2011 Say Bye-bye!

Every year around this time I write two columns one on the year that was and another on what I expect the new year to bring.  There is no methodology for this process and I believe this lack of method is important.  I take a blank screen and fill it up with what has been [...]

#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 [...]

#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 [...]

#OOW10 The Other Fall Classic Part 2

Dust off your baseball metaphors because they all apply.  Yesterday, team Oracle threw strikes, played small ball, swung for the fences, shut down the opposition and generally stole home in a very satisfying win.  We’re talking Open World. It was a team effort at the Moscone Center in San Francisco where forty-one thousand guests and [...]

Summits and a synthesis

Summit must be the secular name our species came up with when we decided that certain business meetings had to have the same weight as religious conversions.  I am not trying to be contentious by using this vaguely religious metaphor so please consider me a radical centrist.  But after a few months of vendor meetings [...]