Oracle OpenWorld 2008 - LIVE FROM SF #9

Par-tay!!!

Okay, denizens, I'm going to tell you the story of a party - what will end up being the hottest ticket at Oracle OpenWorld, or, hottest wristband anyway, minus the Wednesday night (conference mandatory) concerts which are UB40, Elvis Costello, Seal and others. Though on that one, for my tastes, there is NO WAY that it will be SAP's Sapphire choice of Eric Clapton, who is my rock god. So maybe the Oracle Social CRM party, hosted by Anthony Lye, SVP Oracle CRM and about 15 partners including some of my favorites - Helpstream, Eloqua, and InsideView, oh yeah, and IBM - was the coolest of wristband wearing events.

I know this. The expected turnout was 400 or so. They had 850 (I think I sent about 150 their way) and they had to close out registration for fire marshall purposes and for probably, running out of food purposes.

It was held in the Grand Ballroom of the Palace Hotel, which makes you think that it was a elegant black tie affair - but it was "lose the black tie" and wear black jeans or business casual thang" Lots of drink, food and noise, vendor demo tables all rimming the room. When I arrived, I saw ubercool Oracle dude, Steve Diamond, a CRM Senior Director at the door, being the bouncer - though I didn't see anyone bounced on my way in. But Steve would do it, I'm sure, if need be, but in a nice way.

It was a blast.

Truthfully, it didn't start out that way. Given that this thing was at 8pm and ran until midnight (I limped off on my bad foot at 11:30pm or so), I'm not exactly sure why they made the decision to demo the Social CRM applications which had been seen at least twice during the day and probably by either a majority or plurality of this clearly ready to rock crowd - I do mean CLEARLY READY - who wanted nothing more than food, drink, and conversation. Lots of it. But there were an annoying number of speakers - of the electronic kind - situated so that even if you wanted to talk through the demo, you couldn't unless you left the ginormous ballroom and went outside.

Right after that, they played, again with the monster speakers, Siebel Trivia, which was great, I'm sure for all the Siebel vets there - and there were a HUGE amount of them - but escaped not only folks like me who couldn't answer questions about Siebel verticals and consumer packaged goods - but really wanted to eat, drink and party.

But luckily, those were the only glitches in a really cool evening.

I ran all around the ballroom, drinking Perrier with a twist of lime all night - no alcohol - my 58 year old body can't tolerate much more than one drink and I'm totally out of shape - not having worked out since the accident - so sparkly stuff was limited naturally carbonated H2O.

I think throughout the night, I ran into about 500 Siebel veterans (not trivia experts). For example, Kevin Nix, one of the nicest guys who ever walked Siebel's halls was there. When at Siebel, he ran all of product development for the company. Now he owns a cool start-up called Sky Data, that does social network aggregation for business on mobile devices including the Blackberry and Windows Mobile, and soon, the iPhone. Kevin and I were talking and about half the people in the room had either worked for him directly or knew him from his Siebel days. Oddly, this kind of environment created this interesting camaraderie that permeated the room, as old friends caught up and non-Siebel revelers were engaged to blab away the night. Anthony Lye was circulating the room and chatting up an incredible number of people, with a big smile on his face most of the night. Josh Weinberger, the managing editor of CRM magazine, and one of the best and coolest people in the industry - hell, that I know all together - was animatedly discussing several things that were not only engaging but were in perfect sync with his animation. (Parenthetically, Josh, who is someone I not only admire, but trust as a friend, gave me a totally amazing compliment, when he said I was "fearless." That scared the hell out of me! (take THAT, Alanis Morissette. Some of you will know what this means).

Denis Pombriant, key industry analyst was coolly walking the party grounds, wending his way through about a million groups of 3 or 4 playaz, and stopping traffic with those who wanted to talk to him.

Mark Woolen, Oracle's VP of CRM Products, was all over the place, always grinning, laughing and genuinely enjoying the company he kept.

What was interesting is that there were a LARGE group of ZDNet bloggers and Web 2.0 wunderkind there - more than I expected who were moving around conversing with the crowd. My personal favorite is always my friend and business partner Chris Carfi who is the holder to the keys of one of the best blogs on the net, The Social Customer. He actually is kind of a bridge between the enterprise world and the Web 2.0 world - from the Web 2.0 side. I play that role from the CRM side. Chris's buds like Steve Gilmore and Michael Vizard and one of my new favorites, Michael Krigsman, a long time enterprise focused ZDNet blogger who I follow and who turns out to be not only the excellent strategic writer I read all the time, but a genuinely kind person. Something I wouldn't have found out until I met him.

The party just kept going and it was actually good hearted and good spirited though sometimes too crowded - I mean 850 people can do that - and difficult to maneuver through. But the drinks flowed, the discussions were both business, highly personal and even sometimes revealing because all in all people felt the vibe in the room.

I spent my night talking with all of the above and many others like Alicia Wu, the Oracle Product Manager for Sales Library; with John Burke, Group VP of Applications. All relaxed fun informal. People were wandering over, new groups formed, melted, formed, reconvened, dissolved while certain other folks I knew I could hear everywhere.

One other thing that made the party a blast was its messiness. Not messy in that "stuff all over the floor" way, but a party that had a disheveled atmosphere. Hair messed up, drinks in hand, spilling a little, not a lot, smiles all around, kind of messiness.

All in all, a damned good party though next year - lose the demo and the incredibly LOUD speakers - maybe less of them - and it would be, at least within the confines of the CRM world, an A-lister.