#oow10 - what happens when the firehose is not spraying in your direction

To put this in perspective for the six-plus billion people who have never attended Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco, let me explain that when you are there, the experience is overwhelming. The streets around the Moscone Center are clogged with over 40,000 people, all wearing red and white badges, all talking about "stacks" and things like that. In fact, some streets are completely closed down - not only to handle the crowds, but also to allow the construction of additional facilities to take care of everyone. It completely dominates your life - so much so that if you want to get away from the madness for a bit, it takes a great deal of effort to do so. In past years, I have likened the experience to a firehose, and the description is pretty apt.

It's an entirely different experience if you're not there, and you're just monitoring it from a few hundred miles away.

I attended Oracle OpenWorld for several years in a row. Initially I'd just go up for a couple of days, but recently I've been staying for the entire week, flying up on Sunday morning to participate in the Oracle PartnerNetwork activities, and flying back home to southern California late Thursday afternoon or early Thursday evening.

This year, because of the change in my work duties, I didn't go to Oracle OpenWorld this year. (Actually, technically I shouldn't have gone to Oracle OpenWorld 2009 either, but I had already registered for the conference by the time my company's reorganization was announced.)

I'm working on two major projects right now, but I figured that I would cover Oracle OpenWorld 2010 from afar, providing a literal outsider's perspective on the announcements and events. I actually started well before the conference. For example, here are the Oracle OpenWorld 10-related posts that I've written since the beginning of August:

(August 4) Oracle OpenWorld Unconference move for 2010?

(September 6) Phillips and Hurd - one thing in common, but only one's at Oracle

(September 15) You know it's Oracle OpenWorld when they get ready to close Howard Street

(September 15) #OOW10 Five tips to follow Oracle OpenWorld 2010 on Twitter

(September 17) Larry Ellison's Sunday #OOW10 keynote will be interesting, for a variety of reasons

And then the conference officially began.

On Sunday morning, when I'd normally be on a plane heading to San Francisco or Oakland, I was in church.

On Sunday afternoon, when I'd normally be leaving my hotel to go to the Oracle PartnerNetwork event, I was working on one of my two major projects.

And by Sunday evening, when I'd be listening to the Sunday evening keynote...well, I already shared that story. I listened to about five minutes of Ann Livermore (and I didn't think she was as bad as everyone made her out to be), but my wife and I went out to dinner before Larry Ellison started speaking. I had to read about his announcements after the fact.

And by Monday morning...I was back in the office, feverishly working on my two projects. Oh, I'd read the occasional item in Google Reader, and I monitored the tweets surrounding Ellison's Wednesday afternoon speech for a few minutes, and I peeked into Twitter Wednesday night to see how the Treasure Island event was going.

But I had other priorities.

And it helped me to understand something. Although Oracle OpenWorld is a huge experience when you're there, it's a minor blip to the rest of the world.

I always wondered why the Oracle OpenWorld-related hashtags were NEVER trending topics on Twitter, despite the fact the everyone around me seemed to be tweeting about the conference. The answer becomes apparent once you're not standing in the direction that the firehose is pointing.

In a way, Oracle OpenWorld is kind of like FriendFeed. When you're there, it seems gigantic. When you're not there, it seems inconsequential. Remember the big hullabaloo in February when FriendFeed went down and, in the words of MG Siegler, both remaining users were pissed? Some FriendFeed users took offense to that statement...even though in relative terms it was true. For whatever reason, FriendFeed usage has declined since the Facebook acquisition, and even if usage had stayed the same, the number of FriendFeed users is nowhere near the number of Twitter users. And the fact that most in the tech press refer to FriendFeed in the past tense just exacerbates the situation.

So it is with Oracle OpenWorld. What would happen if Oracle, for whatever reason, decided to cancel Oracle OpenWorld 2011? Now a lot of my personal friends and acquaintances would be extremely upset, and it would be a major catastrophe to them. But most of the world wouldn't care.

In fact, I know one person who would be EXTREMELY happy if Oracle OpenWorld would just go away. Back when I wrote about the closures of Howard and Mason streets, I received a comment from a woman named Diana. This is (part of) what she said:

The above closure will be EXTREME hardship for those who are mobility compromised and live at 149 Mason Street! Am I supposed to walk a block and stand at a street corner, when I cannot do so without a wheelchair, and when the Medi-Cal system has not yet processed my wheel chair prescription--and may not for a while? I use Paratransit which comes right to my door at 149 Mason St., on the corner of Ellis and Mason. How can I walk a block to meet them if they cannot come to my door? Not to mention the dangerous neighborhood to stand around in that I will find if I even COULD go a block in either direction. Drug dealers galore, thieves, etc. Did anyone there ever even give a thought to those of us who can't get around except by muni, Paratransit or cab? How can we get where we need to go without walking? This is absolutely unfair and unacceptable!

So while I'm thinking about a place where I can get beer and Oracle Technology Network building blocks, Diana is living in the real world and has real worries.

I still want to get around to exploring Oracle's cloud initiatives at some point. Perhaps I'll start by reading something that Jake Kuramoto wrote back in 2009.

But, like I said, I have two other projects that I'm working on...

#OOW10 Night One (well, five minutes of it, anyway)

It's strange how your priorities change when you're not in the midst of the firehose.

I had every intention of listening to the Sunday evening keynote online. I wanted to hear what both Oracle and HP had to say (and not just for the soap opera reasons). Oracle was sharing the keynote online at http://www.oracle.com/us/openworld/index.htm, so I would be able to hear it, even though I'm not in San Francisco. (Actually, one year when I WAS in San Francisco, I went back to my hotel room to listen to the Sunday keynote online; I wasn't feeling well that evening and didn't feel like braving Moscone.)

And I did listen to the keynote - for about five minutes.

You see, my wife and I wanted to go to dinner, and we had to do some shopping for the daughter, and I had to do some shopping for "Project Joe," and this, and that...

But I enjoyed the five minutes that I did hear, which featured Oracle's good buddy Ann Livermore of HP. The tweets that I saw while Livermore spoke characterized her speech as boring and devoid of innovation, but I thought that she made some good points.

First off, she made the point that Larry Ellison wasn't the only company acquirer in the room, and that HP had been making acquisitions of its own. (See my previous post.)

Second off, she noted that HP has an extensive services business. Although she didn't say it, HP (with its EDS acquisition) and IBM are known for offering services; Oracle really isn't.

Maybe Livermore isn't the most riveting speaker in the world, but she knew what she was saying.

In addition, it was worthwhile to hear Livermore since, as Jean-Louis Gassee recently speculated, she, or co-presenter David Donatelli, may end up running HP at the end of the day.

But I missed Larry Ellison's speech, which (obviously) Oracle itself covered. And it appears that Oracle is starting to provide services also, though not quite of the EDS variety:

"What is cloud computing?" he asked rhetorically. "It's elastic, it's virtualized, and you pay only for what you use."

He then introduced the Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud, the world's first and only integrated middleware machine. "It's a cloud in a box," said Ellison, "that you scale from a quarter rack up to eight racks as a cloud.

"That's one big honkin' cloud."

I guess that fits the definition of an extremely private cloud. More later.

Ellison also talked about an "Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel," and briefly talked about Oracle Fusion Applications - but Ellison will say more on that during his traditional Wednesday keynote.

Meanwhile, Oracle OpenWorld moves on, and the Monday sessions will begin shortly...and I'm paying attention to entirely different news - which, for obvious reasons (I am a Safran employee), I have nothing to say about at this time. Other than to note that, based upon previous experience, an acquisition such as this can take some time to finalize, based upon all the worldwide government approvals that are required.

Larry Ellison's Sunday #OOW10 keynote will be interesting, for a variety of reasons

I won't be in Moscone North on Sunday night, but I'll definitely keep track of Larry Ellison's keynote that evening. You can follow the conference on Twitter, you know.

Oracle describes the keynote as follows:

Join Oracle CEO Larry Ellison's welcome keynote on Sunday evening, September 19, 5:30 p.m.-7:30 p.m., as he previews Oracle OpenWorld and offers his unique insight into the product innovations that will be revealed and the key announcements that will be made throughout the week.

"This is the biggest, most innovative, and probably most important year in terms of product releases in Oracle's history," Ellison has said.

And it is big. The Sun acquisition has been formally approved by various governments, and Oracle now wants to execute on its latest iteration of the stack, all the way from hardware to applications. I confess that I don't really follow the fusion applications market, but I'm sure that some of those people are salivating right now.

Oracle dutifully mentions the next part of the Sunday night presentation, as follows:

In the same keynote, Oracle President Safra Catz will join HP Executive Vice President Ann Livermore as Livermore addresses how to Leverage IT to Create Business Advantage from Your Datacenter to the Cloud.

But this paragraph is more notable about what it doesn't say. First off, President Charles Phillips is not mentioned, because (as was previously noted in this blog) he has resigned. Second off, it doesn't mention his replacement, former HP head Mark Hurd. Third off, it doesn't mention that Ann Livermore is showing up at Oracle OpenWorld anyway, despite the fact that Oracle and HP have been making threats to each other over item number two (including something that I neglected to mention on this blog - namely, that Hewlett Packard is suing Oracle over its employment of Hurd).

I'm terrible at predictions, but I somewhat suspect that Hurd will not make an appearance at Oracle OpenWorld until later in the week.

#OOW10 Five tips to follow Oracle OpenWorld 2010 on Twitter

For the first time in several years, I will not be attending Oracle OpenWorld. And even if you are attending Oracle OpenWorld, the firehose is often so wide that you don't get a good sense of everything that is going on.

If you are a Twitter user, here are five tips that will help you get the most from your OpenWorld experience.

TIP 1: FOLLOW THE OFFICIAL ORACLE ACCOUNTS. Obviously you want to follow the @oracleopenworld Twitter account, and you'll probably want to follow @oracle. But remember that Oracle OpenWorld covers a whole...um..."stack" of information, so for information specific to your interest, you might want to follow a more specific Oracle account. In my case, one of those accounts is @OracleDatabase.

TIP 2: FOLLOW (AND USE) THE OFFICIAL ORACLE OPENWORLD 2010 HASHTAG #OOW10. Hashtags are a convenient way to mark that a tweet is relevant to a specific topic. Oracle has suggested that if you're tweeting about Oracle OpenWorld 2010, use the hashtag #oow10.

To join and/or follow the conversation related to next week's Oracle OpenWorld 2010, please use the following hashtag #OOW10

So if you tweet about Oracle OpenWorld 2010, use #OOW10. And if you want to find tweets about Oracle OpenWorld 2010, go to http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23OOW10.

And you don't have to just limit it to Twitter. For example, not only have I included the #OOW10 in the title of this blog post (which ensures that when the blog post title is tweeted, the hashtag will be there), but I've also used it as a tag for the post itself (in Blogger terms, a "label"). Go ahead and use it when you upload photos to Flickr. Incorporate it into your Foursquare check-ins. Whatever gets you through the night - whoops, wrong year for that musical reference.

TIP 3: FOLLOW OTHERS WITH THE SAME INTEREST. Once you start looking at everyone who is using the #OOW10 hashtag, you'll find out that A LOT of people are tweeting about Oracle OpenWorld 2010. If their interests coincide with your own, follow them. This will give you additional information.

TIP 4: CHECK OUT THE ORACLE LISTS. Twitter allows its users to create lists that can be focused on different topics, relevant or irrelevant. And a bunch of people have set up lists that are specific to Oracle. Here are a few:

http://twitter.com/eddieawad/oracle
http://twitter.com/surachart/oracle
http://twitter.com/Radu43/oracle
http://twitter.com/fuadar/oracle
http://twitter.com/theappslab/friends-of-appslab
http://twitter.com/jpiwowar/oracletweeps

There are, of course, many others.

TIP 5: MAKE YOUR OWN LIST(S), BUT DO IT NOW. In fact, you may get the best bang for your Euro by applying this tip and ignoring most of my other tips. If you were to truly follow every account that tweeted about Oracle OpenWorld 2010, your Twitter feed would be extremely busy. So instead of doing all that, why not just create your own list, put your favorite Oracle-related Twitter users in that list, and go from there? However, if you're going to create your own list, I STRONGLY advise that you do it now, before you are overwhelmed by the Moscone madness.

Obviously this list doesn't include all of the wonderful people on Twitter, or all the things you can do with Twitter, and it completely ignores other avenues of #OOW10 communication (Flickr, etc.). So if you are convinced - and you probably are - that I missed a very important tip for following Oracle OpenWorld 2010 online, please add it to the comments.

You know it's Oracle OpenWorld when they get ready to close Howard Street

Yes, folks, it's that time of year again when a certain part of San Francisco turns into a sea of red, and San Francisco drivers have to look at alternate routes.

The San Francisco Appeal has all of the closures, but the one that affects the most people is the complete closure of Howard Street between Third and Fourth Streets. The closure begins at 8 p.m., Thursday, Sept. 16 and lasts through through 3 p.m., Friday, Sept. 24.

But there's a new closure that is very, very important. Mason Street will be closed between Ellis and O'Farrell beginning on 2 a.m. Saturday, September 18 and lasting until 10 a.m. Friday, September 24

Why is this closure important? Because if Mason Street weren't closed, Justin Kestelyn would get hurt very badly. Bob Rhubart explains why:

The OTN Lounge has moved from its old digs on the third floor of Moscone West to the Mason Street Tent, between the Hilton and Nikko hotels. To be more precise, the OTN Lounge hasn't moved to the Mason Street Tent, it has become the Mason Street Tent.

Occupying the entire block from Ellis to O'Farrell, the Mason Street Tent is the new home for all the swag and activities you used to find in the OTN Lounge, and much, much more.

Oracle OpenWorld attendees (unfortunately, not including me this year) - this is the only time that you'll be able to sit in the middle of Mason Street, drink beer, and get away with it.

Incidentally, regarding the "sea of red" I mentioned earlier - it was recently revealed that Mark Zuckerberg is partially color blind, and blue is the one color that he can see really well - hence the predominant blue that is used for Facebook online properties.

Does Larry Ellison have a partial color-blindness where he can only see red?

Phillips and Hurd - one thing in common, but only one's at Oracle

Curiouser and curiouser.

I figured that I'd peek into Google Buzz tonight, and it's a good thing that I did, because Fuad Arshad shared some Oracle-related news from the New York Times.

When you dig a little below the surface, the news is mystifying.

What news? Namely, that Mark Hurd, formerly of Hewlett-Packard, had joined Oracle as a co-president. Normally this would mean that there would be three people in Oracle's crowded co-presidency...except for the fact that Oracle also chose to announce the resignation of one of two of the existing Oracle co-presidents, Charles Phillips.

The reason that the whole thing is seemingly mystifying is because Phillips privately expressed his desire to resign last December. In Phillips' timeline, this desire was expressed after he began divorce proceedings in 2008, but before Phillips became the talk of Times Square in January 2010 after pictures of Phillips and YaVaughnie Wilkins appeared on Times Square (and in other places).

Lest you've already forgotten, the whole reason that Hurd was available to join Oracle was because he resigned from Hewlett-Packard, apparently due to financial misstatements that resulted from HIS affair with a woman.

So why did Oracle trade one guy who was fooling around for another guy who was fooling around?

Or is that the whole story?

Reader of the Empoprise-BI blog will recall that Jean-Louis Gassée had some suspicions about Hurd's exit from Hewlett-Packard.

This is pure speculation on my part, but perhaps Hurd's move to Oracle has been planned for some time - maybe even since last December, when Larry Ellison realized that he needed someone to replace Phillips. Of course, this could not happen until Hurd left HP, and perhaps the financial issues, coupled with the animosity toward Hurd within HP that Gassée hinted at, were what drove Hurd toward the big red blob.

Man, I wish I were going to Oracle OpenWorld this year. Sudden last-minute changes can make things really interesting, especially at a forum like OpenWorld where a lot of companies in co-opetition with each other show up.

Oracle OpenWorld Unconference move for 2010?

In the past, whenever I have attended Oracle OpenWorld, there has been some acquisition or another that pours more and more people into Moscone Center and the adjoining hotels.

This year (the first time in several years that I probably won't make it up to San Francisco) it appears that the Sun acquisition, with all of the Java and MySQL folks, has continued this trend. And it looks like there is at least one ramification of this, if I'm reading and interpreting Richard Foote's July 22 blog post correctly. This is (part of) what he said:

Finally, I’ve decided to put my name down for the Oracle Unconference again this year. Partly because it was relatively successful last year when I attempted this in that it generated a number of interesting discussions, partly because it’s in the spirit of the Unconference where unstructured and interactive presentations are the go but mainly because it requires absolutely no preparation on my part whatsoever, I’ve decided to host another question and answer session on all things Oracle Indexes. This is your chance and opportunity to ask those questions on how Oracle indexes work, how they should be used, how they should be maintained, on indexing issues you want to share or solve or dispel or whatever, with a whole bunch of other Oracle professionals. As always, if the questions dry up, no worries, we can spend the rest of the time discussing which of David Bowie’s albums is the most influential ;) Details are:

“Oracle Indexing Q & A With Richard Foote” Tuesday 21 September, 10:00am Hotel Parc 55 Mason Room

The Oracle Unconference is always one those secret little highlights of the whole Oracle OpenWorld event where you often get the opportunity to listen, meet and speak with some great speakers in relatively quiet and intimate (for OOW) surroundings. Always worth checking out the agenda each day.

Now, as a former Oracle OpenWorld Unconference presenter, I immediately noticed that the unconference has apparently moved from Moscone West to the Hotel Parc 55, and that the unconference will apparently have real rooms, with walls up to the ceiling and stuff.

A week after Foote's post, John Hurley posted a link to Oracle OpenWorld 2010 Unconference information. Oddly enough, the page is on the sun.com domain - http://wikis.sun.com/display/JavaOne/Unconferences+at+JavaOne+and+Oracle+Develop+2010.

Hotel Parc 55 is in the Union Square area, a few blocks from the Moscone Center.


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