AppsLab News

2011 has been a year of change for the ‘Lab.

We welcomed a new member in May, Noel Portugal (@noelportugal), but then lost Rich (@rmanalan) to Atlassian in August and Anthony (@anthonyslai) to Taleo in September. Uncertainty played a role in each of their departures. For quite some time, the future of this team has been up in the air, and I’ve been scrambling to find the best fit for us, which has been challenging.

So, I’m pleased to announce that we’ve found a new home, not far from the old one, WebCenter Evangelism.

We’ll be led by Christian Finn (@cfinn), who introduced himself and the new team over on the official WebCenter blog. Christian came from Microsoft where he ran product management for SharePoint.

No other product at Oracle has a dedicated team of evangelists, which is a relatively new role in the software world, so this will be all new. The term evangelism doesn’t necessarily translate well into other languages or even other disciplines, so here’s what Christian is calling it:

Our mission is to raise the profile of Oracle in all of the markets/conversations in which WebCenter competes—social business, collaboration, portals, Internet sites, and customer/audience engagement.

For our part, the audience will be developers, which fits pretty well with what we’ve been doing here for the past (nearly) five years. We’ll be tinkering with the products that comprise the WebCenter brand, including Oracle Social Network and recently acquired Fatwire, as well as getting the word out on the intertubes and in person at conferences and such.

So, who else is on the team? In addition to Christian, Noel P. and me, Peter Reiser (@peterreiser) and Noël Jaffré (@noeljaffre) round out this small team.

Peter came to Oracle via the Sun acquisition, and his long-time experience with social at Sun makes him the perfect guy to talk about a successful social enterprise. Noël J. came to Oracle via the Fatwire acquisition, and he’s been doing web forever, building e-commerce and web content management software since the mid-90s.

You may be wondering what happens to the AppsLab. Well, nothing really. I’ll keep musing here, ideally with some periodic help from the other guys. That’s really no change. The content may change slightly to include more about WebCenter and what we’re doing as a team, conferences we’re attending, etc. Given our focus on developers, you could call AppsLab the technical arm of WebCenter Evangelism.

At some point, we hope to spin up a new home for WebCenter Evangelism that will link to here and vice versa, but that’s TBD for now.

I spent last week hanging out with the new team in Colorado and at HQ, and they’re a great bunch of guys, much like the old AppsLab. I’m stoked to work with such an experienced team on something brand new. It’s a bit scary, but exciting, like your first time on a roller coaster.

I’m realizing this is the second consecutive new job I’ve taken that is brand-new to Oracle. I’m not sure that’s a good thing, but it does make my work life interesting.

Welcome to Christian, Peter and Noël J. I need to send out some stickers and change the About page soon; it’s just lazy at this point.

As always, your input is appreciated. If you know conferences we should attend, places online we should be, ideas on how to reach out to potential WebCenter developers, really anything useful, let us know in comments.