Oracle Open World 2006 Wrap-Up

By Chris Heller • October 27, 2006

We survived Oracle OpenWorld 2006. A very long, but rewarding week. We originally planned to to blog the show as some other folks did. However, it was a little too hectic.

Our sessions turned out great, approximately 600 people attended each session, so we got some great feedback and questions from people (so look for some good new blog entries coming up). For those of you that provided contact info for copies of some of our products, look for those coming your way next week.

It was amazing the difference between this year and last year. Last year, we were a company that was only several weeks old and we didn’t have an official presence. This year we have several products with live and happy customers. We also presented two highly-attended and (we think) successful sessions. From a PeopleSoft customer perspective, it was obvious that Oracle had listened to the feedback from last year, and provided a lot more presentations focused on providing information needed by the PeopleSoft customers.

Out of all the customers we talked with, people were definitely a lot happier this year. Applications Unlimited is turning out to be a great hit.

Our Oracle Open World Kodak moment has to be the following:

It was the first day the exhibit hall was open, and we had spent much of
the previous day trying to iron out the kinks in our booth. 2 hours into
that morning, a PeopleSoft customer made a bee-line to our booth, and started
peppering us with questions, verifying features and pricing for one of our
products.

After about two minutes of talking with us, he paused and asked, “We’re in
a hurry to get something put in for this. How long would it take for you
to generate an invoice?”

Needless to say, we got him an invoice. We subsequently helped him
install the product from the Starbucks next to Moscone Center (while he
was still here at the show), and now has it up and running in one of his
environments. The customer expects to put it into production
next week.

We definitely want to thank all of you that came to our sessions and to our booth. Special thanks go out to Jeff Robbins and David Bain for being our co-presenters. Thanks also go to Mike Ni and Nadia Bendjedou for their upfront work in having us as presenters. Finally, we wanted to thank Jake Abrams for helping out in our booth. Jake has more expertise in implementing our products than anyone else, so having him help answer questions at our booth was great.

And thanks to whoever planned out the evening event at the Cow Palace. That was fun (almost too fun – it was hard to work the next day).

Our only recommendation for Oracle next year is to do something better with the Meet The Experts sessions. We went to visit some of the folks that we used to work with and they were hidden off in the mezzanine level where customers couldn’t easily find them.

Labels: 2006, Events

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2 Replies to “Oracle Open World 2006 Wrap-Up”

  1. And as a happy follow-on to the Kodak moment story, the customer went live today.

    So 2 weeks is now our official best for “Contact to Sale to Install to Go-Live”.

    But we do welcome others to try to top that 🙂

  2. Great sessions, thanks a lot. Once I get back to work Monday, I’ll send an email to “oow” asking for the pside helper. I didn’t have business cards printed for me yet at my new job.

    Thanks again for the great information you proivided!

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