Must-See Products At Oracle OpenWorld

Oracle Open World.
More than 43,000 Oracle partners and customers will converge on San Francisco this week (and occupy every hotel room north of SFO airport) to attend Oracle OpenWorld 2008. There they can check out the latest news from the world's second largest software company about its database, middleware and application software.

Attendees can also check out what's hot from the more than 400 exhibitors on the show floor at the Moscone Center. Dozens of vendors, service providers and other companies in the Oracle ecosystem are expected to announce new products and services and we've collected 11 of them here to offer a taste of what Oracle OpenWorld attendees can expect.

To Infiniband And Beyond
Voltaire will showcase its Grid Director 2004, a 20 Gbps-DDR InfiniBand switch populated with InfiniBand ports and new 10-Gigabit Ethernet and storage gateways. Voltaire says it's the first switching provider to announce full Infiniband support for Oracle Real Application Clusters 11g. The company said companies can increase the performance of their applications by as much as 50 percent over Ethernet-based configurations.

Change For The Better
Need to reconfigure your Oracle E-Business Suite applications? Newmerix is showing the latest version of Newmerix Automate!Change, a comprehensive, integrated change management system for creating and executing reusable change workflow templates for Oracle E-Business Suite applications. The new release includes Unix remote command execution, SFTP file transfer and command line execution. With the solution users can create workflow templates through Oracle Forms Customizations and Personalizations and Oracle Framework Customizations. Newmerix said it's the only change management software that spans the entire change management lifecycle for Oracle EBS applications.

Pillar Of Oracle Society
Pillar Data Systems will announce customized profiles for Oracle database and application environments for its Axiom storage system. The profiles help IT centrally manage data storage within Oracle environments and improve system performance and uptime. The new product is tightly integrated with Oracle 10g and 11g databases, Oracle virtual machines and the Oracle Unbreakable Linux operating system.

Palm Reader
Having problems with "shoulder surfers," those people who hover around you while you're typing your password? At Oracle OpenWorld Fujitsu Computer Products of America will be showing off its new PalmSecure LogonDirector that uses a person's unique palm vein pattern for security. The technology embeds highly accurate biometric identification technology in a mouse that uses near-infrared light to capture a person's palm vein pattern. That generates a unique biometric template that's matched against a palm-vein pattern record stored in an encrypted repository.

Cutting Through The Haze
DBA's trying to figure out the contents of a database often feel like they're lurching about in a fog. Quest Software will be showing a new release of its Foglight Database Performance Analysis software that offers real-time analysis for diagnosing and tuning Oracle instance and application workloads. A new WebView component provides Web-based access, enhanced alerting and streamlined administration. Quest will also be showing a new release of its Toad for Data Analysis query and reporting tool with native support for the Sybase database and the ability to reverse-engineer SQL queries.

Say 'Yes' To Noetix
Noetix will be showing Noetix Views for Release 12, a new version of the vendor's report development software for Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 applications. The tool automatically creates business views of the database underlying the applications. Also on the show floor will be a new release of Noetix Generator that populates Business Objects, Cognos BI and Oracle BI reporting tools with data from Oracle E-Business Suite and PeopleSoft Enterprise data.

Special Delivery
F5 Networks will be showing a new application delivery networking system for Oracle's Siebel 8 CRM application the company is scheduled to formally debut Sept. 29. The system includes Viprion Application Delivery Controllers (pictured) and WAN optimization devices specifically tuned for Siebel CRM. The F5 solution ensures successful deployment of Siebel apps across the network.

No Gridlock Here
GridApp Systems will be showing Clarity 4.7, the next generation of the company's flagship database management system. New capabilities include the ability to automate operational and administrative tasks surrounding Oracle database upgrades, enhanced Real Application Clusters scaling, and more tools for day-to-day DBA tasks such as rotating logs, checking backups and inspecting audit logs.

Pumping (Application) Iron
Foundry Networks will be demonstrating ServerIron Software release 11.0, a new version of the software that runs the vendor's ServerIron line of application delivery and traffic management switches (pictured). A major enhancement is IPv6 support, including IPv6 management and IPv6 pass-through traffic handling. Other key enhancements include an improved graphical user interface for application management and monitoring, and TCP SIP server load balancing.

Special Delivery II
Zebra Technologies, which develops specialty printing and automatic identification solutions, will announce the Enterprise Connector Solution that allows direct label printing from ERP systems such as Oracle's. The product uses a PC-based graphical user interface for creating label designs the system converts into the Zebra Programming Language. The ZPL commands are used to generate the labels as the ERP system processes transactions.

Change For The Better II
Embarcadero Technologies will be showing off its new Embarcadero Change Manager 5.0 tool for managing changes in database configuration, schema and data. The new release provides developers and database administrators with new capabilities such as advanced schema to compare and alter functionality, configuration auditing, and data compare and synchronization features. The product comes in personal, standard, professional and ultimate editions and now supports the Oracle 11g, SQL server 2005 and 2008, Sybase 15 and DB2 9.5 databases.