TwinFin at Oracle OpenWorld

I’m at Oracle Openworld , now with added JavaOne, in a Netezza shirt after many occasions when I’ve attended in an Oracle shirt. It felt a little odd for the first hour or two. The place is a zoo, but then it’s been like that for years; it must take a huge amount of focus on the part of attendees to extract the agenda that has most value for them. And it’s a big challenge for specialist vendors like Netezza to get onto the agendas of the attendees that we think ought to come see us. In 2008 and 2009 Larry Ellison did a lot of that for us in his keynotes, positioning Netezza as the leader that Exadata sought to challenge.

That hasn’t been the case this year, not just because there has to be a limit to how much free publicity Larry will give us, but because Exadata now seems to have a different focus. Having been introduced (in V1) as a Data Warehouse machine, what i heard from Larry Ellison and Mark Hurd’s keynotes is that Exadata is now positioned more for OLTP consolidation, which is meeting a very different requirement.

So should i be glad that not every Oracle and Sun sales team regards us as public enemy #1 or dismayed that we’ll have to do more of our own marketing this OpenWorld? But we had counted on that so we have a very grand duplex booth and t-shirts that caused a 30 yard line this morning (we gave away 600 in 2 hours). And we have a TwinFin 12 on the stand which has been a big draw. It’s strange the fascination a rack of flashing lights holds. Though i did also speak to several existing customers who use a TwinFin, but who had never seen one. And the booth staff has found it very useful as a phone charger using the usb port.

I’ve bumped into a few old Oracle buddies already and if i get a chance I’ll cruise around to see if I can find some more of them. If you are here, come and see us in Moscone West on booth #3641, not just because we have cool giveaways, but because if you want to know what some of the leaders in analytics are doing in a bunch of different industries and how they are doing it – that’s the place to find out. I recently got the chance for a brief rant on the subject here.

Strange thing though; loads of IBM staff have been visiting us with big welcoming smiles and handshakes. That’s nice of them.