The North American Customer Advisory Board (CAB) was held at Oracle headquarters, April 16-18. Customers were invited to attend in order to get an update on product direction, participate in discussions on key industry trends, and to meet with Product Managers to discuss product road maps and features.
Day 1 consisted of an overview of the Oracle IDM business, including key market trends and customer success stories, followed by presentations by Product Management in three key areas: Directory Services, Identity Governance, and Access Management
Day 2 contained moderated discussions on key topics such as Mobile and Cloud Applications, and also a customer presentation by College Board on their IDM implementation.
Day 3 began with a presentation by Oracle IT on how they are using Oracle IDM to manage systems and applications internally, and then moved on to additional breakout and feedback sessions. There were also opportunities for customers to meet with Product Managers one on one to discuss specific product features and functions. At the end of the day, customers were invited to provide feedback about the various presentations and discussions, and to identify key priorities for their organizations.
Here are some of the more popular discussion topics:
A lot of discussion around reference architectures for IDM: customers identified the need for additional best practice guidance when sizing and scaling hardware for optimal performance. A lot of good reference material exists for 10g products (which have been in the market for quite a while) but less is available for 11g products.
Multi-datacenter configurations, as well as configuring for high availability and disaster recovery.
Mobile application security was a hot topic: most of the attendees were delivering and securing mobile applications but there was a lot of variation in what customers were doing. Most agreed that the management capabilities of IDM for mobile applications needed to improve, and most agreed that mobile application management was a top priority for them.
All of the customers I spoke to agreed that the time was well spent, and that the presentations were detailed and focused on the topics, technologies and timelines that they felt were important. Everyone agreed that the ability to meet one on one with Product Management was very helpful, and everyone liked the customer presentations.
Thank you to everyone that attended, and shared their concerns, thoughts and suggestions with the IDM team.