Oct 5th, turned out to become an extremely eventful day at San Francisco’s Oracle Open World.
It started with quite an ugly twitter battle fueled by the incident by Oracle’s Larry J Elison, cancelling Mark Benioff’s (SFDC) Keynote address. Whatever, be the reason, it certainly ended to be an ugly incident, with counter punches from Benioff and plenty of punches from Larry during his keynote. Added to this, Benioff, decided to address the delegates inviting them to a nearby hotel – St Regis Ame – to the convention.
Ofcourse, Benioff’s session, ran to packed houses, and those who could not make it were well compensated with a Ipod shuffle voucher from Salesforce. Ofcourse, one cannot forget the huge traffic this incident gennerated through the Twitter pipe.
All in all, I think it took away precious time from focusing on the key purpose of these conventions – Technology and how it can help business.
Then ofcourse as Larry was giving a very boring demo of his newly announced Oracle Social Network, and as people were walking out of the auditorium in swarms, we got the first whiff of the sad and bad news of the passing away of Steve Jobs.
To me personally, it meant that we lost the finest true innovator of this century, and we won’t possibly see one for atleast another 20 years to come. He was a legend in making things simple, especially from the user perspective. Yes, indeed… we lost a great man. A man who will be remembered as someone who was daring enough to make changes, for he believed in them.
All the twitter streams that was highlighting Larry’s digs at SFDC, stopped and was replaced by tweets of reverence of the Apple visionary Steve. I am sure Apple, will never be the same again, as I truly believe the loss is profound.
But in all this sadness, earlier to this, at the Oracle Open World event we did have some good keynotes and some interesting perspectives. Cisco’s John Chambers gave quite a visionary speech, even though the story was woven around Cisco.
John talked about 4 foundational priorities;
1. Leadership in core business of routing,
2. Collaboration,
3. Data center/virtualization, and
4. Video.
Certainly a great speaker.
Other Highlights;
Larry: Oracle cloud is based on open standards and Fusion apps will be available on cloud
Larry: Oracle cloud is interoperable with on premise and other clouds
Larry: Announced Oracle Public Cloud with CRM, HCM, ERP also covering a standards -based Platform as a service that included Data, Database etc.
Nordstrom: talked about 3 elements of Demand – Create Demand, Influence Demand & Fulfill demand. Thats what they seem to be focusing on.
Infosys demoed Mobility Use Cases in the areas of Healthcare, Banking,Cable TV on Ipad and mBrochure
Nordstrom: Talked about an application they use that makes reccomendations on complimentary items to customers who try on garments in a dressing room. the idea, is matching accessories to dress, an Upsell Strategy.
To summarize Social & Digital is now mainstream.
To conclude, a very eventful day here at the Bay area. started with speculation and war of words between two IT industry Titans and ended with a loss of the greatest innovator of our times.
