For years now, Oracle OpenWorld has looked like Noah's Ark. As the song goes plenty of green alligators, long-necked geese, humpty-back camels... two or more of each product Oracle has developed or acquired. And there are the usual rare species that turn heads - Michael Phelps, the Olympics Champion, showed up today.
But no unicorns, promised each year in the form of Fusion applications.
I skipped this week's event - not that they miss me in that crowd of 43,000 - betting the unicorns would continue to play their silly games and not show. Besides, Karen Tillman of Oracle made it easy by allowing me to join the Influencer Community and get a close enough view from far away. And fellow EIs like Paul Greenberg are live blogging.
But the waters are rising around the Ark. Last quarter, Oracle reported a 14% drop (in constant currency) in application license revenues from the previous year. While Oracle says the previous year was unusually high, the stark reality is the quarterly application license revenue last year and this was under $ 400 m - paltry after $ 30+ billion spent in acquisitions in the last few years.
The unicorns need to jump on the Ark.
Instead a bunch of bees showed up today. And created a buzz (you knew that was coming!). Their collaboration focus should wake up Cisco and Microsoft, and anyone like Siemens leveraging Unified Communications. And every wiki, blogging and social tool vendor who was at the Office 2.0 conference a couple of weeks.
But as Sam Diaz at ZDNet summarizes - he keeps looking for more excitement. As the optimistic, extended lyrics to the original song go - look up, Sam, the unicorns are on the second star to the right.
