Friday, November 16, 2007

OpenWorld 2007 - Thursday Communique

I spent much of Thursday in efforts to consider what Larry Ellison had to say on Wednesday. His keynote hinted at some pretty deep concepts regarding the future of Oracle Apps. I'm still attempting to sort it all out...

Spent some time on the smaller exhibit floor in Moscone West, rechecking the conclusions I drew from my time on the exhibit floor in Moscone South on Wednesday. No change in my observations and conclusions...there is a certain sense of urgency and even desperation in the air, especially from some of the smaller software and service providers.

My own presentation, "A Roadmap To Fusion Applications", went pretty well. I was surprised by the size of the crowd. The usual Thursday afternoon session at OpenWorld draws about eight people. Over 130 people attended this session, which indicates to me the need to address the "how" details of preparing for Fusion Applications. Lots of good questions, which is always a strong sign to a presenter that the message got through to the audience. Now it's time to work version 4.0 of the roadmap - I'll put it up here when it's finished, probably sometime in January.

During my session, I took a quick "show of hands" on how many E-Business customers were using Oracle Irep. Although almost two-thirds of the audience identified themselves as technical and as E-Business users, only one person (other than me) had ever accessed Irep - Brian Bent from Solution Beacon (a really smart guy from a great company, so it's no surprise that he's clued into Irep). This tells me we must do a much better job of getting the story on the value of Oracle Irep out to the user community.

Time to go catch a plane...I'll put up some more thoughts over the weekend.

3 comments:

Gaby said...

Hi Floyd,

Great Job at Open World! I attended your presentation and got a lot out of it and can't wait to look at your roadmap in more details. I also started sharing the irep link with my technical team... they love it! I did ask you after the presentation if you guys were using Grants at all in hope that someone would give us some hint as to what to expect in fusion... You mentioned you may be able to find out more on who's is participating in the module for fusion... if the offer is still valid please email me at gaby.peloquin@rfsuny.org.
Thanks!
Gaby

fteter said...

Gaby, thanks for the compliment. I'm glad you got some value from the presentation.

My offer is still open. I'll see what I can find on the future of Grants and let you know via email.

--Floyd--

vinnie mirchandani said...

good to meet you there. I worked with Linda when she was at Accenture and I was at Gartner and agree with your assessment of her.

Overall, as I wrote on my blog, I expected to hear/see a lot more on Fusion Apps and Oracle SaaS, and I walked away with more concern about Oracle's ability to develop product (as against acquire product) from the middleware pitches and discussions I had there. Like with SAP, the web 2.0 stuff they showed at the conference, is nice, but still a thin layer of innovation for the billions in maintenance customers do pay them.

So it was a good show, and great to meet folks like you and other Oracle bloggers but from a macro perspective I left with more questions than answers...

...stay in touch