Oracle Apps Still Need Skilled People

I spent four days attending the technical sessions at Oracle OpenWorld. Similarly, I spent two days at Salesforce.com's Dreamforce conference held last month attending a variety of technical and application sessions. The bottom line from attending these sessions at both events is that while the executive level message is "faster, more flexible, more manageable," someone has to design, implement and run these systems. Aside from the obvious differences—that Salesforce abstracts the data center functions into a multi-tenant, SAAS (software as a service) model whereas Oracle lives in a data center at your organization—the applications and business processes must be created and run by people who understand the lines of business. Oracle, along with a slew of other vendors, offers CRM (customer relationship management) and SFA applications in a SAAS model. However, the bulk of OpenWorld, and Oracle, was focused on the database and applications that customers run in on-premise data...