Oracle’s Global Leadership Summit

Last year Oracle’s events team invited me to describe some of the better events I had been to (and that I blogged about here).  They heard me compliment a couple like Cognizant Community for its focus on thought leadership more than product marketing, for its location and for its executive audience.

Not sure if that inspired Oracle but their Global Leadership Summit today in Palm Springs raised the bar a few notches

a) the locale was spectacular – Porcupine Creek in Palm Springs the agenda was mostly thought leadership – President Bill Clinton (see my detailed note here), Dr. Laura D’Andrea Tyson (a key player in Clinton and Obama administrations and now professor at Haas at UC Berkeley), Larry Leibowitz and Bruce Lee, President and CIO at NYSE Euronext. The only Oracle executive to speak on its products was Thomas Kurian, though Mark Hurd and Bob Evans hosted the event.

c) the audience was senior and global (at lunch I sat with executives from Italy, France, Brazil, Hong Kong and Argentina)