FFK @World’s Biggest Tech Show

The biggest show on earth came to San Francisco and left late September, with more things than usual sticking in my jetlagged brain.

The big conference show
For one, the city of San Francisco and technology giant, Oracle, are TIGHT. The mayor of San Francisco, Ed Lee, helped to open Sunday’s keynote with a, “I don’t mind closing down Howard Street for you (to hold your event). What other streets do you want to close down??”

In return, the 1853 tech companies based in San Francisco; Oracle being one of them; have helped elevate the city to “Innovation Capital” status, inadvertently creating jobs and holding unemployment rates down to 5.5%.

(The homeless shelters and its occupants located near a few of the hotels participating in the event, somehow lent a stark contrast to that statistic).

Oracle Open World 2013 was BIG.

Encompassing Moscone Center and almost all the hotels around that area and Union Square (some say even further away than SFO airport), as many as 3600 partners spoke at the event comprising over 26,000 sessions.

Those living further away had to be in winding lines waiting for shuttle buses (and taxis) to session venues from as early as 6.45am. 

With over 65,000 attendees (one English journo heard that this figure could be over 80,000 actually), hotel rooms were scarce and one particular Irish journo had to be put up at an apartment in town, instead.

The big Fong Fei Kei (FFK or Stand Up)
With this many people having come to town for OOW 2013, and all the hard work put in by employees and partners to make it HAPPEN, we’d expect no less than Oracle chief Larry Ellison’s undivided attention to his once-a-year humongous global tech conference.

Instead, the very first line he opened the OOW 2013 event with was a, “I hope some of you got to see the sailing today. I did. Awesome job, guys!” The Americas Cup sailing race which was supposed to have ended that Sunday in San Francisco Bay was prolonged due to bad weather, and Ellison is the largest backer of the United States’ Team Oracle sailing team.

It should have been a sign of things to come.

When Tuesday rolled around for Ellison to announce database-as-a-service and Java-as-a-service, he was instead at the SF Bay to watch the sail races. There had been an immediate mass walkout of the hall following the last minute news that Ellison was not coming.

Even in-memory rival SAP, had ‘respected’ OOW enough as a global-scale ‘soapbox’, to show up, albeit with a snarky message in the sky. Suddenly, all the grumbling about snack privileges at the press tent being revoked, or the dismally cold packed lunches, paled in comparison.

For the rest of the conference, all I could hear about was how Ellison had stood up OOW 2013 at the last minute, for his America’s Cup sail team.

You don’t FFK 60,000 people who have come from all around the world to hear you speak, just so you can go watch how your team is doing.

Stick to Twitter updates like the rest of us, Larry.

IT BYTES BACK! says: Against all odds, Oracle Team USA rallied back from a two-race deficit to lift the trophy on Wednesday and Larry has come out of it smelling like a bold, risk-taking winner. The hurt has subsided. It doesn’t sting so much now.

But what would have happened, if your sail team had lost, huh, Larry, huh?