One of the most enjoyable aspects of my job as director of product marketing for Dell Software’s information management group is attending industry events. Not only do I get an early look at the latest and greatest technologies poised to lead our industry into the future, I also get to enjoy face-to-face interaction with customers, partners, vendors, peers and colleagues. To me, those conversations are invaluable and irreplaceable. Nothing energizes me more than talking with customers and hearing about their challenges and successes. That’s why there may be no event I look forward to more each year than Oracle OpenWorld.
In many ways for me, and more importantly for Dell Software, Oracle OpenWorld is like a homecoming. Though Dell Software continues to expand the breadth of its information management offerings to address critical needs such as data integration, self-service business intelligence and big data analytics, the management of leading databases such as Oracle is our heritage, and each year the show gives us a tremendous opportunity to reconnect with that heritage. It gives us an opportunity to talk first-hand with Oracle customers about the latest trends impacting their day-to-day jobs, where they feel challenged and how we can better shape our solutions to help them meet their objectives. It’s also historically been a great forum for Dell Software to unveil its latest Oracle database management technologies, and this year was no different, as we announced critical updates to our Toad for Oracle and SharePlex product families.
Dell Software’s flagship database development and administration solution, Toad for Oracle, is an absolute workhorse for driving productivity in the development and administration of Oracle databases. The latest release delivers support for Oracle Database 12c, including the 12c multi-tenancy feature, in which multiple database instances can be hosted on a single DB server for database consolidation. The release also delivers several new functions designed to further Toad’s ability to enable connected intelligence, many of which are detailed by my colleague Bert Scalzo in our Toad World community, including code refactoring and upgraded ETL capabilities.
On the SharePlex side, with new enhancements announced today, users now can seamlessly migrate data from existing Oracle databases to their new 12c implementations while replicating data from 12c to a host of heterogeneous Oracle databases. In addition, we’re excited to unveil our SharePlex Connector for Hadoop, which empowers near real-time replication from Oracle databases, including 12c, directly to Hadoop HDFS and HBase environments, helping customers drive improved business intelligence and big data analytics.
While these capabilities are new, Dell Software’s commitment to enriching Oracle customers’ experience is not. We have a long legacy of delivering affordable, easy-to-use solutions that enable customers to better manage information and get move value from Oracle implementations. Over the years, we’ve built Toad World into one of the industry’s largest and most active user communities, with more than three million visitors yearly. We’ve also consistently ranked as the leading vendor for development and optimization of Oracle and other leading databases.
We don’t take this leadership – or the enthusiasm of our customer base – lightly. Going forward, even as we continue to expand the scope of our information management software offerings, we’ll remain committed to serving the Oracle customer community with database management solutions that make their jobs easier. And I’ll personally continue looking forward to meeting them in person each year at Oracle OpenWorld. You can count on that. Did you have a favorite moment from attending this year’s OpenWorld? If so and you’d like to share, drop me a line at john.whittaker@software.dell.com or send me a Tweet at @AlertSource.