At one of the largest IT conventions and exhibition

SAN FRANCISCO, CA -- While a small group of journalists from South Asia watched American and global IT gurus rolling out technical stuff and new innovations, scores of American journalists punched the keyboards on laptops, rolling out bullets, snaps, alerts and full-outs – news agency jargon for fast-moving stories.

Indeed for high tech magazines, business journals and specialised newspapers, there was virtually a lead story with every star performer at Oracle OpenWorld 2007 from November 11-15 as they gave hints on what is in the making of a new product or a new deal to be clinched – all hot news for the IT industry.

The huge hall at the giant Moscone Centre, straddling two or three streets with undergrounds halls in the heart of San Francisco seating several hundreds and three to four theatre-size screens, was filled to capacity. Late-comers however happily stood on the corridors until there was no standing room.

Happy-go-lucky founder
The acoustics was stunning and screens all over clearly showed the presenter – however small he or she would look from a distance. One cannot forget the infectious laughter of Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison as he went down memory lane describing how the company grew from a small room into a global giant headquartered in Silicon Valley.

The company marks its 30th anniversary this year and during an entertaining evening presentation, occasionally interrupted by bouts of nostalgic laughter, Ellison highlighted the personalities and the goals that carried Oracle from a four-person startup to the largest enterprise software company in the world.

He dedicated the evening to the memory of Oracle co-founder, the late Robert M. Miner and explained to the audience how Oracle came into existence, with one simple contract bid for a company called Precision Instruments. The company’s first accountant was the pizza delivery boy who had kept the team busy with enough food during overnight programming sessions. “We said why don’t you quit your job as a pizza salesman and become our chief financial officer,” Ellison said, grinning. That was one of their first recruits.

The five-day event drew more than 42,000 participants – Oracle OpenWorld’s biggest ever annual convention -- and hundreds more, thronging the city and often stopping traffic. Two streets were closed with carpeted tents serving as the restaurant to provide free meals to the delegates.

Giant buntings and Oracle signs across buildings added colour to the event. Shops and malls joined the celebrations offering discounts and service ‘with an endearing smile’ as the city earned a record US$80 million in revenues just for the five days. City Mayor Gavin Newsom took the unusual step of placing an advertisement in the San Francisco Chronicle newspaper thanking Oracle Corp. for once again hosting Oracle OpenWorld here and providing a boost to the economy, hotels, restaurants, shops and taxis.

Special buses
Almost every hotel room in the city was grabbed by Oracle guests while 300 buses provided a regular shuttle between the hotel and the convention centre for the participants from 100 countries and other parts of the United States. Conference organisers stamped their own carbon footprint making sure there were no paper print outs – with all documents available on the website or like the press, provided a flash drive with the information. Water bottles, unlike last year, were done away with and each delegate provided a handy bottle to fill up from scores of water dispensers spread across the huge complex.

Residents were exuberant over the event, praising Ellison for annually helping the city. “We almost lost the event this time over some local issue and Larry (Ellison) wanted to hold it in Las Vegas, considered the convention capital of the world. Fortunately the problems were ironed out and the convention went ahead as planned. Larry paid overtime to police and other workers and the extra city taxes,” said a resident manning a registration booth, among dozens who volunteered for the event.

To us in South Asia, it would have been a logistics nightmare. Not the Oracle organising team. Everything worked like clockwork – from the time delegates landed at San Francisco airport, checked into hotels and attended the sessions. There were few hiccups.

Crisp presentations
The keynote speeches were presented in an interesting manner. None in the audience was bored as top CEO’s like Ellison or Dell Computers founder Michel Dell spoke sans a podium or a script – walking up and down the lengthy platform helped by giant screens that flashed power point presentations. They would then themselves invite another speaker on stage and pose some questions on a new product, data base or chip. Informal but effective.There were no presenters or breaks between speakers. The flow was smooth, the language crisp and the delivery – powerful. There were cheers when singer Billy Joel came on stage to introduce Ellison on the penultimate day of the convention. Later in the evening Joel joined stars like Lenny Kravitz and Mick Fleetwood of Fleetwood Mac fame to entertain guests at another venue during an all-night appreciation party.

San Francisco is well known as the city where Silicon Valley and Stanford University are located. The state of California also has two other famous ‘guests’ – Las Vegas and Hollywood. A few kilometres off shore stands the Alcatraz (meaning pelican in Spanish), a military fort which was turned into a prison perched on a rocky island. While it once held famous prisoners like Al Capone, the island is now home to deer and mice and the venue for top movies like ‘The Rock’ starring Sean Connery.

Silicon Valley is the leading high-tech hub in the US and home thousands of engineers and venture capitalists. Thousands of high technology companies are headquartered either in or near Silicon Valley. Among those, the following are in the Fortune 1000: Adobe Systems, Apple Inc, eBay, Google, Hewlett Packard, Intel, Oracle, Cisco Systems, Sun Microsystems, Symantec and Yahoo!

There were 11 keynote addresses, over 1,600 sessions, hundreds of demonstrations in massive exhibition halls and 1,000 journalists and ‘Press Analysts’attending.

Cars as prizes
The IT exhibition was stupendous with even fast cars being offered as prizes in everyday draws. Laptops, portable keyboards and Ipods were among a host of freebies offered as prizes as exhibitors outdid each other to draw crowds – and a possible deal -- to their stall.

The stakes were so high and rewarding – probably millions of dollars worth of business were transacted by the displaying IT firms – that some enterprising companies used magicians as their trump card. One magician even crept into a small box with his hands tied in chains and the box locked from the outside. He emerged– all the while conversing with the crowd with a clip-on microphone – after a few minutes, grinning and exclaiming: “Oh it’s getting tiresome now. I have done this more than 10 times today.”

Oracle, the world’s largest enterprise software company, has provided software and services that enable organizations to get the most accurate and up-to-date information from their business systems.

It has more than 275,000 customers—including 98 of the Fortune 100—in more than 145 countries with a employee base of 74,000 worldwide. At the opening session on Monday, November 12, Oracle President and CFO Safra Catz spoke on Oracle’s community outreach and education efforts, including Oracle Academy, Think.com, and ThinkQuest, a highly acclaimed learning competition for students ages 9 to 19.

She discussed how Oracle is building and acquiring a wide range of technology and applications and integrating them with modern, standards-based middleware. Mark Hurd, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, HP – one of the world’s leading IT companies, discussed HP's strategic partnership with Oracle and how the companies' combined innovation, joint development, and testing have resulted in greater breath and depth for their platform, software, and middleware solutions. "If you're an Oracle customer, there's a one-in-two chance that you're an HP customer as well," Hurd said. "Oracle is a very valuable partner to HP."

New trends
Intel President and Chief Executive Officer, Paul S. Otellini explained future trends in computing and highlighted Intel's current investment in silicon process technology, micro-architecture design, and IA-based platforms.

He also discussed how Intel platforms are architected for visualization, and revealed how Intel's new technology is in use in Dell, Sun, HP, and IBM products.

Jonathan Schwartz, CEO and President, Sun Microsystems, made two major announcements -- unveiling a free, open source virtualization and management platform called Sun xVM, and a new partnership with Dell Inc. on Solaris distribution and support.
Michael Dell, charismatic founder Chairman of the Board and CEO of Dell described his company's green strategy as part of a larger initiative to help organizations save costs, reduce IT management complexities, and avoid brownouts. Server virtualization, what Dell refers to as "the hottest thing going in IT today," reduces power consumption, cooling requirements, and data centre complexity.

Oracle OpenWorld is the world's largest event dedicated to helping enterprises understand and harness the power of information and the best place to see that technology in action. The 2007 event brought together customers and partners of Oracle and showcased their products.