| About My Work | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 |
My history at Oracle has been both both tumultuous and steady over the last seven years. For (nearly) the entire time, I've been working with the Oracle Applications product suite in one way or another. To fully understand what my role is, a bit of background in the product will help. (Feel free to skip to the next section if you already know about it.)
Oracle Applications is a collection of financial, manufacturing, supply chain, human resource, and sales and marketing applications designed to operate virtually every aspect of large companies. The key buzzwords to describe this type of business are ERP (for Enterprise Resource Planning) and CRM (for Customer Relationship Management). (If you really want to impress your company's CIO, throw in BI, for Business Intelligence. Yup, we do that, too.) Technically, these are distinct types of software, but Oracle has recently combined both offerings into one package — a nice selling point, given you want your salespeople to know what you have in inventory before promising it to customers. The latest release of the suite has over 100 individual products, such as Accounts Payable, Order Management, Supply Chain Planning, Internet Procurement, Call Center, Payroll, and so on. It's the industry's second largest-selling application suite, rivaled only by those of our chief competitors SAP AG in ERP and Siebel in CRM.
The technology that makes this suite work is all Oracle from top to bottom. We call this the "technology stack", as it consists of many layers, each of which carries dependencies on the layer beneath it. For example, the foundation of our product is the Oracle 8i Server, our relational database. On top of this, we build forms (using Oracle Forms) for querying and entering data from end users, and reports (using Oracle Reports) for displaying present and historical data. These forms and reports are delivered to the user via a web server (Oracle WebDB). We also integrate with large data warehouses (Oracle Data Warehouse...sensing a pattern yet?) for analyzing huge amounts of historical data. The list of components to this "stack" goes on — there are literally dozens of different technologies we collect to put everything together, most from within Oracle, but some from third-party companies every once in a while.
Now that you have an idea of how it all works, let me tell you a bit about what any of this has to do with me.