This week, Oracle announced the finalized acquisition of Sun. This is undoubtedly one of the most significant events the technology community will witness in the next few years.
I attended the post-acquisition press conference Wednesday at the Oracle campus in Redwood Shores, California. It was a marathon event, lasting 4 1/2 hours.
Absolutely fascinating!
You can view the conference online. The webcast is broken into several files – the longest one is an hour, so you can easily view the segments at your leisure. See http://www.oracle.com/us/sun/044498.
The first few hours were various Oracle and Sun execs talking about product strategies, job opportunities, and such. When they announced an area in which Oracle was hiring, they displayed a button on the current slide that said “We’re Hiring”.
It looked like the Easy Button from Staples. I kept waiting to hear, “That was easy!”, but never did.
The last hour was Larry Ellison making a brief presentation, and then he took questions from the audience. Ellison was poised, knowledgeable, and a very good extemporaneous speaker.
Most questions were about Oracle Corporation policies or Oracle products, but a couple were not, and they were the most amusing:
The first was whether he would run for the California governorship, and his answer was essentially that his family would disown him if he did that. The audience got a good chuckle out of that.
The second was about a picture on-screen of the Oracle World Cup competition boat. There was a person precariously perched up high on the boat, and the question was, is that you, Larry? Now, the media likes to cast Ellison as an egotist, but that wasn’t apparent in his answer, “Oooooooh, nooooooooo, that’s not me up there!” (His tone of voice led me to believe that he’s afraid of heights.) “I’m just the navigator, which means I’m down in the belly of the boat, watching a computer screen and occasionally saying, oh, we’ve wandered 1 degree off course.” The audience enjoyed that one, too.
Thank you, Oracle, for inviting me to this once in a lifetime event.
Mary Elizabeth McNeely
Good to see Dallas represented at this historic occassion… How did you ever manage to get invited to this event?
There was a conference for leaders of the major worldwide Oracle user groups going on in Redwood Shores (I’m the president of the Dallas Oracle Users Group). They invited us to attend the press conference, too.