I spent yesterday at the AMR conference on Enterprise Software at the Ritz Carlton in Half Moon Bay, CA. Great location and genial hosting by Tony Friscia, the CEO. As usual, Bruce Richardson, the Chief Research Officer was at his joking best with quips and jabs for every one in the industry. And he manages to keep them coming back for more!
But I left the conference feeling half-full - no not food wise, more about the content presented by the vendors.
a) Oracle's SVP of Application Strategy, Jesper Andersen had few details about real progress on Fusion. Just a few hours later and a few miles away, Charles Phillips and John Wookey presented far more details to the press. The audience at the AMR conference is more influential in the market - what statement is Oracle making with that scheduling?
b) Shai Agassi of SAP was probably the most entertaining presenter of the day - funny, charming. Did a nice job summarizing SAP's positioning and SOA. But was way too fixated on Oracle. Would have liked to hear more about what SAP is doing around new verticals, redefining application categories, open source, BPO - there are plenty of other non-Oracle competitors lurking in those niches. More importantly plenty of customers.
c) I was really looking forward to the speech on innovation from IBM's Rod Smith, their VP of Emerging Technologies. IBM should have a bunch of case studies to highlight examples of magical innovation. Instead the presentation was a fairly high level discussion of IBM's views of trends around SOA, Open source and Web 2.0 stuff (AJAX, PHP etc). Confirms the point I made about IBM last week.
d) Same thing with Microsoft. Dan'l Lewin, Corporate VP of .NET Business Development could have spent more time on that community and how Microsoft's enterprise software is doing- Dynamics, SQL server etc given the focus of the conference. But there was little of that.
e) Parker Harris of salesforce.com demoed some of the partners in their recently launched appexchange. Probably was the most "real" portion of a day filled with vendor promises and slideware.
f) Patrick Grady of Rearden Commerce, like Parker, talked about a real life application his company supports - travel and other services. It was nice to hear about a business use of technology. One nit - during Q&A he was evasive of the volumes he is supporting today. Patrick - look at it this way - whatever you are supporting is miles ahead of others.
g) Dave Duffield and Aneel Bhusri, co-founders of Workday in their "coming out" of stealth mode teased the audience with basic tidbits of what they are planning. Enough to merit a post on the blog of Jeff Nolan of SAP.
In their kick off presentation AMR presented the fact that players like Logility, Descartes, Indus and ILOG stocks were up between 40 and over 100% - whereas SAP was only up 2%, and Oracle went down 11%. I wish AMR had allowed a couple of their CEOs to present - see how the so called "living dead" are reinventing themselves and getting the stock boost.
AMR also presented an interesting theme in their kick off - one around the workplace of the future - aging workforces on the one hand and the next generation of iPod and myspace.com savvy users -will influence business applications. It did not get covered again during the day.
I posted yesterday that I thought it was nice to see AMR allow vendors, more than their analysts, to talk. In retrospect, there was too much vendor talk. As a result, there was way too much SaaS and SOA - not enough telemetry, next generation CRM, BPO. Now I wish AMR analysts had presented more.
I certainly did not feel like running out to the cliff at the hotel with a stunning view of the Pacific and screaming "I am full" - a la the Taco Bell commercials.
Author Note: Randy Weston of AMR posted his summary of the event here. I missed yesterday's CIO panel session and see at bottom their reaction to SOA - a little different than vendor excitement.
