
Space Invasion @ Dreamforce
Last year I made a bit of fun of Oracle, picking on the symbolism in their closed, walled conference setup vs. the open festival-like environment at Salesforce.com’s competing event. Here’s a little pictorial reminder: Dreamforce did not even feel like a conference, rather a Festival – Woodstock, Mardi Gras, SXSW – your pick. Fun. Contrast that to Oracle’s […]

Is Oracle at a Junction Point in Its History?
I attended Oracle Open World a few weeks ago (and been traveling since, which is why I am just getting to this now – but then again, there is more information in this post than Just that catalyst event of #OOW13). It brought together a few items that have been bouncing around my head for […]

Oracle OpenWorld 2013: A conundrum solved
For years I couldn’t resolve how and why Oracle approached the market so differently than other major apps providers. Finally I have. They aren’t truly an apps provider – at least not primarily.

Last Look at Oracle OpenWorld 2013
The ghost of Anthony Lye presided over Oracle OpenWorld’s third-day customer experience, or CX, keynote. For CRM and related things, it was the moment I’d been waiting for. Lye is in robust health as far as I know, but he has been gone from Oracle for about a year. He was the architect of Oracle’s […]

Can we refocus on SAP customer needs?
Reacting to the Oracle in-memory switch announcement, Vishal Sikka of SAP has commented “ it hasn’t been released yet, so please come back and talk to us when it is available” He is right. Makes for a lot of idle media gossip when we should be focused on SAP’s 200,000 application customers, many long-term ones, […]

Oracle BPM 11g – The View From Afar
You know where I’m not this week? Oracle OpenWorld. You know why? Because after an email conversation where I said that I could attend if my travel expenses were covered, and having them register me for the conference, I was informed that “PR doesn’t cover any hotel rooms or air travel”. Whatever. However, I did […]

Is Oracle Burying the Lead? Why?
If you are Oracle, one of the challenges of OpenWorld is trying to fit everything into just three days. The company has something like 3000 SKUs and it already splits the conference into multiple tracks and holds a conference within a conference for developers using Java. And of course, there are zillions of breakout sessions […]

Oracle OpenWorld 2013 Sails On
Like any major trade show of long standing, OpenWorld has been in planning for a long time. But this OpenWorld might be the most planned show of its kind ever because in addition to the extravaganza taking place in the Moscone Center, many of the hotels in the area and even in closed-off streets, an […]

Oracle OpenWorld 2013 Kicks Off
Larry Ellison’s keynote at Oracle OpenWorld on Sunday night had many flourishes as well as reminders of previous OpenWorlds. If this is your first experience with OpenWorld it is a TECHNOLOGY conference with, yes, a heavy emphasis on tech. That included a preliminary address by Fujitsu, one of the sponsors, that managed to make watching […]

Event Report: Day 1 At Oracle Open World 2013: The Quest For Innovation #oow13
Past Oracle Open Worlds Have Disappointed Customers and Partners Let’s be frank. The past five years at Oracle Open World have disappointed even the faithful. The over emphasis on hardware marketing and revisionist history on cloud adoption bored audiences. The $1M paid advertorial keynotes had people walking out on the presenters 15 minutes into the […]