As Published In November/December 2006

Each year the editors of Oracle Magazine present Editors' Choice Awards to extremely accomplished candidates—people that best reflect the highest achievements and vision in their areas of expertise. Nominated from all corners of the globe, these candidates represent the most advanced, forward-thinking, and experienced people working with Oracle technology today.

Selecting the winners from a pool of such candidates, all of whom are worthy of recognition, is a difficult yet rewarding task. We're pleased to announce the winners of our fifth annual Oracle Magazine Editors' Choice awards—together they represent a diverse, vital, and driving force bringing innovation and leadership to the workforce every day.
-THE EDITORS OF ORACLE MAGAZINE

Anthony Abbattista
Dennis Alley
Yoshikazu Amano
Øystein Amundsen
Rob Aneweer
Mark Arratoon
Eddie Awad
Jean Chavinier
Albino Faustino Jr.
Adriana Ferreira
Steven Feuerstein
Tim Hall
Erin Hamm
Ton Hardeman
Lisa Harris
Kevin Horner
Basheer Khan
Linda Leong
Jonathan Lewis
Kunal Malik
Brad Maue
Jim McDonald
Logan McLeod
Barak Moffitt
Gordon Mohr
Deb Morton
Chris Newcombe
Vasif Pasha
Rob Patton
Pratik Ray
Regent Roberge
John Scott
Michael Smith
Marc Staheli
John Stegeman
David Ufton
Brian T. Wilkinson

You might not think that Irish whisky, French champagne, and Russian vodka have a lot in common, but to Pernod Ricard, the world's second largest wine and spirits company, they do. Founded in 1975 by the merger of two French companies, Pernod Ricard has 15 key brands including Chivas Regal, Stolichnaya, Jameson, and Perrier Jouët.

"Our strategy is local roots, global reach," says Jean Chavinier, group vice president of Information Systems and Oracle Magazine's CIO of the Year for Europe, Middle East, and Africa. "Pernod Ricard's decentralized organization is one of our great strengths, since it sets us apart from other companies and allows decision-making based on in-depth knowledge of each market and consumer expectations."

For Chavinier the strategy is also the challenge. "CIOs now have to think globally to leverage cost savings and identify benefits for the whole company, but we have to execute locally to stay close to stakeholders and react quickly whenever conditions change," he says. "As a result, flexibility and adaptability are key drivers for us. The pace of our IT strategy implementation is also a key success factor—rather than running lengthy IT projects over years, we try to deliver value to business with clearly defined projects that bring quick wins."

Chavinier's main objective is to improve the efficiency of Pernod Ricard IT support while keeping IT costs under control. To do this, he promotes best practices; sharing solutions, platforms, and resources; and developing a network approach across the Pernod Ricard IT organizations. "We are also improving our supply chain by implementing forecasting and production planning modules [from Oracle], and we have started a partnership with Oracle to update and extend the wine modules of [Oracle's] JD Edwards EnterpriseOne," Chavinier says.

The company has grown aggressively, including acquisitions of Seagrams in 2001 and Allied Domecq in 2005. Within a year, the size of the group has nearly doubled, and IT is moving to a regional cluster approach with a shared infrastructure. Allied Domecq was using an SAP R/3 enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform and legacy systems, but for its common ERP solution, Pernod Ricard chose to continue to develop and roll out core finance, distribution, and manufacturing models based on JD Edwards EnterpriseOne for its sales and manufacturing regions around the world.

Although this type of approach is not new, it's a paradigm shift for a traditionally decentralized organization such as Pernod Ricard. "Changing a company's culture is always much more complex than solving specific technical issues," says Chavinier.

A key task for Pernod Ricard is to create an IT community, since the IT directors previously hardly knew each other. "After three years of communications, conference calls, and IT meetings, we have managed to establish an IT community with people sharing best practices at the IT directors' level," says Chavinier.

"Good communications and a close community are an important part of building a successful IT organization."

Adriana Ferreira

Winner Specs

Name: Adriana Ferreira Job Title/Description: CIO Company: Companhia Vale do Rio Doce Location: Rio de Janeiro, Brazil Award: CIO of the Year, Latin America, 2006

CIO of the Year, Latin America

CIO provides centralized infrastructure for enterprise growth and remote capabilities.

The business world is sometimes called a jungle, but for Adriana Ferreira, CIO of Brazil's Companhia Vale do Rio Doce (CVRD) and Oracle Magazine's CIO of the Year for Latin America, business really can get wild.

"We're a large mining company, so our people need to be able to go to the middle of the jungle and other remote places to examine minerals and conduct business," says Ferreira. "We're not talking big cities or even big countries, so we're designing an IT infrastructure that can support people traveling even in remote parts of the world."

With operations in more than 17 countries and a market capitalization of more than US$55 billion, CVRD is the largest mining company in the Americas and continues to grow rapidly. From iron ore, aluminum, and copper to three railroads and eight ports, CVRD has extensive and varied business units operating around the world.

"The main challenge for IT is supporting the growth of the company, including supporting individual business units," says Ferreira, who's responsible for providing the IT infrastructure for more than 23,000 users. "Although each unit used to have a separate IT department, we've been centralizing IT resources to support the rapid growth of the company."

After centralizing operations, CVRD then selected specific functions to outsource and started to implement new enterprise resource planning functionality based on Oracle E-Business Suite. "We've been changing the governance model of IT to be more flexible and more agile and support the growth of the company," says Ferreira. "Oracle E-Business Suite helps us do that."

For example, CVRD operates three railroads, each of which used to have different business processes and IT applications. Now, under the unified system, it has both an integrated view and greater flexibility to share resources and people among the railroads, since the systems and operations are consistent. "When we unify the systems, we're actually unifying the business processes and helping the businesses to be more efficient," says Ferreira.

Kevin Horner

Winner Specs

Name: Kevin Horner Job Title/Description: CIO Company: Alcoa Location: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Award: CIO of the Year, North America, 2006

CIO of the Year, North America

Alcoa CIO streamlines with Oracle. Alcoa produces metal that's incredibly strong and lightweight, but a few years ago the company realized its IT systems weren't.

In 2000, Alcoa—a US$26 billion company and the world's largest aluminum producer, with 129,000 employees operating in 44 countries—had 25 lines of business, each with its own IT and infrastructure strategy. For example, "In North America alone, we had more than 40 procurement systems," says Kevin Horner, CIO for Alcoa and Oracle Magazine's CIO of the Year for North America. "With that type of infrastructure, we simply couldn't support the business processes effectively from a value standpoint."

To unify its IT resources and streamline information flow, Alcoa initiated a strategy to consolidate its IT infrastructure and standardize its applications. From 2001 to 2003, the company consolidated data centers around the world, from more than 100 to 4. Between 2001 and 2006, Alcoa rolled out its enterprise business solution of common processes and data—enabled by Oracle E-Business Suite—to hundreds of locations in North America, Europe, Australia, Latin America, and other areas, replacing a wide set of individual, unintegrated applications with an integrated Oracle architecture.

Now, Alcoa has a footprint of about 78 Oracle E-Business Suite modules that are operational inside its production plants, from procurement to financials to process manufacturing, demand planning, and more. "The current Alcoa North America Oracle application system is—from Oracle's perspective—the largest and most complex system supported in the world," says Horner. "By the end of 2006, we'll have about 75 percent of our revenue operating inside of an Oracle application environment. That makes a huge difference in how we can run our business efficiently, optimize our facilities, and better serve customers."

Alcoa is also continuing to invest in its solutions, including investments in three major analytics areas in 2006. "We're augmenting our sales and finance applications with customer, product, and market information so we can segment our markets and better understand product and customer profitability. This will enable improved strategic planning and rationalization of our customers and products," says Horner. "With the analytical tools and our Oracle applications, we believe we can achieve significant value on increasing product profitability."

A key component of Alcoa's success at integrating a huge number of systems and streamlining its business processes has been the Oracle stack. "One of the biggest benefits to us of the Oracle architecture is the value of its integration from top to bottom," says Horner. "It allows you to gain visibility across your enterprise—from individual plants to lines of business to collections of business units. It's a big advantage to have an integrated environment and common data that allows you to look across the company."

Yoshikazu Amano

Winner Specs

Name: Yoshikazu Amano Job Title/Description: Managing Officer Company: Toyota MotorCorp. Location: Tokyo, Japan Award: CIO of the Year, Asia Pacific, 2006

CIO of the Year, Asia Pacific

Team leader ensures that management and customer requirements are met in a timely way.

For Yoshikazu Amano, managing officer, Toyota Motor Corporation, and Oracle Magazine's CIO of the Year for Asia Pacific, the role of CIO isn't a solitary position so much as a team endeavor.

"Everybody on my IT team has CIO-like responsibilities in helping to ensure that new requirements from our management and users are satisfied in a timely manner so that Toyota can achieve its corporate growth objectives," says Amano.

An important key to Amano's success as an IT leader at Toyota has been his ability to lead a streamlining of business processes and information systems. For example, Amano's team recently finished the global standardization of a bill of materials and CAD system that culminated in improved productivity of Toyota's key business processes, including its R&D and production processes.

Moving forward, Amano's corporate IT team is working on an enterprise architecture to articulate both the next-generation standards for IT system development and management as well as the technologies required to support business processes from an end-to-end perspective.

Amano sees globalization and governance as his biggest challenge. As Toyota's business continues to grow (2005 saw the launch of the Lexus brand in Japan and new projects in countries from the Czech Republic to India and China), the number and magnitude of local and regional system requirements have increased significantly. Amano and his team need to not only drive regional localization but also ensure that individual plants adhere to standard baseline criteria.

Part of the globalization and governance solution has been Oracle's back-office applications. "We have deployed PeopleSoft Enterprise Human Capital Management and PeopleSoft Enterprise Financial Management Solutions in Japan, North America, and other overseas subsidiaries and group companies," says Amano. "They are very effective in sustaining Toyota's global back-office operations and its competence."

In addition, Toyota relies on Oracle Database. "We also use Oracle Database for many third-party software applications throughout the Toyota companies," says Amano. "Oracle is valued for high availability, great usability, and market leadership."

Lisa Harris

Winner Specs

Name: Lisa Harris Job Title/Description: CTO Company: Gevity Location: Bradenton, Florida Award: CTO of the Year 2006

CTO of the Year

CTO finds that Oracle is the power behind the technology.

For Lisa Harris, Oracle Magazine's CTO of the Year, customer satisfaction—and her measure of Oracle's ability to deliver—comes down to a paycheck.

"We need scalability, we need flexibility, and we need 24/7 capabilities. We cannot be down," says Harris, CTO of the Florida-based human resource services company Gevity. "We need to deliver paychecks every day we're in business. If we cannot deliver a paycheck, we're not in business."

Gevity provides human resource services to small and medium businesses, with 8,000 clients across the United States, serving almost 140,000 employees. Eleven years ago, Gevity selected Oracle to provide the core foundation for its HR capability, and the company has grown to become one of the largest Oracle HR payroll implementations in the world.

"Technology is core to our business, and Oracle is the power behind our technology," says Harris. "With 8,000 clients, each with its own business rules, we need an application and technology partner that provides the ability to easily configure to each client's particular rules."

Over the years, Gevity has progressed through the Oracle stack, starting with Oracle HR and Oracle Payroll and then implementing the rest of the enterprise resource planning suite, as well as customer relationship management, Oracle Application Server, and Oracle Fusion Middleware. This year it is implementing Oracle COREid and Oracle Collaboration Suite. The resulting scalable suite of Gevity services is delivered on Oracle Portal.

An important initiative for Gevity was its recent launch of a new solution aimed at the midmarket and built using Oracle Fusion Middleware 10g, including Oracle Identity Management Suite as well as Oracle SOA Suite and Oracle Portal. And by using Oracle BPEL Process Manager for application integration, Gevity was able to enhance the end-user experience of the online portal and significantly improve service.

Key to it all has been Gevity's ability to leverage Oracle's technology. Harris notes, "As Oracle extends its product line, we are also able to extend our service offerings. Our Oracle relationship is a competitive advantage."

Regent Roberge

Winner Specs

Name: Regent Roberge Job Title/Description: DBA and Principal Architect Company: Jesta I.S. Location: Verdun, Quebec, Canada Award: DBA of the Year 2006

DBA of the Year

Architect makes Oracle-based solutions work for a wide range of retail customers.

Just as successful retail stores have to adapt their product lines to serve changing styles and consumer interests, software suppliers to the retail industry have to adjust their solutions for individual businesses and clients.

"Retail technology is very different from customer to customer. Some of our clients have hundreds of stores and a limited number of items, and other clients have few stores but a huge number of items," says Regent Roberge, database administrator and principal architect for Jesta I.S. and Oracle Magazine's DBA of the Year. One of Roberge's key challenges is to make Jesta I.S. solutions work for a wide range of customer needs.

The Jesta I.S. Vision Suite of Oracle-based solutions enables retailers and specialty markets to manage inventory, sales, transfers, distributions, and other business functions. Jesta I.S. retail clients are located mainly in the United States, Europe, and China and range from organizations that process 50,000 sales transactions per day to those that process 10 million.

Roberge works with Jesta I.S. clients to install, configure, and customize the Oracle database and application server underpinning the Jesta I.S. solutions. Since each installation is so different, both the application and the underlying Oracle database typically have to be optimized for customer needs. "If we have to do tuning at the database level, it's usually easy," says Roberge. "We also leverage database scalability so that as our client's business grows, it can simply add hardware to scale."

Since Jesta's application is built on the Oracle stack, the architecture is important to Roberge. "What I really like about Oracle is that there are so many things that you can do with the database and so many features to take advantage of," he says. "It has so much flexibility and power."

The fact that Jesta I.S. solutions are built on Oracle helps make the sale. "Most of our large clients, especially in the retail and wholesale markets, are looking for solutions based on Oracle because they already run Oracle," says Roberge. "They want to be able to integrate with their existing systems that already run on Oracle, so it's compelling for them and easy to integrate for us."

Deb Morton

Winner Specs

Name: Deb Morton Job Title/Description: Director of Business Systems Company: McDATA Location: Broomfield, Colorado Award: Oracle Applications Implementer of the Year 2006

Oracle Applications Implementer of the Year

Director leads migration from SAP to manage growth, acquisitions, and consolidation.

When Deb Morton, Oracle Magazine's Oracle Applications Implementer of the Year, joined the storage networking products and solutions provider McDATA in 2000, the company was preparing for its IPO. But it was also expanding its business; moving into new markets; aggressively acquiring new customers; and growing its revenues, shipments, and customers at 30 percent quarter over quarter.

Not an easy set of challenges to manage, but Morton did just that. In fact, after reevaluating infrastructure needs and doing a total-cost-of-ownership and return-on-investment analysis, Morton and McDATA decided to replace the company's existing SAP enterprise resource planning system with Oracle's E-Business Suite.

Morton served as the key project manager for the Oracle E-Business Suite 11i migration, implementing the full suite of Oracle applications in approximately seven months. Since then, McDATA has added warehouse management and Oracle's advanced supply chain to help manage its new, fully outsourced contract manufacturing strategy.

"We don't contemplate an upgrade without reviewing what the improvements are on the business side. It's not just about IT," says Morton. "For example, when we went to [Oracle E-Business Suite Release] 11i.5.10, there were a lot of benefits for our finance organization around intercompany invoice streamlining and streamlining the order processing between locations and headquarters."

With all the applications and solutions McDATA has deployed from Oracle, Morton is increasingly impressed with the robustness of the solutions. "When we rolled out 11i.5.10, we were amazed at the lack of patches we needed to apply—it was very solid," she says. "We were able to upgrade in six weeks."

Another key initiative for McDATA is continuing to streamline its business and IT operations. "We have an internal project called "Consolidating to the Core." With all the acquisitions we've done, we've ended up with data centers around the United States and the world. So we're consolidating using our own products so we get the strength of a single data center with failover for disaster recovery," says Morton. "We'll be more cost-effective by consolidating our data center, but we're not losing any of the performance that users expect."

With its ever-changing business needs, McDATA finds Oracle's Fusion path particularly compelling. "Our strategy is to stay on top of the Fusion path that Oracle has laid out," says Morton. "We absolutely want to take advantage of that new functionality, since it seems like we're doing an acquisition or upgrade or two every year. But we also need to make sure that each time we're delivering value to the business."

Albino Faustino Jr.

Winner Specs

Name: Albino Faustino Jr. Job Title/Description: CIO Company: GRSA Location: Sao Paulo, Brazil Award: IT Manager of the Year 2006

IT Manager of the Year

For this CIO, success is all about connecting.

"The main challenge we face as a company is connecting everybody in the business to the same systems so they can act together and make business decisions from the same data sources and applications," says Albino Faustino Jr., CIO of GRSA and Oracle Magazine's IT Manager of the Year. GRSA, part of the Accor Group and Compass Groups, is a regional leader in catering and owns seven specialized brands, which supply food services at schools, airports, bus stations, companies, and hospitals.

Since he became CIO in 2004, Faustino has focused on implementing a three-phase plan for converging strategic information and integrating end-to-end processes. He started by consolidating eight key systems into only two, both running on Oracle. "Apart from the intrinsic benefits of a consolidated architecture, we have significantly reduced our total cost of ownership by cutting system maintenance and support costs," says Faustino.

In the second phase, GRSA consolidated multiple data centers into one built on a grid architecture. In the third phase, GRSA used Oracle Collaboration Suite as a single-sign-on portal to deliver applications with supporting tools to users within a single view. The Oracle Collaboration Suite portal will help move GRSA toward a service-oriented architecture infrastructure.

An important part of Faustino's success has been his partnership with Oracle, beginning with GRSA's 2003 implementation of Oracle E-Business Suite. "The management of this project has been run in a partnership between our IT team and Oracle consultants," says Faustino.

"The project was efficiently run, based on the high-quality standards of Oracle AIM [Application Implementation Method] methodology," he says. "We completed it on time and on budget with a 1.5-year return on investment. It was an excellent performance standard for this type of project."

Since the completion of the original Oracle deployment, GRSA has expanded its capabilities with the use of Oracle 10g Real Application Clusters and, most recently, Oracle Discoverer to develop a business intelligence layer for translating a daily cost assessment model and as a basis for a move toward menu centralization. "The implementation of our business intelligence solution has practically doubled our business in Brazil in the last three years," says Faustino.

Overall, Faustino is extremely satisfied with the scope of GRSA Oracle solutions and the benefits they've achieved. "We've been pioneers in this technology in Brazil, and we've achieved a 140 percent gain in our processing speed," says Faustino. "We're very happy with our Oracle-based deployments."

Michael Smith

Winner Specs

Name: Michael Smith Job Title/Description: Physical Scientist Company: U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Location: Hanover, New Hampshire Award: Spatial Developer of the Year 2006

Spatial Developer of the Year

Scientist develops geographic information systems for emergency response.

For Michael Smith, Oracle Magazine's Oracle Spatial Developer of the Year, hurricanes and natural disasters are an integral part of the job he does every day.

A physical scientist for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Smith and his group mainly work on civilian-related projects, including supporting sound water resources solutions and emergency-management functions when there's flooding or hurricane damage.

"The Corps has a central system called EngLink, the emergency response link, that we've developed the GIS [geographic information systems] portion for," says Smith. "We used an Oracle database with spatial components and developed PL/SQL packages that allow individual users to log in from throughout the United States to create, update, and examine GIS information that's stored in the central database."

Smith's group works on a wide variety of other GIS-enabled applications and finds that the Oracle Spatial solution is particularly efficient. "One of the really nice things about Oracle Spatial is that it doesn't take a lot more development effort to do spatial applications," says Smith. "In addition to ease of use, the inherent features of Oracle—such as role-based access and Virtual Private Database—add to the effectiveness of Oracle Spatial applications."

John Stegeman

Winner Specs

Name: John Stegeman Job Title/Description: Senior Program Director Company: Cambridge Solutions Location: Oak Brook, Illinois Award: Java Developer of the Year 2006

Java Developer of the Year

Program director uses community process and information sharing to take the risk out of adopting new technology.

If you're walking a tightrope with a short time to complete the act and you're trying out a new wire, it's nice to discover that you have a safety net, as John Stegeman, senior program director for Cambridge Solutions, discovered.

Stegeman, Oracle Magazine's Java Developer of the Year, was working on a consulting project for a large hotel chain that involved creating a Java-based application for managing the hotel's capital projects. "We were looking for the latest and greatest Oracle Java tools that would enable us to deliver results fast and to iterate improvements easily in the future," says Stegeman. "We had only two months to develop a medium-to-large-sized application."

Cambridge Solutions went with Oracle JDeveloper, although the new version had just been released. "Our biggest concern was that we'd have trouble finding help when we ran into roadblocks using Java tools that were newly released," says Stegeman. "We were saved by the community process for sharing information that Oracle provides in the user forum [forums.oracle.com]. Whenever we couldn't figure out a problem, we'd post a question and get a response back fairly quickly. Being able to get that kind of response was a big help."

Pratik Ray

Winner Specs

Name: Pratik Ray Job Title/Description: Systems Architect Company: Landmark Location: Houston, Texas Award: Composite Applications Developer of the Year 2006

Composite Applications Developer of the Year

Architect's philosophy of integration leverages technologies and benefits the bottom line.

Composite applications and Sanskrit may not seem to have a lot in common unless you've met Pratik Ray, Oracle Magazine's Composite Applications Developer of the Year.

Ray studies Vedic scriptures for insights. "I love learning about Vedic culture, because one aspect of it is the integration of human life—how we depend on each other. Each of us as individuals is integrated with others, and we are all an integral part of the universe." Ray applies the company's philosophy of integration and innovation to develop new versions of Landmark's OpenWorks software, the most widely used Exploration and Production Project Data Management system in the oil and gas industry.

Bridging the past and future is important for both Ray and Landmark's customers. "As we develop new generations of project data management, we have to support the legacy systems and maintain backward compatibility for our existing customers," says Ray. "We do that by using composite applications and leveraging Oracle technologies."

For Ray the direction of IT architectures is certain. "Organizations have investments in their existing products and don't want to rewrite them because something new comes out, unless there's a value-added proposition for their customers," he says. "Composite applications let organizations integrate technologies seamlessly for the benefit of the bottom line."

David Ufton

Winner Specs

Name: David Ufton Job Title/Description: Senior Architect Company: EnergySys Location: Guildford, England Award: XML Developer of the Year 2006

XML Developer of the Year

Architect stores and transports energy with XML.

If energy could be captured in an XML format, David Ufton, senior architect at EnergySys, could design a better way to process and transport it. The company develops applications (most notably, for hydrocarbon accounting) for the oil and gas industry. The applications, based on Java architectures and leveraging XML, manage everything from inventory positions to processes that schedule vessels arriving to transport oil, gas, or liquefied natural gas from processing plants.

"We used to have relational tables in the database. We were forever writing code to translate that data into the business and user interface tiers," says Ufton, Oracle Magazine's XML Developer of the Year. "Then we realized that if we stored XML in the database, we could process it in the business tier in XML form, transform it using standard tools, and pass it straight to the user interface."

The result: an enterprise architecture that uses XML standards from end to end. "We use Oracle's XML DB, XPath, and XQuery to retrieve and create the XML that we have in the repository," says Ufton. "Although the packets of information we pass across tiers are somewhat larger than traditional solutions, we don't have to translate them as much as we did with older approaches. Using XML creates a far more flexible and robust architecture that benefits our clients."

Gordon Mohr

Winner Specs

Name: Gordon Mohr Job Title/Description: Architect and Lead Developer Company: Internet Archive Location: San Francisco, California Award: Open Source Developer of the Year 2006

Open Source Developer of the Year

Developer watches Web innovations and uses open source to go back in time.

"If you enter a URL in our Wayback Machine, you'll get a list of all the captures we've made of that site over the 10 years of our history," says Gordon Mohr, Oracle Magazine's Open Source Developer of the Year. "You can click on the links and browse the Web as it was at a prior date and time."

An architect and lead developer for Web projects at the Internet Archive, Mohr has been a pioneering user of Oracle Berkeley DB Java Edition, incorporating it into an open source Web crawler, Heritrix.

"The Heritrix crawler uses hundreds of threads to communicate with Web sites and retrieve their contents," says Mohr. "Oracle's open source Berkeley DB Java Edition is a good fit for our requirements since it works so well with big, changing data sets in a highly concurrent environment."

Mohr has been a key contributor to the Berkeley DB Java Edition development effort by stress-testing the system and working with the development team to analyze, reproduce, and fix key bugs.

A key challenge is keeping up with Web designs and technologies. "We watch innovations in browsers and Web site design closely, since our software has to capture it all in an automated fashion," says Mohr.

Steven Feuerstein

Winner Specs

Name: Steven Feuerstein Job Title/Description: PL/SQL Evangelist Company: Quest Software Location: Chicago, Illinois Award: PL/SQL Developer of the Year 2006

PL/SQL Developer of the Year

Writing good code—and testing it—is one developer's mission.

"PL/SQL developers don't test their code often enough or deeply enough," says Steven Feuerstein, Oracle Magazine's PL/SQL Developer of the Year. "It's a big problem, and not just in our small part of the programming world. Sure, unit testing is tough and there are lots of obstacles, but we've got to reduce the number of bugs that make it into production applications."

Feuerstein emphasizes testing in his training sessions and conference presentations. He's also the development manager for a new unit testing tool for PL/SQL from Quest Software. Of course, there is more to coding than testing, and Feuerstein's 10 books on PL/SQL prove the point. He complements his interest in testing with a broader focus in his Best Practice PL/SQL column on Oracle Technology Network and his PL/SQL Practices column in Oracle Magazine.

His take on the PL/SQL language? "It's elegant and accessible. It may not have all the power of Java, but it is without doubt the premier database programming language," says Feuerstein. "And let's face it: the tens of thousands of mission-critical production applications built on PL/SQL will be running for decades. It's critical for developers to pay attention to the robustness, maintainability, and testability of that code."

Kunal Malik

Winner Specs

Name: Kunal Malik Job Title/Description: Director of Global Applications Company: Wind River Systems Location: Alameda, California Award: Oracle Fusion Middleware Developer of the Year 2006

Oracle Fusion Middleware Developer of the Year

Director streamlines access and empowers customers.

With platforms that control devices from Apple's AirPort to NASA's Mars Rover, Wind River Systems routinely creates efficient technology solutions. But when the company needed a streamlined way for customers to access its internal applications, Wind River turned to Oracle Fusion Middleware.

"When we did the competitive evaluation, the comparison and value weren't close," says Kunal Malik, director of global applications for Wind River and Oracle Magazine's Oracle Fusion Middleware Developer of the Year. "It was an easy decision to standardize on Oracle Fusion Middleware."

A key goal was to empower customers and provide them with more self-service-based applications. The solution needed to be secure but easy to navigate as customers accessed different applications. "In a matter of months, we launched the solution worldwide. It integrated all the composite applications, including support-ticketing systems, license-managing systems, and other custom applications," says Malik. "Customers register once, and they get access to everything." Oracle Fusion Middleware has helped Wind River transition to a service-oriented architecture (SOA).

"If you ask me what my SOA strategy is, I'd have to say it's Oracle Fusion Middleware," says Malik. "It provides great time to market, it's able to integrate, and it's able to build and leverage reusable services that we create."

John Scott

Winner Specs

Name: John Scott Job Title/Description: Owner Company: Shellprompt Hosting Location: Leeds, England Award: Oracle Application Express Developer of the Year 2006

Oracle Application Express Developer of the Year

Business owner brings fast, easy development to personal Web sites and e-commerce systems alike.

Oracle Application Express enables fast, easy creation of Web-based applications, and John Scott, owner of Shellprompt Hosting and Oracle Magazine's Oracle Application Express Developer of the Year, sees unlimited opportunities for it.

"I haven't come up against a Web site or system that I wouldn't like to do in Oracle Application Express," says Scott, who recently became an Oracle ACE. "It can be used for any Web site that's backed by a database—there are a huge number of potential applications out there on the internet." Shellprompt Hosting specializes in hosting Oracle-based Web sites and applications. "Oracle has refined the technology into something you can use to develop everything from a personal Web site to a sophisticated e-commerce system," says Scott. "You don't even need to install anything on your computer to use it—all you need is a browser."

Oracle Application Express also reduces maintenance and security concerns. "It's a lot simpler to maintain an application written in Oracle Application Express because everything is stored in the database, meaning you have fewer moving parts to look after," says Scott. "Oracle has gone to great lengths to ensure that the security features available in the database, such as fine-grained access control, can be seamlessly used in your application."

Mark Arratoon

Winner Specs

Name: Mark Arratoon Job Title/Description: Senior Technical Architect Company: GE Healthcare Location: Burlington, Vermont Award: BPEL Developer of the Year 2006

BPEL Developer of the Year

Architect uses BPEL to keep systems in good health.

"Solving the collaboration problem between devices, information, and different people with different roles is very complex," says Mark Arratoon, a senior technical architect for GE Healthcare Integrated IT Solutions and Oracle Magazine's BPEL Developer of the Year. GE Healthcare provides healthcare products and services ranging from medical imaging to information technologies.

"Combining loosely coupled service-oriented architecture [SOA] approaches with the transparency and maintainability of business-process-management [BPM]-based process design is a great fit for the complex and varied collaborations that happen between people and machines in today's hospital and healthcare environments," says Arratoon, whose group provides information system solutions for hospitals and integrated delivery networks.

Arratoon sees BPM and its associated standards such as Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) as the perfect fit for healthcare. "We're driven by standards-based approaches and platforms," he says. "One of the key standards for BPM is BPEL, and we believe that BPEL is emerging as the dominant standard and approach to developing BPM-based solutions."

BPEL gives organizations transparency into the processes that constitute their business, and it gives them a relatively easy way to maintain and extend those processes as they grow and change. "That's important for us, because we find that for many large-scale healthcare ISVs [independent software vendors] the problem of customized installations is a large one, given the complexity of organizations," says Arratoon. "Anything that helps us be more agile in the process of customization, installation, and maintenance is a definite advantage."

Enter Oracle BPEL Process Manager. "We're very impressed with Oracle BPEL Process Manager and its relative maturity and rich capabilities, compared to other tools," says Arratoon. "We're particularly impressed with Oracle BPEL Process Manager's close adherence to the BPEL SOA standards. Oracle is in the forefront of shaping those standards as they evolve." Arratoon also likes Oracle BPEL Process Manager's support for different application servers and database platforms. "As a supplier to the enterprise-level healthcare providers, we need to have the flexibility to deploy on different platforms, so it's important for us that our server-side architecture adheres to standards as we go forward," says Arratoon.

Arratoon is optimistic about the possibilities. "BPM, BPEL, and SOA hold great promise for healthcare from our point of view," says Arratoon.

Linda Leong

Winner Specs

Name: Linda Leong Job Title/Description: System Architect Company: Hansen Information Technologies Location: Rancho Cordova, California Award: .NET Developer of the Year 2006

.NET Developer of the Year

Architect's solutions start at the database.

"A reliable application depends upon solid database design, and with today's emphasis on workflow and top-down system design, people sometimes lose sight of designing a solid database structure," says Linda Leong, a system architect at Hansen Information Technologies and Oracle Magazine's .NET Developer of the Year.

Hansen creates public sector enterprise applications that manage government services from local cities and towns to state and federal agencies worldwide. Hansen's latest release, Hansen 8, is designed around a .NET framework, so customers can deploy their applications on Microsoft's Internet Information Server and access them via browsers.

As important as .NET is to Hansen solutions, Oracle Database is an equally critical component for many customers, since many Hansen clients run on the Oracle platform. Leong focuses extensively on optimizing the Hansen platform and its .NET framework for Oracle-based deployments. "Many of our clients use Oracle for their large-scale database applications," notes Leong. "The database is a core tier of our application, so we use Oracle's ODP.NET data provider. We use ADO.NET to interact with the database from our .NET business logic."

Rob Aneweer,
Erin Hamm

Winner Specs

Name: Rob Aneweer, Erin Hamm Job Title/Description: System Architect Company: American Century Investments Location: Kansas City, Missouri Award: Portal Developers of the Year 2006

Portal Developers of the Year

Developers create a business launching pad.

Running a successful investment company requires that your employees have the right information at the right time. That's why American Century Investments upgraded its portal strategy by deploying Oracle Portal.

"Our vision is that the portal becomes the work space for all American Century employees—the launching pad from which we do our jobs," says Rob Aneweer, who along with Erin Hamm is Oracle Magazine's Portal Developer of the Year. American Century had an internal portal composed of flat HTML pages, but the company has converted to a dynamic portal environment based on Oracle Portal and Oracle Business Intelligence Suite. The process integrated more than 80,000 legacy Web pages into Oracle Portal and consolidated fragmented intranet sites and disparate content sources into one portal.

"The key to our portal's success is its integration to external applications outside of the portal, dashboard reporting, and the integration of the external database for the display of key metrics within the portal," says Hamm. Oracle Portal's security features are also important.

"We've taken advantage of the security inherent in the Oracle Portal applications so that we can distribute information to specific groups within our company," says Aneweer. "It's much more efficient than our previous intranet."

Øystein Amundsen

Winner Specs

Name: Øystein Amundsen Job Title/Description: System Developer Company: Bouvet AS Location: Karmsund, Norway Award: Oracle JDeveloper Extensions Developer of the Year 2006

Oracle JDeveloper Extensions Developer of the Year

Finding solutions and sharing them is what this developer is all about.

Consultant Øystein Amundsen's natural inclination is to find solutions.

Although he programs extensively in Oracle JDeveloper, Amundsen, Oracle Magazine's Oracle JDeveloper Extensions Developer of the Year, also needs to use Microsoft Visual Source Safe for version management of his code and applications, because it's the company's standard.

When he couldn't find existing support for using Microsoft Visual Source Safe with the Oracle JDeveloper environment, he solved the problem by creating an Oracle JDeveloper Extension that allows developers to easily integrate the two. Amundsen also made the extension available as an open source project, so other developers can leverage the code, learn from it, and enhance it.

For Amundsen, the Oracle community can be a rich source of support and opportunity. "There are a lot of plug-ins out there that make the job of writing code easier. Developers should explore the upgrade center [the integrated function in Oracle JDeveloper, located in the top menu bar at Help/Check] and see what's available, because they can really make things easier," says Amundsen. "If there are features that you're lacking, I'd recommend checking out the Oracle JDeveloper Extension API, because it's easy to understand and it holds the key to almost all the features of the Oracle JDeveloper environment."

Dennis Alley

Winner Specs

Name: Dennis Alley Job Title/Description: Partner Company: Computer Sciences Corporation Location: Oak Brook, Illinois Award: RFID Architect of the Year 2006

RFID Architect of the Year

Developer uses RFID to streamline business.

For Dennis Alley, Oracle Magazine's RFID Developer of the Year and a partner at Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC), radio- frequency identification (RFID) is an increasingly important way to streamline business processes. For example, working with a major defense contractor, Alley was recently challenged to design an RFID solution that could be used by all of the contractor's business units to meet the Department of Defense compliance shipping requirements.

Rather than take a simple "slap and ship" approach to RFID deployment, Alley's team suggested using Oracle Database and Oracle Application Server and enhancing Oracle's RFID Supplier Compliance Workspace application so the contractor could incorporate interfaces with the customer's SAP system and share information to streamline processing and reduce manual interactions.

"We ended up wanting to deliver a solution that went beyond the Oracle RFID Supplier Compliance Workspace application, so we designed extensions to the database and reworked the application to interface with SAP and generate the RFID-enabled military shipping labels," says Alley.

To meet their goals, the CSC team worked closely with Oracle engineers. "We worked very cooperatively with Oracle—it was a good give-and-take situation," says Alley. "We were able to complete the work on time and get the solution installed successfully."

Basheer Khan

Winner Specs

Name: Basheer Khan Job Title/Description: President Company: Innowave Technology Location: Los Angeles, California Award: Integration Architect of the Year 2006

Integration Architect of the Year

Architect finds that integration improves efficiency.

"Integration has always played a critical role in improving the efficiency of businesses and providing information to decision-makers," says Basheer Khan, Oracle Magazine's Integration Architect of the Year. "While there have been other historical approaches, we're now seeing the industry move toward a more efficient, flexible, scalable, and standards-based approach to data and process integration."

Khan uses this approach at his own company, Innowave Technology, helping companies integrate their Oracle, Oracle's JD Edwards, and Oracle's PeopleSoft applications with third-party applications. For example, he recently leveraged Oracle Fusion Middleware and a service-oriented-architecture approach to integrate 52 touchpoints between a customer's Oracle E-Business Suite applications and a third-party logistics provider.

"What's compelling about the solutions that Oracle brings to the table with Oracle Fusion Middleware and Oracle BPEL Process Manager is that no matter what legacy or third-party application a customer may have, they can easily use Oracle adapters to integrate their systems without a lot of investment in rewriting their code," says Khan. "That makes it easy for customers to maintain and troubleshoot any integration—it's kind of a 'what you see is what you get' approach to integration."

Marc Staheli

Winner Specs

Name: Marc Staheli Job Title/Description: CTO Company: vAudit Group Location: San Diego, California Award: SMB Architect of the Year 2006

SMB Architect of the Year

CTO chooses Oracle to scale up to multibillion-dollar customers.

Even small companies dream big. And when they do, they plan their IT infrastructure in advance. "We're a small company now, but we anticipate growing dramatically, so Oracle gives us peace of mind because we can scale up endlessly with them as we grow," says Marc Staheli, CTO of vAudit and Oracle Magazine's SMB Architect of the Year.

vAudit provides a suite of online tools that helps companies comply with their sales and use tax across the United States and Canada. Staheli and his partner Robert Schulte created the idea in 2003 when they realized the potential of helping companies manage their tax compliance issues. Initial funding came in 2005, and the company now serves clients with revenues ranging from US$20 million to US$5 billion.

When it came time to build the infrastructure, vAudit chose Oracle Database 10g Standard Edition with Real Application Clusters and Oracle Application Server 10g, along with Oracle JDeveloper. "We do have a significant amount of traffic, so we wanted to have an extremely stable platform and one that could support significant growth," says Staheli. "Oracle's platform comes with a comprehensive set of powerful tools and features, which makes us very efficient and highly productive. Oracle's solutions really fit the SMB market these days."

Vasif Pasha

Winner Specs

Name: Vasif Pasha Job Title/Description: Software Engineer Company: SUMCO USA Location: Phoenix, Arizona Award: Oracle Fusion Middleware Architect of the Year 2006

Oracle Fusion Middleware Architect of the Year

Engineer integrates system information with workflow capabilities to improve collaboration.

Sometimes little things can mean a lot—especially in the silicon wafer manufacturing business, where a small drop in production can result in a huge hit to corporate profits or a large financial loss.

To avoid such problems, SUMCO USA, a manufacturer that supplies silicon wafers for chip manufacturers, turned to Oracle BPEL Process Manager to manage its customer order specification review processes.

"The implementation of a spec registration system was essential for our company, and the key was to reduce the cycle time for order processing. We needed the ability to review specifications collaboratively to make efficient decisions on product manufacturing," says Vasif Pasha, software engineer for SUMCO USA and Oracle Magazine's Oracle Fusion Middleware Architect of the Year. "Efficient integration of our system processes with human workflow capabilities was critical not only for achieving reduced cycle time for order processing but also generating cycle time data for reports."

Integration was an important consideration for SUMCO USA. It needed to create systems that could work easily across multiple platforms, languages, and technologies, since the company works closely with a large number of chip manufacturing companies. SUMCO USA used Oracle BPEL Process Manager to improve its decision-making process for capability analysis of wafer manufacturing by integrating information and workflows to collaborate with divisions across multiple sites and systems. The implementation involved creating business processes on-the-fly and enabling parallel execution of flows within a business process.

While SUMCO USA faced new challenges with the e-mail notification service and subsystem install with the initial product version, Pasha and the SUMCO USA team worked closely with Oracle's BPEL engineering team to address them. "Oracle's team has been extremely quick in responding to our questions and giving us alternative solutions for problems we came up with," says Pasha.

The project was a success. "I think one of the key points is that it's not difficult to implement a solution with Oracle BPEL Process Manager," says Pasha. "It doesn't take much time, it's reliable, and you basically implement an SOA [service-oriented architecture] with minimal effort while producing an extremely valuable solution for your company."

For Pasha, using Oracle BPEL Process Manager to support, automate, and manage complex workflows that included a high degree of human interaction was exciting. "I had a great time implementing Oracle BPEL Process Manager and building solutions on top of it," says Pasha. "Developers who are interested in SOA or BPEL don't need to be apprehensive about learning a new language or technology—they should try it, and they'll see how easy it is to use."

Chris Newcombe

Winner Specs

Name: Chris Newcombe Job Title/Description: Senior Software Engineer Company: Amazon.com Location: Seattle, Washington Award: Embedded Architect of the Year 2006

Embedded Architect of the Year

Software engineer strives for elegance of design to maintain simplicity and transparency.

"My main technology interest is building flexible, scalable systems that are highly available in the presence of operator errors or software defects. That's why I'm such a strong advocate of Oracle Berkeley DB," says Chris Newcombe, senior software engineer at Amazon.com and Oracle Magazine's Embedded Architect of the Year. "Elegance of design is essential, because elegance implies minimal artificial complexity."

A transparent and efficient IT infrastructure is imperative for Amazon. Transparency enables the business without impeding Amazon's innovation, yet systems must also be high-performing and cost-effective so that Amazon can keep prices low for customers.

For years Amazon has used Oracle Berkeley DB for fast read-only caches of catalog data. Newcombe built a nonintrusive repartitioning solution for the primary catalog cache, based on Oracle Berkeley DB. It's a mission-critical system that serves several hundreds of thousands of requests per second.

"Berkeley DB applications can be designed to require very little (potentially zero) human administration cost, which helps keep our costs down," says Newcombe. "Berkeley DB has simple, convenient APIs, which helps with rapid prototyping and fast time to market."

Jim McDonald

Winner Specs

Name: Jim McDonald Job Title/Description: Manager of IT Company: Ingersoll Rand Location: Annandale, New Jersey Award: Security Architect of the Year 2006

Security Architect of the Year

Manager makes the case for data security by tying it to business strategy.

When industrial giant Ingersoll Rand created a portal for its dealer network, the company planned to streamline business processes and make the portal secure.

"At Ingersoll Rand, security is a top priority and an integral part of our IT strategy," says Jim McDonald, manager of IT and Oracle Magazine's Security Architect of the Year. One of McDonald's biggest challenges is trying to be both a security strategist and an implementer.

Keeping the business requirements foremost is critical. "A single security breach could cost more than the investment in proper security," says McDonald. "That's the key: talking about security as an investment and tying it to the business strategy."

In developing the portal, both business and security goals were paramount. "We invested significantly in our portal's security infrastructure," McDonald says. "Our business case was that we could simplify access for our dealer portal and at the same time tighten our defenses around data security."

The result was a dealer portal with security built around Oracle's COREid identity management platform that enabled Ingersoll Rand to delegate management capabilities to individual dealers.

Brad Maue

Winner Specs

Name: Brad Maue Job Title/Description: CTO Company: Stuart Maue Mitchell & James Location: St. Louis, Missouri Award: Business Intelligence Implementer of the Year 2006

Business Intelligence Implementer of the Year

CTO uses business intelligence to increase efficiencies and improve client service.

What is business intelligence worth? One law firm can tell you.

"Our Oracle-based data warehouse has more than paid for itself by a factor of five or ten," says Brad Maue, CTO of Stuart Maue Mitchell & James, a pioneer in legal cost management. The firm specializes in handling all legal fees for major litigations such as large class-action suits.

"We put all [the bills] into an Oracle database and sort everything out for our clients, along with identifying billing abuses," says Maue, Oracle Magazine's Business Intelligence Implementer of the Year.

Stuart Maue Mitchell & James started its business intelligence initiative to enable customized reporting for its customers. It uses Oracle Database 10g for the data warehouse: Transactional data is imported nightly, and clients use Oracle Discoverer to run ad hoc queries and reports. The solution has been extremely successful with the firm's clients; it contains information on more than US$2.2 billion in legal fees.

"The Oracle Warehouse Builder was phenomenal," says Maue. "In the past you'd have to write tens of thousands of lines of code manually, while Oracle Warehouse Builder has built-in intelligence and just writes the code for you. It cuts down on development time by a factor of 10."

Ton Hardeman

Winner Specs

Name: Ton Hardeman Job Title/Description: Chief Business Architect Company: ABN AMRO Location: Amsterdam, the Netherlands Award: Business Process Management Architect of the Year 2006

Business Process Management Architect of the Year

Architect uses business process management to manage complexity and increase customer satisfaction.

Every financial company has to translate its strategy into a business model. For financial giant ABN AMRO, the resulting business processes are complex, because its business is built around a multichannel sales and customer service approach. ABN AMRO needs to ensure that its customers can start a business process (such as opening a new account) in one channel (such as a call center) and continue it in another (such as a bank) seamlessly. To manage the complexities and enable business agility, Chief Business Architect Ton Hardeman and his team designed a business process management (BPM) solution for multichannel customer contact for key processes and built the infrastructure using PeopleSoft CRM components with PeopleTools as a programming environment.

"It's had a direct and positive impact on our business,” says Hardeman, Oracle Magazine's Business Process Management Architect of the Year. "With this BPM solution, we've seen an increase in customer satisfaction. In addition, all customer interaction around standard bank products has been unified into one system, giving a 360-degree customer view. A BPM management layer manages/guides the interaction with the customer. Our customers obtain better service, and we have more up-sell and cross-sell opportunities."

Brian T. Wilkinson

Winner Specs

Name: Brian T. Wilkinson Job Title/Description: Senior Manager for SOA Practice Company: Accenture Location: Chicago, Illinois Award: SOA Architect of the Year 2006

SOA Architect of the Year

Manager finds that many business processes can benefit from a service-oriented architecture.

Implementing a service-oriented architecture (SOA) requires technology. But it also requires something else—a business driver.

"You need a strong connection to the business process to improve existing processes, enable new capabilities, and ultimately make SOA successful," says Brian Wilkinson, senior manager, SOA Practice at Accenture and Oracle Magazine's SOA Architect of the Year. "Not all business processes should be architected using SOA, but there's a healthy set that can benefit greatly from SOA—and those are the ones that organizations should address."

Over the past year, Wilkinson's team at Accenture has produced an SOA reference architecture to define a set of reference services that organizations can easily deploy to speed the implementation of an Oracle Fusion Middleware-based project. "With SOA, the ability now exists to integrate the human and automated components of a business process and gain real-time visibility into business performance metrics and compare them against historical trends," says Wilkinson. "As a result, organizations can change the way they're performing in the marketplace in almost real time with SOA."

Wilkinson says that Accenture is already seeing clients benefit from SOA, a trend that he says will increase over time. "We see SOA and how Oracle has 'baked' it into Fusion as fundamental to the future of Oracle," he says. "Oracle's SOA direction is consistent with how Accenture views SOA."

Anthony Abbattista

Winner Specs

Name: Anthony Abbattista Job Title/Description: Vice President of Enterprise Technology Strategy and Planning Company: Allstate Insurance Location: Northbrook, Illinois Award: Content Management Architect of the Year 2006

Content Management Architect of the Year

Managing structured and unstructured data is critical to this VP.

For some firms, content management isn't a luxury. "In a business like ours— property and casualty insurance—the amount of structured and unstructured data that moves through our business processes is astonishing," says Anthony Abbattista, vice president of enterprise technology strategy and planning for Allstate Insurance and Oracle Magazine's Content Management Architect of the Year. "To manage that data, we're automating and virtualizing many of our business processes with Oracle Content Management Services to increase efficiency and to attract and retain customers."

A key factor of Allstate's content management strategy was developing a taxonomy that enables a standard set of services across the enterprise, so employees can access information easily. "We're unleashing the power of both our existing data and the new content that we're creating," adds Abbattista. The result is back-office operations and business processes that serve customers better. "Having a content management strategy that marries structured and unstructured data into a coherent record management strategy is important," he says.

Resiliency was also important for Allstate. "Because Oracle has great technology with RAC [Oracle Real Application Clusters], the database, and a good application server layer, we could take advantage of that physical configuration as a disaster recovery mechanism," he says. "Oracle has such a strong database heritage that they tend to have bulletproof infrastructure at the base level."

Tim Hall

Winner Specs

Name: Tim Hall Job Title/Description: DBA/Developer Location: Birmingham, England Award: Oracle ACE of the Year 2006

Oracle ACE of the Year

Teaching how to learn is consultant's goal.

Tim Hall became Oracle Magazine's Oracle ACE of the Year by not minding his own business. "I'm inquisitive," says Hall. "I like to be involved when people make design decisions, because I believe that a DBA should be the most skilled person at handling a database as well as helping developers understand [how] to optimize their applications."

Hall earned a PhD in 1994 and took a job programming Oracle Forms; at his current job, he is responsible for all the databases (Oracle Database 10g Real Application Clusters and Oracle9i) and Oracle Application Servers. And he shares his knowledge with the Oracle community. "Whenever I was studying for an OCP [Oracle Certified Professional] exam and writing revision notes, I would put them on the internet so others could read them," says Hall. "I get e-mails from all over the world from people telling me how much my notes helped." But for Hall, enabling new learning is even more important. "It's fine to tell people how to do something, but if you can show them how to learn, that's much better."

To learn more about the Oracle ACE program, visit oracle.com/technology/community/oracle_ace.

Logan McLeod

Winner Specs

Name: Logan McLeod Job Title/Description: IT Strategist Company: Dell Inc Location: Round Rock, Texas Award: Oracle Grid Control Architect of the Year 2006

Oracle Grid Control Architect of the Year

Strategist manages huge stack with Oracle Grid Control.

Managing a worldwide IT infrastructure requires efficient use of IT resources and a thorough knowledge of what is deployed and where. To gain that, Dell Inc. IT embraced Oracle Grid Control. Last year Dell Inc. IT embarked on a global deployment of Oracle Grid Control to manage all of Dell Inc.'s Oracle Database production infrastructure, enabling a single console for managing all database infrastructure throughout the enterprise, regardless of the deployment platform or physical location.

"Our biggest challenge was our own legacy—we've got thousands of Linux servers that have been deployed over many years by many teams," says Logan McLeod, IT strategist at Dell Inc. IT and Oracle Magazine's Oracle Grid Control Architect of the Year. "So the biggest challenge was getting the Oracle Grid Control agents deployed consistently on all those servers." Once the agents were deployed, the benefits were realized immediately. "Now we can instantly get a holistic view of our entire database environments around the world," says McLeod. "We're also managing our database environment much more proactively and have begun leveraging capacity and change management capabilities of the tool. Grid provides a solid foundation for our Oracle strategy here at Dell Inc. IT."

Rob Patton,
Barak Moffitt

Winner Specs

Name: Rob Patton, Barak Moffitt Job Title/Description: Executive Director, Business Intelligence and Data Architecture; Executive Director, Production Operation (respectively) Company: Edmunds.com Location: Santa Monica, California Award: High-Availability Architects of the Year 2006

High-Availability Architects of the Year

Directors scale up their site for greater availability, reliability.

With almost 10 million people coming to Edmunds.com every month to research new and used cars and collect automotive advice, high availability definitely matters.

"Availability is critical to our dealer leads and advertising revenue," says Barak Moffitt, Oracle Magazine's High-Availability Architect of the Year, along with Rob Patton. "We chose Oracle 10g RAC [Real Application Clusters] for our database primarily because we have aggressive high-level design principles for availability, scalability, reliability, and performance."

Two years ago, Edmunds realized that its hosting architecture needed to be replaced with one that could scale up while assuring improved availability. To achieve this, Edmunds put in place a new data center approach that provides high availability by relying on a wide-scale deployment of Oracle Fusion Middleware on top of Oracle Database 10g using Linux and Intel EM64T technologies.

"By using Oracle technologies, we were able to create separate yet symmetric operational environments to handle the wide spectrum of consumer- and business-oriented services that Edmunds needs to deploy," says Rob Patton. "With Oracle we now have high availability and increased flexibility, while benefiting from widely supported standards."

Eddie Awad

Winner Specs

Name: Eddie Awad Job Title/Description: Application Developer Company: ESCO Location: Portland, Oregon Award: Oracle-Related Blogger of the Year 2006

Oracle-Related Blogger of the Year

Developer shares and communicates news, information with other Oracle users.

For Eddie Awad, Web logs are a way to keep his head straight about Oracle.

"I'm addicted to Oracle, and I like to share what I learn with other people," says Awad, Oracle Magazine's Oracle-Related Blogger of the Year. "My blog has become a notebook for me and a great way to share and communicate with other Oracle users."

Awad is an application developer for ESCO and has worked with Oracle since 1994. Awad started blogging to stay in touch with friends but soon realized that blogs could be useful for keeping track of the IT challenges he encountered in his work. So he started a more-technical blog focused on Oracle.

Awad also created the Oracle News Aggregator (oradot.com/news), a site that allows readers to monitor Oracle-related news sources and blogs, Firefox extensions that make it easier for developers to search Oracle documentation, and oraQA.com, an Oracle question-and-answer blog.

Accuracy is important for Awad, and he keeps the blog fresh by publishing three or four times a week. "My posts tend to be specific to a certain problem," says Awad. "I ensure the accuracy and comprehensiveness of my posts by providing examples, citing sources, and pointing to additional relevant information."

Jonathan Lewis

Winner Specs

Name: Jonathan Lewis Job Title/Description: Consultant Company: JL Computer Consultancy Location: Surbiton, England Award: Oracle Author of the Year 2006

Oracle Author of the Year

Consultant tries to reach as many people as possible by writing books.

Computer glitches rarely launch a writing career, but for Jonathan Lewis, Oracle Magazine's Oracle Author of the Year, the Y2K problem was a blessing.

In 1999 Lewis, who lectures, trains, and consults with companies around the world on maximizing the efficiency of their Oracle databases, found that corporate budgets were devoted to the Y2K problem. Rather than take a long holiday, he used the time to write his first book, Practical Oracle8i. This year Lewis wrote Cost-Based Oracle Fundamentals, the first of a three-volume series.

"Few people understand how Oracle's Cost-Based Optimizer works. Virtually anyone who worries about the performance of their database should read the book," says Lewis. "I decided to write down some of the stuff I knew about cost-based optimization so that I could help thousands of people instead of training individual groups of 50 or 100."

He found a rich subject—the first book has more than 500 pages and he has two volumes left to go. But it's a job he enjoys.

"Researching technology problems can be interesting, and working with customers on specific performance issues can be exciting," says Lewis. "But the writing part of my job is the toughest bit, which is why it gives me the most satisfaction when I think I've got it right."