I'm at my first Oracle OpenWorld since 1994 this week. Today was the first day, and I'll share some impressions in this and subsequent posts.
To begin with, some fun with statistics (from a keynote session this morning):
- There are 43,000 people here for the event, and a total of 1,830 sessions (I think I ran into most of the other attendees tonight at a reception event that offered -- but not for long -- free food).
- Oracle has 85,000 employees; of those, 20,000 are developers, and one-third came from acquired companies (50 companies acquired during the last five years, for ~$34B).
- Oracle invested $3B in R&D during its most recent fiscal year.
- The company has ~3,000 products.
The only other OpenWorld event I've attended, ~14 years ago, included a last-minute surprise closing keynote, during which Oracle and Lotus Development Corp. unveiled a strategic partnership -- Oracle explained that Lotus was its strategic groupware partner, and Lotus made a strategic commitment to Oracle as its preferred DBMS partner.
I was on-stage for the closing keynote, working as a Notes product manager at the time, co-presenting a series of demos of how Lotus Notes and Oracle products could be productively used together.
That's all ancient history now, as the Lotus/Oracle strategic relationship ended abruptly when IBM completed its hostile acquisition of Lotus less than a year later, but it was a fun week, and in many ways, as I'll explain in a separate post, Oracle is only now finally getting its collaboration act together.
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