Monday

So taking the left turn made a big difference this morning. I got to the platform just as the BART pulled in. The ride to Embarcadero went quickly and I was right on time for my breakfast meeting. Then up to the Moscone center for the opening keynote.

The hall is huge, the crowd is overwhelming. We’re talking arena concert proportions. Charles Phillips proceeds with the wonders that are Oracle, then he brings up 2 CIOs to extoll the support excellence in a scripted conversation. Call me cynical, but hearing ten thousand people applaud this schtick rolls my eyes.

Fusion is introduced by first saying that everything’s moving to SOA followed with a story about the evolution of Business Process Management, finishing with the description of the Fusion concept – an architecture based on a ‘unified portal’ atop Oracle’s activity monitoring and BP orchestration tools, atop their service bus and service registry sitting over the infrastructure (configured as a grid) and finally the apps.

The talk segued to Paul Ottelini of Intel who happliy announced that “Tech is back!” Two of the examples of the growth in his opening video were podcasts and blogs…very interesting. But it’s an unvarnished sales pitch and I bail out as he demos virtualization by crashing a virtual instance of NT – no big feat – running under Windows Server without taking out any other running instance. No real info for me here.

Today’s sessions included ‘Building Collaborative Solutions’ and ‘Enterprise Portals, then and now’. I found both to be too fundamental for my purposes. I spent some time on the show floor, and aside from an engaging talk with Rich Manalan, generally known as a guru of the PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal I didn’t really engage with many of the vendors.

I had a meeting with the VP of support which was valuable for the connection made and covering some issues and questions with my colleagues from Latam and Asia who joined us.

I met up with Rich aagain after hours at an informal gathering of folks that participate in a Yahoo group on the Enterprise Portal. There I read a paper on the strategic direction for the Portal. It looks like no further development after version 9, so that’s something to think about. I had to leave after an hour to go to another dinner held for my company. I met up with some of the support folks I met earlier, and as is often the case due to the sheer size of my company, I met some folks who I knew by name but hadn’t met in person before.

My shins and soles ache, and I lost sleep last night so by 8:45 I was back on the BART heading back to my hotel. I intend to soak them once this is posted.

If I sound cynical in this post, I think it comes from a kind of defensiveness I get when I’m at these events. I really don’t usually operate on that level. The real value of the day came from all the one-on-one discussions and meetings I had. The large sessions either get too deep into marketing or are off-point for my particular needs; the work I do is typically on a much larger scale than the usual customer.

Sunday

It’s about a 15 minute walk from my hotel to the San Bruno Caltrain station. The fare to “San Francisco” is two dollars, although I’m not sure where I’ll be when I get off. I’m about 15 minutes early. While it’s not too far to walk I’m wondering if I’ll bother tomorrow, I have a meeting at 7 AM near the Moscone center and I can have a car pick me up.

Cool, a double-decker commuter train. Top deck for that low-flying view. Clouds are pouring in over the hills from the west on a strong wind. The ride ends up at the San Francisco Caltrain station,  I walk up Fourth and stop at Moscone North to register for the show, figuring that the lines would be very long tomorrow.

The customer welcome reception is going on at Yerba Buena, and since I’ve eaten very little I swing through to grab a bite and some water. Huge crowds, a jazz combo playing. I walk to the end of Mission street where Oracle is having a dinner for attendees from my company. It was a pleasant, low-key dinner. About 10 or 12 folks from my company about half of whom I know and 5 or 6 Oracle folks. One fellow tells me that due to the large scale of the event – 40,000 attendees – Oracle employees aren’t allowed to attend most of the party events. Hopefully they’ll make their own fun somehow, or go home and rest.

I cabbed back to my hotel in the ‘burbs to find that I had screwed up the hotel’s directions to the train and gone in the opposite direction from the BART. So I’ll give it a try tomorrow as the cab cost over $40.

Oracle World approaches

By way of introduction, I’ve spent some of my professional time as a technology manager around PeopleSoft implementations at a Fortune 500 company – back in 1998 and again from 2002-2004. I’ve been at the same company on other assignments on this year but now I’m back in a business role with responsibility for systems I formerly helped deploy.

This weekend I’m heading to Oracle’s annual meeting in San Francisco. A year ago I attended my first – and last – Peoplesoft event in the same location. I hope to catch up on whatever I’ve missed, and will be certainly be viewing this through a different filter. Time permitting, I’ll post daily impressions. I welcome any comments.