A Brief Recap on OpenWorld 2011

Well, my intentions were good, at least. I had intended to blog throughout the week from Oracle OpenWorld, but ended up being so busy (this is the first year that we have had a booth at OOW), I never had time to post anything. The event itself was even bigger than last year, with more than 45,000 attendees and 4,500 Oracle partners.

Although I didn't get to attend any sessions due to other commitments, I'm planning to download and watch the sessions of interest later. In the meantime, here are a few things that we learned this week:

• Oracle seems committed to nurturing and expanding a flourishing partner network, and appears to have no interest in providing services.
• Larry Ellison's keynote received, let's just say, a lukewarm reception. The spat between Larry and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff cast something of a dark shadow over proceedings, especially when the former referred to Salesforce as a "roach motel". Of course, all of this pointless bickering was put into stark perspective when it peaked on the same day that Steve Jobs passed away.
• The Public Cloud is core to Oracle's vision of providing subscription-based access to business applications, including the Fusion middleware stack.
• Oracle's first partner preview of Solaris 11 proves that my favorite *nix O/S is still alive and kicking, nearly two years after the Sun acquisition (yay!). Solaris 11 is fully virtualized, contains an impressive range of performance and functionality enhancements
• The Oracle Big Data Appliance (BDA) is a BFD!
• From an IAM perspective, not much to report, although admittedly I haven't watched the IAM sessions yet. There doesn't appear to have been much movement in this space since last year. Frankly, given Oracle's size and ambition, IAM appears to be losing some relevance for them. I hope I'm wrong about that.

There is no ambiguity about Larry's Oracle's technology vision. It can be summed up in three simple phrases: Big Data, Cloud and Parallel Processing.

Conference weeks always leave me feeling drained and needing a few days to recover. So I'm spending the weekend in Venice Beach, where I will NOT be thinking about Exadata or anything else to do with technology for the next couple of days.

Have a great weekend everyone!