Listen To The Music - OOW 2018

Don't you feeling it growin', day by day

People gettin' ready for the new

Some are happy, some are sad

Oh, we got to let the music play

          - From The Doobie Brothers "Listen To The Music"

So it's Oracle OpenWorld time again.,, can you hear the music playing?  It really kicked off last Thursday, but the event really starts peaking today (Oct. 22nd) through Thursday.  Gazillions of people descending on downtown San Francisco to hear the latest about Oracle products and services.  It's a massive event, with lots of people and venues scattered through the downtown area.  It's tough to take it all in.

In the Cloud Applications or SaaS segment, you should pay special attention to a few specific themes:

1. Oracle's progress in shifting from a products-focused company to a product-as-a-service company.  We've made some notable progress over the past year.  Is it enough?  Personally, I'm too caught up in the trees to evaluate the forest without bias.  So the story will get told and y'all get to make the evaluation.
2. The positive disruption coming from customers moving to SaaS.  In all honesty, we've been more than a little surprised here.  It's bigger than I personally anticipated.  You'll hear some open and frank stories on this front.
3. We've built quite a bit of AI capability into the Cloud Applications.  You'll hear quite a bit on how that effort is playing out in the market.
4. Specific to HCM Cloud Applications, you'll hear quite a few customer experiences around Newsfeed UX (aka Mobile Responsive).  We've had a large group of customers uptake this new UX during the 18B update and expect quite a few more to make the move in 18C (which comes out shortly after OOW).  From my own perspective, this is one of the coolest innovations to hit the enterprise applications market ever.  I'm looking forward to hearing what people think of it after hearing the stories we'll present at OOW.

For those of you attending OOW, or those of you not attending but paying attention, I'd really like to hear your thoughts and impressions about the conference.  After listening to the music, find the comments and share what you think.