As I leave OOW a few random thoughts
Most enjoyable - time spend with customer reps. market watchers like David Dobrin, Paul Greenberg, Frank Scavo, Ray Wang, Ameed Taylor,Tom Wailgum, Bruce Richardson, Thomas Otter and many more; vendor reps like Karen Tillman at Oracle, Anshu Sharma at salesforce.com, the team at NetSuite.
Most surprising - running into Joyce Boland at Oracle I worked with at Gartner 10 years ago, Brad Everett who I run into every few years starting with our first meeting in Saudi Arabia, 25 years ago and now at Equaterra, Ben Worthen of the WSJ.
Most disappointing - little news on Sun integration and converged services - understandable given the regulatory approval process the merger is still going through. Not understandable is the decision to wait till Larry's keynote to talk about Fusion apps. An Oracle rep told me once Larry speaks, all the NDAs on the analysts and media who have seen early versions will come off. They will create the buzz. Really? A few hundred of them? Had they started the conference unraveling that, 35,000+ attendees would have created magnitude more buzz over the 3 days. Also not spending time with the folks at Rimini and many others I could not visit with.
As I fought the lashing rain on Tuesday, I said I could have experienced the near Category 1 conditions at home in Florida. I did not need to fly all the way here , especially since I did not pick up much from the conference. But then I would not have spent time with Karen and Paul and Brad ...on balance, worth the trip.
Thanks, Oracle for the hospitality.
