Reaching the Pinnacle

I had the great pleasure of attending the Paetec - Pinnacle User Conference being held in San Francisco this week.

Pinnacle is the software division of Paetec which is a large telecommunications company in the US. Pinnacle is an application suite for telecommunication companies for expense management. They provide their suite as either Licensed (You get the source and install internally), Hosted (Installed on Pinnacle servers but you run everything) or Managed (Installed on Pinnacle servers and they run the suite for you). What is especially cool for me about Pinnacle is that they completely rearchitected their solution to use Oracle APEX. So here we have a commercial offering that is also an enterprise, software-as-a-service application suite built using Oracle APEX.

The latest Oracle Magazine's (May/June) feature is Developer Nation and includes a great write-up on Pinnacle. Well worth a read and goes to show the flexibility of Oracle APEX.

Oracle APEX + Enterprise + SaaS + Commercial suite is just gold dust for me and look to see / hear more about them in the future.

Unfortunately, I had to do a quick drop in talk and fly out again but it was certainly worth the trip. I conducted an APEX session which went well despite being in a long room with huge pillars in the middle. Got through my presentation, got to the Q&A section, the questions were flying from all-over, then the sirens went off - a "false" Fire Alarm ... One way to bring a session to a screaming halt!

While I was there though I did get to spend some quality time with the Pinnacle team and was very interested to learn and see how they have built a very interesting development framework - Special thank-you to Dennis and Erik and the rest of their team. Carl Backstrom was also in town for the Web 2.0 conference (it was very dangerous Tuesday night with Carl, Christian Shay and myself roaming the unsuspecting streets of SF) so I dragged him along to look under the covers and we got some useful ideas that may well make it into future releases.

The Pinnacle folks (staff and customers) all like to have a good time so it was a shame I had to get the red-eye out. Had to get some rest before driving to Indianapolis {3 hours each way :( }

For those of you in the Indianapolis area I am presenting at the INOUG meeting on Friday. Looking forward to going to my home state's user group meeting for the first time.

Later,
David