OOW14 Update: Oracle OpenWorld 2014 comes to an end

Today was the last day of Oracle OpenWorld 2014 at San Francisco. Even though it started a bit later due to yesterday's Appreciation Event which hosted Aerosmith, Spacehog and Macklemore & Ryan Lewis (which I did not attend, but that's a different story), the day was packed with good sessions. I have particularly appreciated the PeopleTools Meet the Experts session, which allowed me to network with Oracle PeopleTools experts and share points of view with other partners and customers.

From a PeopleSoft perspective, the event has produced some news, but actually nothing unexpected or that was not rumoured on the internet in the latest weeks. Here is a summary of the news that I found more interesting (*):

• Fluid interface was the hottest topic from a PeopleSoft standpoint. As previously seen on this blog, Oracle announced the availability of the first applications in the coming days.
• Fluid is initially intended for casual and executive users, but there is a plan to extend it to the power users. Under my point of view, not only the interface would need to improve a bit in order to achieve that, but also the development should be somehow simplified, as currently designing Fluid pages requires more effort than traditional PIA pages.
• These are features in the roadmap for the Fluid interface: wizards for tile creation, related contents, activity guides and master/detail page template.
• Oracle has no plans to deliver PeopleSoft 9.3. Still, this does not mean that they will stop investing on PeopleSoft (read more).
• I was nicely surprised by the interest shown by attendants for the PeopleSoft Test Framework sessions. This tool has been around for a while, but the customer adoption has been slow. The new Continuous Delivery Model may bring some interest to this tool, as testing should become more iterative.
• On the architecture side, the ability to use the new in-memory features of Oracle DB 12c under PeopleTools 8.54 brings unprecedented performance to PeopleSoft environments. Still, you would need to dedicate a minimum of 100 Gb of memory to the in-memory part of the database SGA, but if you have the money, it seems worth going for it.

This has been a very interesting and intense week. Now, a few days to rest and return home, and then back to work with some new perspectives and ideas.

(*) Keep in mind Oracle's Safe Harbor statement, which practically says that what was presented during the sessions does not express a commitment from Oracle.