Oracle OpenWorld 2011, The Story So Far ... !

It doesn't matter how often you've visited Oracle OpenWorld before, it remains an overwhelming experience every year! The enormous crowds (over 45,000 this year), the gigantic amount of information to absorb, all the networking, business opportunities, social events and meetups with old friends and new people, all the new ideas that start bubbling in your head by listening, dicussing, asking, answering, and presenting.

Mix all of that with a proper jetlag and you'll get a feel of the spicy cocktail that OpenWorld is :-) Returning from OpenWorld gives you a tired yet really energetic feel!

Tuesday feels a bit like the calm before the storm. Everyone digested a lot of information and attended a lot of events these last few days and is now prepping for the final encore on wednesday with Larry's keynote and the appreciation event that evening at Treasure Island.

To give you an idea of the things going on at OOW, I've compiled a short list of activities we participated in so far:

• ACE Director Briefing at Oracle HQ. Product management gives a preview of the things to be announced at OpenWorld and presents roadmaps of Oracle's products and tools.
• BPM and SOA Partner Advisory Council. Every year Jurgen Kress organizes a partner council at OOW in which product management present a detailed roadmap for BPM and SOA products such as Oracle SOA Suite, Oracle BPM Suite, Oracle Enterprise Repository, AIA, and so on. Partners are encouraged to provide feedback for product improvement. It's good to see that the Oracle products in this space such as OSB and SOA Suite are mature and future versions will build on the same programming models and will be made even more stable. 
• SOA & BPM Partner Social Event. This year Jurgen took us eBiking in San Francisco and Sausalito. Beautiful weather, beautiful scenery, and a lovely dinner at Sausalito. Excellent event. This was followed up by the SOA & BPM Community Reception at Gordon Biersch later this week. Again a great event. And on behalf of the Dutch, thanks for the "active community" award :-)
• Loads of sessions and hands-on labs on BPM, SOA, NoSQL, Java/JEE, and so on. This year I had a chance to play with Coherence, BAM, CEP, ADF Mobile, BPM, and some other cool three letter acronyms.
• Lonneke presented on how to make SOA successful - session 28720 "Approach to SOA: Making This A Successful Endeavor For The Whole Organization". Full room!
• Annual ACE Dinner. Yet another great event to meet up with the OTN team and your Oracle peers!
• More good stuff from the OTN team who make a lot of this stuff possible! The OTN Lounge and OTN Night Party. Excellent hangsouts for Oracle developers! Go to the Howard Street Tent. Always something good going on in the OTN Lounge with techcasts, meetups with the OTN team, chatting with others from the OTN community.
• ODTUG social event in the French Bistro. Already lots of discussions on Kaleidoscope 2012.
• Oracle Publishers Seminar. Another heads up from product management on all the various products. We were invited thanks to Packt, who is publisher of the SOA Made Simple book we're writing.
• The Fusion Apps User Experience Advocates program had a short meeting to discuss the UX topics for the upcoming period.
• Demogrounds. Almost all Oracle products are demoed at Moscone. Go there to learn more about products and ask questions to Oracle staff. 
• Oracle BeNeLux event at Ruby Skye.

What's there to come?

• Meetup with Bob Rhubart (OTN Architect Community) for a podcast recording on our new book "SOA Made Simple".
• Larry's keynote of course: bright lights, loud music, cool intro, and hopefully some big news!
• Appreciation event at Treasure Island with Sting!
• Sessions, and even more sessions!

So, I can only say this. Come to OpenWorld next year if you're not here this time!