Oracle Buries the Lead

At his second and final keynote address to the 2011 Oracle OpenWorld user meeting, Larry Ellison finally gave the rabid software oriented audience something to savor. Throughout the week the Oracle CEO and his minions had spent large amounts of time telling us about hardware or some other aspect of the business leaving me and [...]

Benioff Speaks

When his part was over Marc Benioff could look back on a keynote that was fresh and interesting for OpenWorld but without a great deal of the controversy that had been expected.  There are definite differences between Benioff and Larry Ellison and their respective companies. Benioff preaches openness, cloud, social, mobile and other modern technologies [...]

#OOW11 WTF! Larry Cancels Marc, Oy…

WTF!  I’ve been writing, talking and meeting all day.  I thought I had the night off when this bombshell went off (it comes directly form Twitter): “RT @Benioff: Larry just cancelled my keynote tomorrow! Sorry #oow11! Join me @ St. Regis AME Restaurant at 10:30AM! The show must go on! Sorry Larry!” There are so [...]

Pay the Man, He’s Worth It

Musings on Oracle OpenWorld October 2 to 6 Oracle OpenWorld won’t start until a reception on Sunday night but that won’t stop many of us from writing something about Oracle or the event before a word is spoken.  And there are so many things to say. There will be the usual product centric talks and [...]

Shark Jumping at Dreamforce

The clear lesson from this week is that you can over do it. And when the spotlight is on Salesforce, Oracle, Microsoft or whoever, that company has the public relations advantage. They have millions of dollars staked on a successful outcome and some skunk works prank by a competitor is not likely to achieve anything positive for the simple reason that it’s ad hoc and the principal vendor has been planning the event for a year.

The CEO is the Decider

“… organizations are becoming more social but perhaps the right application hasn’t come along yet to enable a CEO to be more social in a professional setting.”

Open World — You had to be there

A lot went down at Oracle Open World and you are probably as tired of reading about it as I am of writing about it.  Some very good reporting and analysis has come out of it all and you can easily find it on line if you wish.  I was impressed with several things that [...]

#oow10 Part 3 Cloud Orthodoxy

Writing about the seminal event for CRM at Oracle Open World — the public cloud computing debate between Larry Ellison and Marc Benioff respective CEO’s of Oracle and Salesforce.com — is tougher than coming up with rent and alimony.  There are so many threads to pull together and I have so much history following the [...]