The theme for this years event is 'Equilibrium Get the balance right. According to Martin Metz, TSG alliance manager at diamond sponsor, HP, the company has enjoyed a long working relationship with Oracle and the user community. Optimal value is a function of technology and applications, hardware infrastructure and the people needed to deploy and run business solutions, he says.
 
As such, HP has maintained close ties with user communities, as well as vendors, to ensure that our product development is congruent with user needs as well as software advances. With the Oracle mergers of recent months, we believe our involvement at this years SAOUG conference is critical to help users find the equilibrium necessary for ongoing value creation, he adds.
 
Processor manufacturer, AMD, says that it has, meanwhile, continued to make advances in the design of central processing units, which are at the heart of the hardware platforms that support technology and business applications.

Mark Anderson, business development manager at AMD which is the Platinum conference sponsor notes that particularly with the introduction of multithreading and 64-bit processing for Windows environments, it is important to create effective relationships with software vendors and user communities.

Software has to be programmed to take advantage of hardware developments such as multithreading and extended memory access capabilities; users also require education on the potential benefits and even pitfalls of introducing new hardware architectures into their environments. As such, AMDs participation in this event is considered crucial, he explains.

Ian Child, SAOUG president, notes that the participation of all elements of the value chain is a valuable development for the conference. The contributions in terms of sponsorships are highly valued, as is the interest from hardware and tools vendors which play a significant role in the total cost of ownership of Oracle technologies, he says. With this participation, and an agenda packed with stimulating and valuable insights and experiences from local and international Oracle users, we believe every delegate will benefit considerably from this event.