Though it isn’t something with which I’ve been directly involved, BI is a very interesting field and when I saw that Sun was hosting a free one day event attending seemed a no-brainer. First time I’ve been back on the Sun Quentin campus in Menlo Park in several, maybe four, years but the place looks pretty much the same.
The morning presentations were okay but not great, about 60-70 people in the seats including Steve Gillmor and Nic (more details about this event in their post). The keynote was from Mark Madsen of Third Nature; he looked at open source generally, not BI specifically, mainly from an economic and historical perspective. Other than mentioning a few FOSS companies new to me I didn’t see a whole lot of meat in his presentation.
Ian Murdock, Sun’s Vice President of Developer and Community Marketing, did an hour on Sun’s open source strategy and roadmap. Plenty of the former and about none of the latter, mostly vague generalities, except for a mention of Zembly. That’s a new Sun project, still in private beta, that enables anyone to “create, host, and deploy Facebook apps, OpenSocial apps, meebo apps, iPhone apps, widgets, Google Gadgets, and other social applications, in minutes, all using just your browser and your creativity.”
Zack Urlocker is the afternoon speaker and is definitely interesting and on topic. I first ran into Zack about 15 years ago when he was running the Borland Delphi 1.0 product launch and he’s always doing something creative and useful. He came into Sun the other month when the MySQL acquisition closed and is now VP Products, Database Group.
His talk opened with a view of how MySQL used open source as part of their strategy to successfully disrupt the database market, moved on to specific customer case studies and their partner ecosystem and then a look at the MySQL technical strategy.
Key Lessons from Zack:
- Referenceable customer case studies are a huge sales tool
- New use cases make for easier sales than rip and replace migrations
- Partners, partners, partners (probably due in large part to the makeup of this audience)
Much better!
BillSaysThis 