My Content At Oracle Open World

Being a speaker at Oracle Open World is an honour. I have spoken many times over the past few years but each one is important. I wrote about my sessions before the event, but what did I think afterwards?

My first outing was as a guest speaker at an analyst event. Organised by Ray Wang of Altimeter, unfortunately that well known San Francisco fog delayed flights and some people arrived late but it was a great event. The panel I joined consisted of my great friend Floyd Teter VP of OAUG, Frank Scavo, President - Strativa, Enterprise System Spectator and Thomas Wailgum, Journalist - CIO Magazine, End User Advocate. 

We were looking at the customer expectations from OOW and I could have answered questions all day, it was great interaction with the audience. Floyd and I couldn’t stay for the second panel as we both had our first sessions to deliver so we had to run (we walk fast) through the city to Moscone.

My first presentation was entitled ‘Fusion MiddleWare for Business – Stay Away if you are Technical’, this is something I am passionate about, not the staying away, I love techie really; but the importance of business understanding what the technology can do for them.

One tip for attending OOW is to plan your schedule; an advantage of doing that is that it secures you a seat in a hall. Many sessions are oversubscribed and it great for the speaker but annoying if you decide. So I was delighted to find that this session was full, but I do thank my friends in the Usability Labs for their help on this.

I did a straw poll at the beginning and there were a few techies but only about 10 – 15 %. I got lots of positive feedback and was so pleased I did it. I also learnt a lesson; I have talked before about how I use the analogy of USB charging to explain SOA, after the session someone asked me where they could by the USB charging kit, she had never seen one. I always say I take my sessions to the lowest level and work up; perhaps I have not gone low enough.

My second session was ’42 Real Life Examples of Fusion Middleware’ which really made me laugh. I try not to be a Geek but my friends are winning and I got very excited about this. Those who were part of it know how close to the day it was getting the 42 examples into the white paper but I got there and thanks to all those who helped me.  

Again the audience was mixed but this time more 50/50. It was great to start a presentation with a video clip from ‘The Hitchhikers Guide to The Galaxy’ and to hear the audience laugh. No one seemed to have an issue with the presentation only containing the 3 examples; Life, The Universe and Everything so I was very pleased. I will be presenting this again at UKOUG and have submitted it for a few others.

Finally I talked about ‘What to Look For in A Systems Integrator’, this was a partner session I presented for Fujitsu. I wanted to talk about the process and although use my examples I did not want this to be a marketing pitch. I had my colleague Andy Seferta with me on stage and I think we hit the right balance. Interestingly about a third of the audience were partners and several were Oracle Consulting.  Again we got good feedback and a number of individuals come up with questions afterwards.

So that was my presenting at OOW for another year. I was very grateful that mine were all over by the end of Monday, allowing me to enjoy and participate in the rest of the event without all my worries about presenting getting in the way.

All my presentations and the white paper are available on my Fujitsu Site and you can hear them if you attended OOW and have access to the On Demand site.