Last night was an interesting keynote session to jumpstart this year's Oracle OpenWorld. Scott McNealy lead things off with an innovation theme that went through a list of Sun's accomplishments in the industry. James Gosling and John Fowler of Sun joined Scott on stage - lots of subtle messaging that Java is going to be ok, that MySQL is going to be ok, that Oracle will continue to invest in Sun technology, etc. etc. etc. Also a lot of shots at IBM - especially when it came to performance (claiming to be #1 in TPC-C) and pointing out that Sun consumes less power than IBM (poking fun at IBM's Smarter Planet marketing). There was also discussion of how Oracle runs best on Sun platforms and that will continue to be the case. When Larry Ellison took the stage - there was an interesting analogy(and some flattering remarks) given to Apple and what they've accomplished in the market by controlling both hardware and software design. The way it was presented, one might wonder whether we will someday see machines designed to run certain applications ("an ERP server").
Overall though - I was not "wowed" - Scott seemed to be delivering a farewell speech, not a keynote to pump up the crowd. Larry's dialog was more interesting but really very much compute / storage / network centric. There was no "setting the stage" for the week - so I left without much anticipation... perhaps today will set a different tone.
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