When I think about Oracle OpenWorld, a couple of things spring to mind: great learning and networking opportunities, all in the fabulous city of San Francisco.
Instead of having to endure cookie-cutter hotels in antiseptic places, we get to do all these activities in the center of one of the truly great cities on earth, enjoying unparalleled varieties of food and entertainment.
Oracle OpenWorld spans five days and features thousands of sessions, including keynotes, demonstrations, and customer presentations.
This will be my second Oracle OpenWorld, and I learned during my first experience that the vast majority of attendees have been coming over and over again for years—some for more than 20 years. So you can imagine the level of expertise and resources available in the sessions and hallways in Moscone Center, as well as on the sidewalks and in the cafes nearby.
The 2015 edition of Oracle OpenWorld promises to be the most modern yet. The focus of this year’s business and technology conference will be on the intersection of cloud, social, and mobile business opportunities.
Attendees will get a taste of not only what Oracle and its customers have accomplished, but also the innovation road map for the year ahead.
And yes, I did call it a business and technology conference. Oracle OpenWorld isn’t just about database geeks talking to other database geeks, although you can find that too in one of the many Birds-of-a-Feather sessions (BOFs).
It’s about business people learning about and making use of cutting-edge technology to improve their top and bottom lines, manage talent more effectively, manage their supply chains more efficiently, drive higher productivity, and manage their finances using the agility-enabling cloud technologies now at hand.
Most important, it’s about learning from your peers in a variety of venues.
There are literally thousands of keynotes, general sessions, customer presentations, and technology demonstrations to choose from, and five days during which to do it. I myself plan to gravitate to the Larry Ellison and Thomas Kurian keynotes.
Oracle Appreciation Event
And I won’t lie; I’m also looking forward to this year’s Oracle Appreciation Event, which once again takes place on Treasure Island (with the San Francisco skyline as a backdrop).
The event includes fair games (which is great for me because I missed this year’s Ulster County Fair), a Ferris wheel, and a VIP area for select customers and partners. (Speaking of which, early-bird registration has been extended until the end of August, which means you can get full conference passes at a steep discount).
The Oracle Appreciation Event will be capped off this year by performances by a couple of surprise musical guests. I can’t say who they are just yet, but I can say this much: You won’t be disappointed. More to come.
This year also marks the twentieth anniversary of Java, and the JavaOne conference, which will take place concurrently with Oracle OpenWorld. JavaOne is the main event for the community of software developers who use the world's most popular programming language.
This annual event, located at the Hilton San Francisco Union Square and Parc 55 San Francisco, is where thousands of software developers attend more than 400 lectures, workshops, and hands-on tutorials about Java.
In addition, JavaOne hosts Birds-of-a-Feather sessions in which developers with common interests meet at preselected times to share tips and compare notes. JavaOne also offers sessions for very young developers (teens and preteens), tailored to their specific learning needs.
If developers go to a single Java event, it is almost certainly JavaOne, not only because its sessions cover the spectrum of experience levels, from beginner to expert, but also because it’s where Oracle unveils its plans for the language as well as the Java runtime platform.
It is also the place where experts from Oracle, the company that underwrites Java, explain the unique advantages of new features, business-oriented development, preferred ways of coding, how to handle security issues, and other topics of vital interest to modern businesses.
So follow my lead—sign up now to take advantage of early-bird pricing. And don’t miss out on this singular opportunity to dive into cutting-edge business technology as deeply as you’d like, network with and learn from your peers, and trip the San Francisco night fantastic.
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