Research Product Strategy Curtiss Barnes following this fall's Oracle OpenWorld to capture some conference highlights for higher education.
Oracle OpenWorld is always a huge conference. What was the size of this year’s conference, and what part of that was specific to the education market?
There were about 1,500 customers who affiliated themselves with the education and research industry out of the 42,000 total conference attendees. We had more than 40 sessions presented by us, our partners, or our customers, targeted specifically to the interests of the education and research industry, and then, of course about 1,400 sessions available to anybody who is interested generally in Oracle technology and applications.
Given those numbers, what is the emphasis Oracle places on the education market—where does education stand in Oracle’s overall customer base and strategy?
Oracle continues to invest in and expand its commitment to the education and research industries--higher ed, K-12, and nonprofit research. Part of Oracle’s overall corporate strategy is to align itself with a vertical focus. The activity that Oracle has undertaken in the past few years in consolidating the technology industry is led in large part by the idea of industry verticalization--building our applications and technology with a view toward supporting the unique needs of each specific industry. This is the way that the technology is going to be sold and developed, implemented, and used going forward--to be more ‘fit-for-purpose.’
Can you talk about a few of the highlights of the conference, in terms of announcements or coverage that might be of special interest to higher ed?
Sure. First, I want to point out that at Oracle, we have the advantage of the entire technology stack. Oracle is not just a database company, or just a middleware company, or just an applications company, or just a business intelligence company. It’s all of those things, and we can now engineer solutions that rove between and leverage those different components. So, this intersection of