As Published In November/December 2004

Editors' Choice Awards
By David Kelly

Selecting only a handful of Oracle technologists, administrators, and leaders from around the world to receive an award is a bittersweet exercise. All of the individual and group nominees that we considered are truly remarkable in some way—each committed to improving business processes through technology and pushing the limits of that technology—yet the nature of awards is such that they go to "the best."

The editors of Oracle Magazine are extremely proud of this year's winners. The women and men on the following pages represent some of the most innovative, interesting, visionary people from every region of the world working with or managing Oracle technology today. We suspect you'll be as impressed with them as we are. —Oracle Magazine Editorial Team

Rand Bell, Data Warehouse Architect of the Year 2004
David Browne, OTN Contributor of the Year 2004
Tim Bunce, Open Source Developer of the Year 2004
Angus Chan, Oracle JDeveloper Extension Developer of the Year 2004
Penny Cookson, Educator of the Year 2004
Cynthia Crane, CIO of the Year, Asia Pacific 2004
Thomas Czypulowski and the AUB Team, Integration Architects of the Year 2004
Berik Davies with Ordnance Survey Development Team, Beta Testers of the Year 2004
Ibrahim Fashho, Consultants of the Year 2004
Francisco Javier Gomez, CIO of the Year, Latin America 2004
Jeff Holt, Oracle Author of the Year 2004
Korey Knote, Data Warehouse Architect of the Year 2004
Marcel Kratochvil, PL/SQL Developer of the Year 2004
Rajesh Kumar, Early Adopter of the Year 2004, Oracle Grid Control
David Lindgren and Team, Early Adopters of the Year 2004, Oracle Application Server 10g
John MacAskill, DBA of the Year 2004
Grant McAlister, Data Warehouse Architect of the Year 2004
Maggie Miller, E-Business Innovator of the Year 2004
Cary Millsap, Oracle Author of the Year 2004
Les Morton, Jr., Early Adopter of the Year 2004, Oracle JDeveloper 10g
Peter Moser, Security Architect of the Year 2004
Kerem Par, Wireless Developer of the Year 2004
Jyotika (Joy) Patel, Portal Developer of the Year 2004
Steve Printz, CIO of the Year, North America 2004
Adrian Rietberg, Web Services Developer of the Year 2004
Vin Siegfried, IT Manager of the Year 2004
Antonio Sobral, CIO of the Year, Europe, Middle East, and Africa 2004
Catherine Szpindor, BI Development Manager of the Year 2004
Venkat Tipparam, Java Developer of the Year 2004
Matt Topper, Spatial Developer of the Year 2004
Geoff Zeiss, Early Adopter of the Year 2004, Oracle Database 10g

Steve Printz

Winner Specs Name: Steve Printz Job Title/Description: Vice President and Chief Information Officer Company: Pella Corporation Location: Pella, Iowa Award: CIO of the Year, North America 2004

Maintaining focus is the secret of Printz's success.

Most companies that are using Oracle products probably consider them part of their technology infrastructure or IT strategy. But not Pella Corporation, a leading manufacturer of windows and doors.

"Our business team really sees our Oracle implementation as a business strategy, not an IT strategy," says Steve Printz, vice president and CIO of Pella Corporation and Oracle Magazine's CIO of the Year for North America. "At Pella, our business drives the technology. The focus in IT is on making the business successful by leveraging our Oracle framework and enabling it to drive new business strategies that satisfy our customers better than our competition."

Unlike traditional manufacturing companies, Pella specializes in build-to-order products, so it doesn't have deep stockpiles of inventory or materials and therefore has to maintain amazingly tight control over its supply, production, and sales processes. However, a few years ago, Pella found itself hampered by its multitude of legacy business systems and data stores that couldn't easily or seamlessly deliver a unified view of its current customers, orders, or manufacturing status or, more strategically, enable Pella to take advantage of the growth opportunities it identified. As a result, Pella made the decision in 2000 to move to Oracle E-Business Suite 11i as the integrated solution for all applicable business applications, including sales, marketing, financials, and manufacturing.

For Printz, keeping the business and IT teams focused on strategic priorities such as the move to Oracle E-Business Suite is what leadership is all about. "It takes work and focus," says Printz. "It takes continuous reporting on the success of where you are in achieving the right metrics and making sure you're not wavering and going off on something that may or may not be important."

So far Pella has deployed Oracle E-Business Suite to two of its four divisions and is currently rolling it out to one of its largest divisions. The deployment will eventually span 10 factories and more than 2,000 users (in addition to the users of Oracle Sales and Marketing applications and in the call center).

"Oracle gives us more agility, enables our growth, gives us a consistent view of the customer, and has reduced our costs," says Printz. "Oracle is also a key component of our Lean initiative, which is a way of life at Pella. Having all our information in Oracle enables us to focus on the time, cost, and quality of our processes and constantly identify ways to remove unnecessary steps."

Although Oracle E-Business Suite has been a critical part of Pella's Lean initiatives, Printz admits that it hasn't been the most important component of the company's success. "Our people make the difference," says Printz. "We're blessed not only with a strong, professional IT team but end to end, from sales to manufacturing/ logistics, also with great people who work hard every day to improve on our time, cost, and quality imperatives."

Cynthia Crane

Winner Specs Name: Cynthia Crane Job Title/Description: Chief Information Officer Company: Cairns City Council Location: Queensland, Australia Award: CIO of the Year, Asia Pacific 2004

Consolidation helps CIO Crane raise the bar.

Sometimes a CIO's job just keeps growing.

"The more we improve our usage of appropriate enterprise architecture and IT applications systems, the higher the expectations of users will become. It enables them to focus on business issues," says Cynthia Crane, manager for information services at the Cairns City Council, in Queensland, Australia, and Oracle Magazine's CIO of the Year for the Asia Pacific (APAC) region.

In 2003 the Cairns City Council replaced a disparate legacy architecture, upgrading to Oracle E-Business Suite 11i running on Oracle Real Application Clusters and Red Hat Linux. The city's goal was to reduce the complexity and cost of delivering and supporting IT while giving its approximately 800 users efficient access to information to help achieve their business objectives.

"We wanted to make information more accessible and known to the business users who need it," says Crane. "The more information we can make easily available to them, the more effective their decisions will be. So far with this particular implementation of the Oracle architecture, we've achieved improvements in supply-chain processes and now are gaining the benefits of better business intelligence reporting and analysis from our corporate systems."

Making government more effective and efficient is an important goal for the Cairns City Council, which provides local government services for more than 120,000 residents of tropical northern Queensland, an area of Australia that is home to sandy beaches, tropical rainforests, and the Great Barrier Reef. From maintaining local roads to managing compliance activities, the effectiveness and efficiency of Cairns City Council's operations are directly felt by residents and visitors. "Our community is directly impacted by how we operate," says Crane.

Moving to a consistent and consolidated enterprise architecture built around Oracle also paid off financially. "With Oracle we put in place a better architecture to support the use of technology while cutting costs significantly," says Crane. "We saved 35 percent of our support costs in one area alone and expect to save up to 75 percent in software, hardware, and maintenance costs over the next two to three years."

Although the financial impact of her decisions is important, Crane sees her job as more than just managing the bottom line. She believes in helping people reduce the overwhelming nature of technologies down to solutions that make the most sense for the business. "It's important to have a vision and an understanding of where you need to be from both a business and a technology standpoint," says Crane. "There is a tendency for people jump to solutions without thinking through the problem. Instead, we think about business solutions first and aim to use technology as a business enabler."

Antonio Sobral

Winner Specs Name: Antonio Sobral Job Title/Description: Chief Information Officer Company: OGMA-Indústria Aeronaútica de Portugal, S.A. Location: Alverca, Portugal Award: CIO of the Year, Europe, Middle East, and Africa 2004

OGMA CIO leads a successful midflight transformation of his company's IT system.

Reassuringly, it's well known that airplane designers strive to make airplanes resilient, so that a problem with a single component doesn't necessarily result in a catastrophic failure. So it's not surprising that Antonio Sobral, chief information officer for Portugal's leading aircraft maintenance company, OGMA, brought that same concept of resilience to his IT architecture.

"We need our systems to work. If they don't work, it is very, very difficult. In the past, if there was a problem with our old UNIX servers, it could take days to resolve," says Sobral, Oracle Magazine's CIO of the Year for Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA). To remedy the problem, Sobral led OGMA's IT infrastructure transformation from UNIX to a clustered Linux environment in early 2004. Today, OGMA is running Oracle E-Business Suite 11i on 18 Intel-based servers, along with Oracle9i Database, Oracle9i Application Server, and more than 2TB of storage.

"I had the objective to restructure our IT infrastructure and applications in a short period, and we did," adds Sobral. "With our new system, if one server fails or we have troubles, the other server will cover the functionality of the server that failed. It's much better in fault tolerance."

With the goal of converting and upgrading the company's systems in less than four months, the challenge was similar to changing an airplane engine in midflight. Sobral, OGMA, and Oracle Portugal were successful and did a live cutover and upgrade of key business applications from the existing UNIX servers to the upgraded versions running on the Linux cluster. "Although we had to work weekends and after hours to complete the entire project in three and a half months," says Sobral, "the Oracle Portugal team was great and had a good relationship with our OGMA team. Their collaboration was key to our success."

And it was successful. Sobral estimates that OGMA has increased performance threefold, reduced wait times per request to a seventh of what they were, and increased daily report usage by 35 percent—all while saving a minimum of 35 percent—or roughly c1 million—in operations costs alone. "Now we have one of the most integrated ERP systems in Europe," says Sobral. "The results of our migration have been incredible. It's enabled us to provide much lower costs, higher performance, high availability, easy scalability, and hardware vendor independence."

Sobral also planned for the future during the upgrade, by working to eliminate the extensive customization done on the previous versions of the applications. "Not only did the migration save us money today but it will also pay off in the future, by giving us more flexibility, reduced costs, and the ability to take advantage of future upgrades quickly and inexpensively," says Sobral. "We should be able to upgrade to future versions in a weekend."

Francisco Javier Gomez

Winner Specs Name: Francisco Javier Gomez Job Title/Description: Chief Information Officer Company: Grupo Bimbo Location: Mexico City, Mexico Award: CIO of the Year, Latin America 2004

Grupo Bimbo CIO leads by following.

One of the secrets to Francisco Javier Gomez's IT success is being a fast follower, letting other companies make the mistakes and learning from them. "We have a strategy of being a fast follower," says Gomez, Oracle Magazine's CIO of the Year for Latin America. "We watch the evolution of new technologies and the mistakes other companies make when first implementing them to learn how to avoid those mistakes and implement solutions more quickly."

It's a strategy that's paid off well for Mexico City-based Grupo Bimbo, an international baking company with 74 plants in 14 countries, more than 70,000 workers, and 26,000 trucks serving more than 26,000 delivery routes. "Our business doesn't change as fast as others do," says Gomez. "It's a very high-volume, low-margin business, so we carefully evaluate new technologies and then implement them fast without disrupting the business at all."

A good example of Gomez's strategy is Grupo Bimbo's deployment of Oracle E-Business Suite, which it initiated in 2001 to serve as the foundation for all of its new systems. "Implementing Oracle E-Business Suite has really helped us gain greater efficiencies between our supply chain and the demand from our customers," says Gomez. "It's given us greater efficiency, reduced our costs, and eliminated a lot of waste."

Although Grupo Bimbo wasn't the first bakery company to deploy an ERP solution, it learned enough from other ERP implementations to allow it to streamline its Oracle deployment and ensure success across 70-plus plants in more than a dozen countries. "Although we arrived late to the ERP world, we're gaining the benefit of using the latest versions of software and the ability to deploy solidly and quickly," says Gomez. "In fact, we're so confident of our approach and Oracle E-Business Suite 11i that we use a "big bang" type approach in each plant we roll out to, without the need for or expense of parallel systems."

That kind of success and confidence is important, especially in a low-margin business such as baking, where eliminating waste and maximizing opportunities is critical to increasing profits. "Our bread is typically on the shelf for only two days, so we need to be very precise in our operations," says Gomez. "Grupo Bimbo pioneered just-in-time bakery production in 1946, and we continue to refine it today. If we put too much product on the shelves, it's wasted. If we don't put enough, we lose revenue and opportunities and can never recover lost sales."

Building on the company's Oracle foundation, Gomez sees additional business intelligence and management capabilities as key to helping keep the right amount of the right products on the store shelves at the right time. "We are currently implementing Oracle Corporate Performance Management, to help us stay close to our customers, give us better market segmentation, and enable us to customize our plants for our current needs to generate increased revenue."

Vin Siegfried

Winner Specs Name: Vin Siegfried Job Title/Description: Information Delivery Architect and Program Manager Company: JPMorgan Chase Location: New York, New York Award: IT Manager of the Year 2004

Cyclist creates an expense management solution for heterogeneous systems.

Mountain biking and corporate technology might not seem connected, but to cyclist Vin Siegfried they're essentially the same thing.

"At the core, being an effective mountain biker means dashing forward while relying on the tech platform beneath you—the bike—to keep you moving and safe," says Siegfried, information delivery architect and program manager at JPMorgan Chase and Oracle Magazine's IT Manager of the Year. "Using technology in corporate America today is very much the same experience—we're hurtling along at a very fast rate of speed and relying on very advanced technology to keep us up and running."

Previously, JPMorgan Chase managed expenses through some manual intervention, review, and reconciliation to its financial applications. With limited automation and tools, it was a challenge to maintain the established high standard of expense management discipline.

To address this issue, JPMorgan Chase Global Finance Technology created a solution called EMPort (Expense Management Portal) that allows the financial management community and cost center managers worldwide to better understand their expenses, generate consistent reports, and do analysis. The portal uses an array of technologies, including Oracle Reports, for standard reporting; Oracle Discoverer, for ad hoc queries; and Oracle Portal as the context-rich container with single sign-on and integrated content management. Because JPMorgan Chase already uses these building block components in a variety of programs, the technology team was able to hit the ground running. The initial project was completed in less than six months through a series of rapid implementation cycles.

"EMPort provides a one-stop shop for managing expenses and allows our financial professionals to spend more time on value-add advisory activities and less time pulling data together," says Siegfried, who, together with his team and boss Rick Thompson, articulated a vision for consistent information delivery and common services architecture that is core to the success of a broad base of programs, including client profitability, planning and forecasting, finance dashboards, and others.

The new expense management solution is part of an overall program that has replaced 10 individual point applications with 1 application, for significant savings. Efficiencies have been gained as well—for example, the firm now has almost instant access to invoices. In addition, the improved analytics allow the discovery of savings opportunities on an ongoing basis.

But it's also just the beginning. "The expense management solution is really just an example of our broader strategy. It's not just about how we delivered information to manage expenses. It's also about using an orchestrated, consistent set of tools within a portal context to deliver information," says Siegfried. "Information out of context is useless. We feel that by driving it through our portal environment, we can provide the highest degree of context and the least amount of manual data collection for all information, and that's our larger strategy."

Maggie Miller

Winner Specs Name: Maggie Miller Job Title/Description: Chief Information Officer Company: Sainsbury's Location: London, England Award: E-Business Innovator of the Year 2004

CIO keeps the lights on during a major IT transformation.

If you think ensuring that you have enough food for your own family's meal during the holiday season is tough, try doing it for millions of people.

"We have more than 11 million customers depending on us for their holiday meals and celebration suppers as well as their daily needs," says Maggie Miller, CIO of London's Sainsbury's food retailer and Oracle Magazine's E-Business Innovator of the Year. "The Oracle infrastructure and database are extremely important to us, and we are committed to the platform, for its resilience, reliability, and scalability, because the volumes are simply huge," adds Miller. "With those kinds of numbers, we have to keep this thing moving, or we'll have a lot of disappointed customers. It focuses the mind a little."

With more than 140,000 employees at 580 grocery stores, 225 gas stations, and 50 convenience stores, Sainsbury's handles 13 million customer transactions in an average week and many more during the holiday season.

To meet these types of needs and enable the business to continue to grow, Miller and her team are transforming Sainsbury's IT, replacing all of the IT systems through a £1.8 billion transformational outsourcing deal with Accenture. "The proposition of revamping all the IT systems to enable significant business change without having the wheels fall off the business was a real challenge," says Miller. "But we needed to undertake a complete replatforming and replacement with packaged solutions on a standard architecture, because we had been spending 95 percent of our annual IT budget to simply keep the lights on, which left precious little for investment in new technologies."

Under Miller's leadership, Sainsbury's set out to reduce the cost of the keeping-the-lights-on IT budget by 50 percent over seven years while plowing some of the savings back into new initiatives and systems to deliver incremental business benefits. "We've achieved a lot to date but the focus is now on making sure we get maximum benefit from the systems in place," says Miller.

Oracle is a key component of Sainsbury's success. "We use Oracle E-Business Suite applications for our back-office environment. The finance and HR applications have given us great tools to allow those departments to reengineer their processes and capabilities to achieve what's required," says Miller. "But more pervasive is our use of the Oracle database and infrastructure, because we've relied on those totally to provide the resilience, scalability, and reliability we need for the transaction volumes we run, which are just huge. That's probably a good thing for all of our customers, especially at holiday time."

John MacAskill

Winner Specs Name: John MacAskill Job Title/Description: Oracle Services Manager Company: Attain IT Location: Sydney, Australia Award: DBA of the Year 2004

Fascination with Oracle technology pays off for Australian DBA.

Although still cluttered as usual with computers, the home of John MacAskill has recently gotten a little more peaceful. MacAskill's keen interest in the latest Oracle technology hasn't been limited to working hours—it keeps him occupied well into the evening. "My wife is happy that the Oracle 10g beta program is finished," says MacAskill, who works as the Oracle services manager at Attain IT in Sydney and is Oracle Magazine's DBA of the Year. "I have to admit that I went home from work to a house full of computers and tinkered for hours, so she didn't see much of me during that period."

But that tinkering and extra work on the Oracle 10g beta program paid off for MacAskill and his former employer, the National Electricity Market Management Company (NEMMCO). By getting involved with the Oracle 10g beta programs early, MacAskill and his team were able to design a migration path from a very complex, Microsoft Windows-based environment with multiple highly replicated but independent databases to a grid environment using Oracle 10g and Linux. The design was completed, tested, and ready for immediate implementation when Oracle 10g went live.

While the Oracle 10g advances made migration to a grid environment practical for MacAskill's former company, they've also altered the role of the DBA—a change that doesn't bother MacAskill. "I've always been open to new approaches. The Oracle technologies are changing, and we need to adapt and change with them," MacAskill says. "The role of the DBA has shifted from the nuts-and-bolts, 'keeping things running' mode to one that's focused on architectural design and improving the overall architecture, performance, and manageability of business applications."

One way MacAskill opens himself to new approaches is by becoming involved in beta programs whenever possible. "With this rate of technology change, you can't sit back and wait for the next wave to hit you. You've got to get there early," he says. "I learn my best when I'm actually playing with the technology, and being involved with the beta programs for Oracle 10g and Oracle Application Server 10g let me do that."

While there are plenty of other products that he can implement for customers, MacAskill finds the Oracle product set compelling. "One thing that Oracle has done very well recently is the integration of the entire technology stack. Other vendors provide individual products that do pretty much everything, but Oracle's put a lot of effort into integrating the technology stack from top to bottom while still supporting open standards. So you can plug in any industry-standard component if you want."

MacAskill is particularly excited about the possibilities of grid computing. "It opens up a whole new world of possibilities for quality of service and availability that you can deliver to your end customer. It's a completely different way of looking at things." This new approach is benefiting MacAskill's customers in his new role. With Attain IT, MacAskill and his Oracle services team are implementing Oracle 10g grid architectures for existing and new customers, who are reaping the rewards of the new database and application server grid capabilities. Hopefully, though, for his wife's sake, it'll be at least a year before he attempts to set up a grid in his house.

Ibrahim Fashho

Winner Specs Name: Ibrahim Fashho Job Title/Description: Senior Manager Company: Dell Database and Application Solutions Engineering Group Location: Austin, Texas Award: Consultants of the Year 2004

Fashho and his group bring standardization to the consulting realm.

Although you might not think of Dell's Database and Application Solutions Engineering Group as a consulting organization, it is, in effect, functioning like one—creating a solution to fit the specific requirements of each customer.

"We proactively design configurations with hardware/software solution stacks that will meet our customers' demands and requirements," says Ibrahim Fashho, senior manager of Dell's Database and Application Solutions Engineering Group, and winner, along with his team, of Oracle Magazine's Consultants of the Year award. "When a customer comes to Dell with its requirements, we can match it most of the time with one of our already designed and tested configurations, saving it time, money, and resources. In contrast, with traditional consultants, every deal is always a one-off or custom solution."

In a similar approach to how Dell changed the way PCs were sold, its approach to consulting is different from a traditional consultant's. By focusing on creating predefined, preintegrated, and pretested configurations of industry-standard building blocks such as Dell servers, OS software, Oracle software, storage devices, and interconnects, Dell's Database and Application Solutions Engineering Group created a way for Dell to sell solutions tailored for specific customer requirements while ensuring that the solutions work well together and that the customers can get them up and running quickly. These solution stack configurations, which go through a rigorous test cycle before they get delivered to the field, also include internally developed deployment CDs, deployment guides, and solution deliverable lists to ensure successful deployment.

"The team, in its current setup and under the current name and charter, has been in place for just over one year. Before that, we had only two Oracle solution offerings on a couple of Dell server models: a single Oracle9i server configuration and an Oracle9i Real Application Clusters (RAC) configuration," says Fashho. "Now we support the entire breadth of Dell two-way and four-way servers, the Dell/EMC CX series storage line, our SCSI storage enclosures, both Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 2.1 and 3, and both Oracle9i and Oracle 10g—in standalone as well as RAC environments. We also support Oracle Database 10g Standard Edition One on Windows 2003 and RHEL 3 on select standalone PowerEdge servers and offer it in factory-installed configurations. With up-front planning and market analysis, we've dramatically increased the range of preconfigured Oracle solutions Dell can deliver to its customers."

As reflected in its approach to the PC business, Dell believes that industry-standard components enable it to deliver solution-oriented products to market quickly and efficiently. "Once you standardize, prices usually go down—compared to purchasing proprietary solutions—and you end up paying a lot less for the same service at the end of the day," says Fashho. "We think that this is a winning solution for our customers."

Catherine Szpindor

Winner Specs Name: Catherine Szpindor Job Title/Description: Vice President of IT Enterprise Services Company: Nextel Location: Reston, Virginia Award: BI Development Manager of the Year 2004

Nextel VP manages complete redesign of financial reporting, business intelligence, and data warehouse systems.

Nextel's company slogan is Nextel.DONE. Such a slogan represents a real challenge when you're talking about a company with 17,000 employees and US$10 billion in annual revenue. In an enterprise of this size, you might think that completely redesigning the financial reporting, business intelligence, and data warehouse systems would be a lengthy, expensive project. Not so with a manager such as Catherine Szpindor in charge.

"We will actually achieve our expected three-year return on investment in 18 months," says Catherine Szpindor, vice president of IT enterprise services and Oracle Magazine's BI Development Manager of the Year. "We've gone through a multiyear transformation of how we look at data. Our businesspeople were spending too much of their time manipulating, programming, and generating reports. Now they can focus their time on analyzing the right data to make the right business decisions."

With a corporate mandate to continuously improve customer service, Spzindor's team integrated and consolidated data warehouses and their financial systems. The company also upgraded its portal to provide single sign-on and access to financial, HR, and other applications. With more than 10,000 users and 40TB of data in its Oracle9i data warehouse, it was no small feat.

Such massive change requires strong executive support and collaboration, which Nextel enabled through a governance structure comprising several committees of key business users and senior management that helped prioritize and drive the decisions about the data warehouse. "Building a single version of the truth. That was really the drive for the executives," says Szpindor. "They wanted the reports they are using to come from a data source where the appropriate business metrics are applied."

According to Szpindor, 75 percent of Nextel's users just a few years ago were directly accessing raw data and spending a lot of time generating reports for themselves. "We've flipped the scales, so that now only 15 to 20 percent of users go directly against operational data. Our 10,000 users are going in and getting data that has already been transformed and already had business rules applied. That allows them to get the information they need for running the business. That's what this is really all about. It's enabled more-proactive business decisions and knowledge transfer within the business."

Szpindor attributes a large part of Nextel's success to the company's close partnership with Oracle. "I can't say enough about the individuals from Oracle we've worked with. They've given 100 percent in helping us make this work," she concludes.

Venkat Tipparam

Winner Specs Name: Venkat Tipparam Job Title/Description: Director of Engineering Company: Agile Software Location: Bangalore, India Award: Java Developer of the Year 2004

Developer uses Oracle technology to Java-tize a flagship product.

As you'd expect, Oracle Magazine's Java Developer of the Year doesn't just sit behind a desk, writing reports. "I love to get my hands dirty," says Venkat Tipparam, director of engineering at Agile Software's overseas development center in Bangalore, India. "Although I manage a team of 15 developers, coding is very close to my heart."

With nearly 1,200 customers, Agile is a leading provider of product lifecycle management (PLM) software, helping companies such as Boeing, Dell, and Hitachi plan, define, build, and support their products. Two years ago, Agile decided to rewrite its flagship product from scratch in Java, using open standards, Oracle Application Server, and Oracle Database. The result was a component-based architecture that Agile's customers can easily customize. "J2EE is a perfect way to get there. I can't imagine a better way to do it than by using J2EE," says Tipparam.

Agile has made Oracle Application Server 10g the default offering for new customers. "Customers love Oracle Application Server, because it's very compact, performs well, and conforms to J2EE standards. It's also very easy to manage," says Tipparam. The Oracle architecture was a key part of the overall application redesign. "We decided to move to Oracle Application Server because it's a well-designed and stable product and has good J2EE support," says Tipparam. "Our customers are very excited that our new product is based on open standards."

Adrian Rietberg

Winner Specs Name: Adrian Rietberg Job Title/Description: COO Company: Infomedics Location: Almere, The Netherlands Award: Web Services Developer of the Year 2004

Innovative COO pioneers use of Web services.

When you're a young company in a crowded market such as medical-payment processing, it's important to have a competitive advantage. That's why the Dutch company Infomedics, founded in 2001, turned to Web services as the core of its payment-processing service.

"In order to gain our fair share of the market and convince a wide variety of doctors, hospitals, and insurance companies to use our services, we had to deliver substantial cost savings," says Adrian Rietberg, chief operating officer of Infomedics and Oracle Magazine's Web Services Developer of the Year. "Using Web services allowed us to design an infrastructure that reduces the typical processing costs from US$3 per invoice down to 30 cents per invoice."

The application includes four main Web services: an electronic invoice service, a payment-information service, an ex-ante check (a master patient index used to validate insurance status), and a billing-management service. In conjunction with Oracle, Rietberg's developers built the application using Oracle9i JDeveloper and deployed it on Oracle9i Application Server for scalability. "One of the things we wanted in a technology partner was a partner that can handle volume," says Rietberg. "We're processing 2 million claims per year and hope to capture a much larger portion of the 100 million that are being processed in the Netherlands. Since we started [working with Web services] a few years ago, the standards have evolved, and the Oracle platform and applications have been able to adapt as the standards adapt. It's been great."

Tim Bunce

Winner Specs Name: Tim Bunce Job Title/Description: Owner/Consultant Company: Data Plan Services Location: Ennis, County Clare, Ireland Award: Open Source Developer of the Year 2004

Creative consultant gives Perl developers access to the database.

Some people write novels or paint as a creative outlet; Tim Bunce writes interfaces to databases. "The work I put into DBI is very rarely to satisfy my own business problems. I'm putting the effort in because I just like the creativity of it," says Bunce. It's certainly work that has paid off—if not financially, than at least in popularity. Perl DBI is a database-independent interface for the popular Perl language, which has become the first choice for tens of thousands of companies worldwide since its release in 1994. Bunce also created and supports a DBI-based interface for Oracle.

"I like open source development, because it's driven by a need," says Oracle Magazine's Open Source Developer of the Year. "There's a much tighter feedback loop between the users and the developers." Although he has devoted a huge amount of his personal time to Perl and the DBI and DBD::Oracle projects over the past decade, Bunce is struggling to find ways to fund the development time that's needed to update DBI for Perl 6 and its new virtual machine, Parrot. In essence, how can he earn a living as a consultant and find enough time to make the critical updates for DBI, even though it's not part of his job?

"That's a jolly good question," he admits, "but I'm working on it."

Angus Chan

Winner Specs Name: Angus Chan Job Title/Description: Project Manager Company: Visual Paradigm International Location: Hong Kong Award: Oracle JDeveloper Extension Developer of the Year 2004

Project manager and team build Oracle JDeveloper extension that offers more UML capability.

Although UML modeling vendor Visual Paradigm has integrated its flagship product with nine development environments, its experience in building an extension for Oracle JDeveloper was unique.

"Because Oracle JDeveloper has UML capabilities, we were concerned that Oracle would think of us as a competitor," says Angus Chan, project manager, Visual Paradigm, and Oracle Magazine's Oracle JDeveloper Extension Developer of the Year. "Instead, Oracle was excited by the possibilities of the additional functionality we could bring and even showcased our tool at the Java One conference. It's been quite open-minded and supportive of us."

Developed by Chan and a four-member team in about seven days, Visual Paradigm's JDeveloper Extension enables developers to do a wide range of UML-related activities from directly within Oracle JDeveloper, including requirement capturing, domain analysis, and code round-trip engineering between UML diagrams and source code.

"The documentation and the open API provided by Oracle JDeveloper are quite comprehensive," says Chan. The Visual Paradigm team was also able to call on Oracle for second opinions on look-and-feel—ensuring that the functionality matched the Oracle JDeveloper environment as closely as possible.

"With other IDE vendors, we had to simply depend on the documentation and the APIs they provided," says Chan, "but Oracle's JDeveloper team was proactive in helping us and being available to review the usability of our integration. I was impressed by how helpful Oracle was during the whole process."

With more than 12,000 downloads a month of the trial version (www.visual-paradigm.com/sdejd.php), Chan says the integration is a success and he's looking forward to future collaborations with Oracle.

Marcel Kratochvil

Winner Specs Name: Marcel Kratochvil Job Title/Description: Chief Technical Officer Company: Piction Location: Sydney, Australia Award: PL/SQL Developer of the Year 2004

Coding whiz gets even more efficient with Oracle 10g.

You might not associate PL/SQL with field hockey, but Marcel Kratochvil has a hard time keeping PL/SQL out of anything—particularly his favorite sport. "I'm excited about the new application I've written that enables any team, club, or association to manage all of its players, registration, and games as well as put out reports, newsletters, and Web pages," says Kratochvil, chief technical officer of Piction and Oracle Magazine's PL/SQL Developer of the Year. "I've even used Oracle's encryption facility so that the whole thing can be stored securely."

Not surprisingly for a man who writes (by his own estimation) approximately 400,000 lines of code per year, this is not the only project he's working on. "I'm working simultaneously on eight projects right now. Over the past 12 months, I've developed PL/SQL applications for a shipping company, the Australian Botanical Gardens, and the Australian War Memorial, as well as a variety of other organizations."

That's in addition to completely rewriting Piction's core image management system in Oracle Database 10g. "I actually made the business decision to rewrite Piction, because the architecture of Oracle 10g has improved so much from earlier versions such as Oracle8," says Kratochvil. "I'm making use of some of the great new features in Oracle10g, and as a result, I can cut my code development down by a factor of three."

Piction originally focused on the wedding photography market, providing a service that enabled photographers and photo labs to display and sell photographs online, but its main focus today is museums and galleries. "We build systems for the internet, and they are used by museums and galleries that have hundreds of thousands of images. One of our biggest customers is the Australian War Memorial, which has more than 500,000 images and documents in an Oracle database and is making a large amount of money selling them online, using Piction."

To be a successful PL/SQL developer, says Kratochvil, a person must understand more than just SQL calls. "I firmly believe that DBAs and developers should be working closely together rather than in separate areas, as I've seen in lots of organizations. Although I develop a lot of applications, I always come in from the standpoint of the DBA, thinking about scalability and security in all cases at all times."

Although he also develops in Java and other languages, Kratochvil continues to be a strong PL/SQL advocate. "It's very easy to develop things very quickly in PL/SQL, but it's also very powerful, flexible, and easy to maintain. The fact that it works so well and so quickly inside the Oracle database means that you can pretty much do anything you want with it."

Jyotika (Joy) Patel

Winner Specs Name: Jyotika (Joy) Patel Job Title/Description: Manager, Business Strategy and Architecture Company: Unocal Corporation Location: El Segundo, California Award: Portal Developer of the Year 2004

Corporate portal at Unocal consolidates numerous intranet sites.

It's a conundrum worthy of Lewis Carroll or a Zen koan: how to have one thing that is many things.

That is the essence of myUnocal, an enterprise information portal serving more than 5,500 worldwide Unocal users. It brings together disparate business information into a coherent form that enables employees to access data and applications in context. "We've gained value by being able to take our structured and unstructured information and have it presented via myUnocal to create a unified experience," says Jyotika (Joy) Patel, manager of Business Strategy and Architecture at Unocal, and Oracle Magazine's Portal Developer of the Year.

"With myUnocal, we were able to consolidate numerous intranet sites into a consistent corporate portal," says Patel. "myUnocal has also facilitated dynamic and personalized employee self-service, financial information management, operations reporting, and virtual collaboration." The portal framework and development platform allow for reuse of many components (portlets) for a variety of purposes. myUnocal also provides an environment where Unocal's exploration and production communities can collaborate and share information across departmental boundaries and geographical barriers. By nature, the portal is a never-ending set of possibilities.

myUnocal is built on the Oracle9i Application Server Portal platform; uses Oracle9i Database; and integrates information from Oracle Financials, Oracle Human Resources, and numerous other data sources. The Oracle Portal Development Kit (PDK) and Java Portal Development Kit (JPDK) tools are used to build reusable components. Unocal is an Oracle On Demand customer. "We're in the planning process now with On Demand to globalize our hosted portal to include two other regional portal instances. Our motivation for globalization is to have fewer systems, provide better controls, and enhance access to information across the organization," says Patel.

A key part of Unocal's success has been in standardization, which has been supported by all levels of the organization. "We fully believe that by managing fewer systems, we reduce our integration burden and increase our ability to gain more value from better information management practices. We leveraged our existing technology investments with Oracle to establish an enterprise information portal that met our current and future needs," says Patel. "Because portals embrace many open standards, it was important for us to work with a technology partner that supported these standards through its products.

"Unocal has been able to partner with Oracle, a business technology provider whose products and services match our short- and long-term objectives."

Matt Topper

Winner Specs Name: Matt Topper Job Title/Description: Technical Lead Company: R.L. Polk and Company Location: Southfield, Michigan Award: Spatial Developer of the Year 2004

Technical lead spearheads development of a new version of his company's ad hoc data analysis application for the automobile industry.

Kerem Par

Winner Specs Name: Kerem Par Job Title/Description: Director of Engineering Company: Infotech Mobile and Location Based Technologies Location: Istanbul, Turkey Award: Wireless Developer of the Year 2004

Bicontinental winner leverages multiple Oracle technologies for tracking application.

Living on one continent and working on another puts a whole new slant on being a mobile worker. But it's all in a day's work for Kerem Par, director of Engineering at Infotech in Istanbul and Oracle Magazine's Wireless Developer of the Year. "My office is in Europe, and I live across the Bosphorus in Asia," says Par. "So, each day I go from one continent to another."

Perhaps that's why Par is so interested in wireless mobile applications, including AssetTracker, a Web-enabled mobile and GSM positioning-based tracking system designed by Par and currently deployed to more than 1,000 corporate customers of the biggest GSM operator in Turkey, Turkcell, for continuously tracking more than 15,000 individual mobile phones.

"We used lots of Oracle technologies in this product, including Oracle9i with the Spatial option, to store geographical data; Data Guard, to provide high availability; Oracle Application Server 10g, as the middle tier; and Oracle JDeveloper, for development," says Par. "All of the applications are Java-based, including JSP and intelligent applets that are the main interfaces to the clients and Web services for integration into corporate business systems. And unlike GPS systems that require investment in specialized equipment and configuration, any standard GSM phone is enough with AssetTracker."

Grant McAlister, Korey Knote, and Rand Bell

Winner Specs Name: Grant McAlister, Korey Knote, and Rand Bell Job Title/Description: Data Warehouse Architects Company: Amazon.com Location: Seattle, Washington Award: Data Warehouse Architects of the Year 2004

A team of experts leverages individual competencies to migrate an enormous warehouse.

When confronted with an enormous database migration project recently, Amazon.com determined that the most critical issue wasn't the size of the data warehouse that needed migrating but rather the reach of the data warehouse architect role. "A project of this magnitude is hard to execute with a single architect," says Rand Bell, data warehouse architect at Amazon.com, who along with coworkers Grant McAlister and Korey Knote are Oracle Magazine's Data Warehouse Architects of the Year. "That's why we assembled a team with domain-specific expertise that could work in parallel. These areas of expertise included optimization of Oracle, Oracle implementation, and the hardware and operating systems. The members' ability to team efficiently and with outstanding synergy enabled the project's success."

Amazon first assembled a team of architects, each with specific domain expertise, to develop the strategy and the architecture. The team, Bell, Knote, and McAlister, created a proof-of-concept platform that carried a subset of the production workload. Once that proved successful, the team migrated the data warehouse to the new environment, with no impact on the user experience.

When Bell says magnitude, he means big. Amazon migrated a 15-plus-terabyte enterprise data warehouse from proprietary hardware and operating systems to Linux, running on commodity hardware and Oracle9i Real Application Clusters (RAC). "Moving to Oracle9i RAC running on Linux clusters lowered the cost of ownership of the system dramatically and made the environment more scalable, available, and flexible than its predecessor while improving the user experience and adding capacity where analysts could innovate and discover," says Knote, a systems architect at Amazon.com.

Key to the success of the new warehouse, which was put into production on schedule, under budget, and with minimal impact to users, was the innovative team approach Amazon used for designing the data warehouse architecture. "We migrated to the new environment with no impact on the user experience," says Bell. "The old and the new systems both carried production load during the migration, and the work was gradually migrated from the old to the new, improving the user experience and adding capacity so that analysts could innovate and discover."

Although a dedicated focus on scalability and innovation made the overall project a success, McAlister, a database architect, believes that something else helped make the architecture team successful. "We have an environment that allows open, candid communications; empowers individuals to make significant decisions; and continually encourages innovation and new approaches," he says. Also important are Amazon's partnerships with Red Hat; HP; and Oracle. "Amazon and Oracle have been able to partner extremely well," concludes Bell.

Thomas Czypulowski

Winner Specs Name: Thomas Czypulowski and the AUB Team Job Title/Description: Project Manager, AUB team Company: TUI AG Location: Hannover, Germany Award: Integration Architects of the Year 2004

Architect and team develop an integrated end-to-end business travel solution.

Although many organizations have spent years automating their supply chains, there's one area of spending that's been difficult to streamline: travel expenses. "Our team recognized that for many companies, business travel can be a huge budget item that isn't handled by standard e-procurement applications, because it needs to cope with extreme volatility in content and pricing, complex travel policies, and the difficulties associated with last-minute trip changes and approvals," says Oracle Magazine's Integration Architect of the Year, Thomas Czypulowski.

To address the problem, Czypulowski, a project manager at TUI AG, and his team of developers (the AUB team) envisioned an online end-to-end business travel solution that could support travel procurement, from booking through expensing, to the automatic entry and matching of travel agency invoices and records in back-end ERP systems such as SAP. The team recognized the role Oracle E-Business Suite and iProcurement could play in making this vision a reality.

"Typically, organizations have tools, such as online booking engines, travel expense applications, and back-end financials and payment packages," says Czypulowski. "We have integrated this entire process, passing essential data between the systems involved and coordinating the handover to a client's existing back-end financials package for financial booking and payment." The solution integrates the Oracle E-Business Suite, the Aergo online booking engine, and a client's existing back-end system, using Oracle Applications Interconnect.

Peter Moser

Winner Specs Name: Peter Moser Job Title/Description: Security Architect for Telco Solutions Company: Swisscom Services Location: Bern, Switzerland Award: Security Architect of the Year 2004

Swisscom's Moser creates a secure architecture for corporate portals.

What does it take to give 50,000 users at 4,500 companies secure, single-sign-on access through a centralized portal to a wide variety of Microsoft Windows, Linux, UNIX, and other applications? Oracle Internet Directory, according to Peter Moser, Oracle Magazine's Security Architect of the Year.

"We had all types of applications based on a variety of different platforms—including Windows, Linux, UNIX, and Oracle—that we wanted to get into one portal with a single sign-on," says Moser, security architect for Telco Solutions, Swisscom IT Services at Swisscom, the leading company in telecom solutions in Switzerland. "After investigating lots of products, we found that Oracle Internet Directory was the only single-sign-on solution that could do validation and synchronization between Microsoft's Active Directory and OID."

The portal enables Swisscom employees as well as customers to securely access a broad range of applications related to their telecom and data services—everything from changing the access rate on their routers, switches, or networks to checking their bills or changing their address. "This approach is great for Swisscom Enterprise Solutions, because now they have only one user environment and access to all the applications is based on roles, so it's very easy to change," says Moser.

David Lindgren

Winner Specs Name: David Lindgren and team Job Title/Description: IT Director Company: Qualcomm CDMA Technologies Location: San Diego, California Award: Early Adopters of the Year 2004, Oracle Application Server 10g

IT director and team blaze the Oracle Application Server 10g trail.

As the result of the early adoption and extensive deployment of the complete suite of Oracle Application Server 10g components in a highly available deployment at Qualcomm CDMA Technologies (QCT), David Lindgren, IT director at QCT, and the QCT IT team are Oracle Magazine's Early Adopters of the Year 2004, Oracle Application Server 10g. "We're a compelling story for Oracle Application Server 10g," says Lindgren.

QCT needed to build an integrated infrastructure to support IT operation and host internal and external custom applications, including document sharing with suppliers; a chip-testing work-request system; custom portals for Oracle E-Business Suite; and an extranet supporting custom engineering applications, business applications, and portals.

QCT implemented an integrated IT infrastructure system with multiple Oracle Application Server components, including Oracle Application Server Containers for J2EE, TopLink, Oracle Application Server 10g HTTP Server, Web Services, Portal, Oracle Enterprise Manager, Web Cache, Reports, Discoverer, Oracle Internet Directory (OID), InterConnect, and Workflow, all implemented on a high-availability platform. "When we received Oracle Application Server 10g beta, we had very good success with it," says Todd Beets, IT lead architect at QCT. "It had all the necessary options for high-availability configuration, improvements in identity management, and performance improvements."

The QCT team hasn't rested on its early adopter laurels. "Recently, to meet our business requirements, we moved Oracle Application Server 10g to the extranet space," says Lindgren. "We used all the identity management infrastructure and Oracle Application Server 10g features to implement very strong authentication, by using client certificate technology with Oracle Single Sign-On and OID. [Oracle Application Server] has been a real business enabler for us."

Geoff Zeiss

Winner Specs Name: Geoff Zeiss Job Title/Description: Director of Technology, Enterprise Solutions Architecture Group Company: Autodesk Location: Ottawa, Canada Award: Early Adopter of the Year 2004, Oracle Database 10g

Ice commuter leads Autodesk to the cutting edge of Oracle 10g adoption.

Geoff Zeiss, Oracle Magazine's Early Adopter of the Year, Oracle Database 10g and the director of technology at Autodesk, doesn't believe in skating on thin ice—literally. For years during the winter, Zeiss has ice-skated to work on a frozen canal that runs through Ottawa, a safe commute on ice made many feet thick by the subzero Canadian winters.

At work, the risk-averse Zeiss, who takes no chances with unproven technology, feels confident enough of advanced Oracle database technologies, such as new spatial and manageability capabilities, to consistently make Autodesk one of the earliest adopters of new database releases. Autodesk was able to certify two of its premier applications for use on Oracle 10g within three months of its public release. "We don't adopt technologies because they're neat—there has to be a real business case," says Zeiss. "There are a lot of companies out there that are desperate for open spatial data and to be able to run spatial applications from different vendors concurrently against the same database. Oracle 10g is absolutely revolutionary in the industry, and supporting Oracle 10g early gives us a real advantage in the marketplace."

Les Morton, Jr.

Winner Specs Name: Les Morton, Jr. Job Title/Description: Manager of Web Services/Manager of Order Management Company: Associated Wholesalers, Inc. Location: York, Pennsylvania Award: Early Adopter of the Year 2004, Oracle JDeveloper 10g

Leader guides his team to a new development platform.

Many early adopters use preview releases to educate themselves on new products before they are released. But for Associated Wholesalers, Inc., in York, Pennsylvania, the preview release of Oracle JDeveloper 10g paid off in a different way: "We've already saved the company time and money, because we're investing in the future," says Les Morton, Jr., manager of Order Management for the US$1 billion food wholesaler distribution company and Oracle Magazine's Early Adopter of the Year 2004, Oracle JDeveloper 10g.

Associated Wholesalers decided in 2003 to reengineer its entire legacy-based order management system. After considering both .NET and J2EE architectures, the company decided that J2EE provided more openness and flexibility. Morton and his team then selected the preview release of Oracle JDeveloper 10g to build their first iteration of the new order management system, including an Enterprise JavaBeans back end running on Oracle Application Server Containers for J2EE. "We started with a team of six to eight developers with absolutely no Java experience and sent them to a basic Java class in September, and by October they were writing code in JDeveloper," says Morton. Morton's team also made extensive use of Oracle's Application Development Framework (ADF) in subsequent iterations to disconnect the client view from the services that are providing the data. "We looked at ADF and found out that it was exactly what we were looking for," Morton explains.

Rajesh Kumar

Winner Specs Name: Rajesh Kumar Job Title/Description: Director of Worldwide Database and Data Warehouse Services Company: Electronic Arts Location: Redwood Shores, California Award: Early Adopter of the Year 2004, Oracle Grid Control

EA's Kumar takes cluster management seriously so the world can play.

Although Rajesh Kumar works at Electronic Arts, a US$2.9 billion leader in electronic and online entertainment, monitoring and managing the company's clustered databases isn't a game to him.

Kumar, Oracle Magazine's Early Adopter of the Year 2004, Oracle Grid Control, has been instrumental in Electronic Arts' use of Enterprise Manager 10g Grid Control to manage approximately 12 Oracle9i Real Application Clusters four-node clusters.

"With Enterprise Manager Grid Control, we spend 20 percent less time on real-time monitoring and troubleshooting than we did before," says Kumar. "But in addition, it makes life 50 to 60 percent easier when we're looking at historical data and trying to solve the types of problems that occur in the middle of the night."

Solving problems quickly is especially important to Kumar, because he's responsible for more than 100 production databases and 100 development databases that are used for everything from company financials to game design, to supporting revenue-generating online games with more than 275,000 simultaneous users. Kumar started evaluating Oracle Grid Control in March 2004 and was able to put it into production by the end of May 2004.

"Now I can directly drill down to problems, so I spend a lot less time diagnosing and troubleshooting them," says Kumar. "It's much more efficient. It makes life easier."

Cary Millsap, with Jeff Holt

Winner Specs Name: Cary Millsap, with Jeff Holt Job Title/Description: Cofounder and Chief Scientist, respectively Company: Hotsos Enterprises Location: Southlake, Texas Award: Oracle Author of the Year 2004

Authors Millsap and Holt r