I am back from Oracle OpenWorld and Thanksgiving holiday and am finally in the swing of things to start writing, vs. catching up. I will start with my critique of Oracle OpenWorld - I thought it was amazing and extremely well organized.
There were more then 42,000 people who invaded San Francisco and I found it very easy to find the people I needed to find, find the sessions I needed to attend (many were back to back in the same room which was very helpful) and broker concert tickets on Wednesday from people who didn't want to go to the Cow Palace - to people who were desperately looking for tickets to hear Billy Joel and others perform.
I even stood on the corner of Howard and 3rd in front of the W Hotel at 7:30pm screaming, New Jersey, trying to give a colleague of a friend concert tickets as a thank you for working the demo booth for 4 days, because someone at my most current reception gave me another spare ticket and I think everyone who wanted to go to the concert, should go.
OK, so what sessions did I think were good? Well, I really didn't sit through a bad session. For instance, I think Larry's opening speech about the history of Oracle was fascinating. If you missed it, you should definitely hear the replay because it was inspirational. For Oracle Application content, I again thought Larry's expression of Fusion Applications on Wednesday was interesting and specific which was the first I had heard anyone speak publically about dates and delivery of the product.
Steve Miranda's talk about Fusion Applications was wonderful. In fact, a customer asked me why he wasn't a keynote? I liked his 4 bucket approach of what Fusion Applications is - Standards-based, Manageable, Secure and Productive.
I think Cliff Godwin's talk about Fusion Applications being an upgrade from current Application Unlimited products (not a reimplementation), was very compelling. I saw many customers in the audience nodding their heads in agreement yet he also emphasized or deemphasized the rush to move to the first version of Fusion Applications unless an organization was ready. He talked about the benefits of staying on the most current release of the Application Unlimited products and specifically highlighted the added functionality of the latest releases that came out in 2007 for all products.
If you didn't have a chance, or couldn't get in because all of her 5 sessions were sold out, to attend one of Nadia Bendjedou's talks about "10 Things You Can Do to Prepare for Fusion Applications", then you should definitely go to the Oracle OpenWorld 2007 Content Catalog and get the notes. Nadia's content is so informative. In fact, an Oracle E-Business Suite customer, Floyd Teter of Jet Propulsion Lab, spoke at Oracle OpenWorld about how he has created a Roadmap to Fusion for his organization based on Nadia's 10 things and gave a progress report of what they have done. Floyd will be following up on his progress report at the Oracle User Group Conference, Collaborate '08, in Denver in April.
Besides hosting a few customers around the event, I also met a lot of new customers by hanging out at the customer video area. I learned a lot about what customers are doing with Secure Enterprise Search, MDM and other Fusion Middleware products.
If you're looking for links to Oracle OpenWorld session presentations, you can find them at this link:
- OpenWorld 2007 San Francisco Content Catalog
- Userid: cboracle
- Password: oraclec6
