Hotsos – Day 1.0

Well, that’s the morning over with and I’m enjoying myself. First up was breakfast – cereal, pastries, fruit, juice, coffee. It’s a nice touch, gets everyone networking early and almost justifies the 8:30 start 😉

Then at 8:30, after a brief introduction of music and photos of past events, Gary Goodman took the stage to introduce Ray Lane. I really enjoyed Ray’s presentation about the Future of Software, looking at where the industry is just now, where the problems lie and where the future benefits will come. He had a ton of interesting things to day – here are just a few highlights as I interpreted them

• I don’t know of an industry that likes to talk about itself as much as the software industry.
• 84% of industry revenue is concentrated in the top 15 suppliers
• The top three suppliers – Microsoft, Oracle and SAP – contribute 75% of the profit pool
• In essence, you need to be an Innovator or a Dominator to succeed and it’s difficult to be both.
• Speak to 15 and 16 year olds about how they’re going to get into the software business and have exciting times. They’re not interested in the computer business because things have moved on
• CIOs are sick of upgrades, expensive and long-running deployments and less pay-off than they should be getting. They want applications that can be deployed efficiently and do the job that they need, not more or less. They just aren’t interested in technology for technology’s sake.

Ray’s Seven Laws for future applications

1. Does it serve an individual need?
2. Viral / Organic Adoption
3. Contextual Personalised Information
4. No Initial Data Entry or Training requirement
5. Utilises Communications and Social Relationships
6. Delivers Instantaneous Value
7. Minimum IT footprint

Agree or not, I really enjoyed it. It’s always good to watch a comfortable and confident speaker like Ray.

Speaking of confident speakers, it’s difficult to believe that Tom Kyte once read the slides out! He was on fine form today, kicking off with his caving tales from the weekend. Sooner him than me! The joy of fatherhood, indeed 😉 His instrumentation presentation was terrific, too, perfectly pitched between the ‘Why’ and the ‘How’ – not merely technical but explaining just why instrumentation is so important. As a DBA, I wish there were more developers like him, but at least he’s spreading the word. At the end David Aldridge (who is walking around with Oracle Sponge written on his badge. Quite right, too, but I think there may have been alcohol involved) asked Tom a question about tracing Parallel Execution in 10g. Tom kindly bumped it my way and my presentations got a mention. So, if you want the answer, you’ll need to attend tomorrow morning.

Then it was on to James Morle for me. His presentation on SANs was pretty dear to my heart. I might have known most of it already, but this stuff is really key in my workplace and even to the PX work I’ve been doing. I also like his dry sense of humour. What surprised me was his original audience survey. Either people didn’t understand the question, were too shy to put their hands up, were lieing or SANs aren’t as ubiquitous as I thought. I suspect a combination of all of those reasons. I’m a bit embarassed about the best thing I got from his presentation but, as soon as he said ‘Polyserve’, it reminded me of something that had been bugging me. This one’s for Dave Whiting – Polyserve is the name of the clustering software.

The Sponge just walked over and said, ‘Tell everyone I said hi!’

Humph! Perhaps he should blog something and spare me the lunchtime effort.

Finally just a quick hello to Mads, Flatcat, Tiggs, Polly, Bill, Frank, Celtic Monkey, Derek Junior and the mouse that seems to have moved into the kitchen. (Updated – Oh my god! How could I have forgotten The Rabbit?!?! He’ll probably have run away by the time I get home ….)

Now either I’m getting more sick of Scotland than I thought or I’m not a real geek, because that sunny, sunny day outside is pretty tempting when compared to Oracle presentations.

P.S. My camera isn’t coping too well with the darkened halls, but here’s one of an expectant audience before James Morle’s presentation.