For this week’s TBT, considering I just attended Oracle MSCE 2017, I thought I’d go back to my blog entry that I posted prior to my attendance at Oracle OpenWorld 2010. I’d love you to comment about what has changed with Agile’s event presence, and what has stayed the same, since then.

As the title suggests, I will be spending next week in the lovely yet highly congested city of San Francisco consuming all things Oracle and hopefully some decent seafood. I doubt if I will actually get to see the Wizard of Redwood City live but you never know. Oracle was kind enough to approve me as an event blogger so I will be bringing my "PLM Perspective" to the massive Oracle OpenWorld event. As we say here in Texas, “this isn't my first rodeo,” having attended this event a couple of times since Oracle acquired Agile. Things have improved significantly since that first year where Agile was housed in the Hilton as sort of a mini show inside the bigger OpenWorld spectacle. I will be providing a Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) perspective to the show focusing exclusively on Agile PLM and Agile PLM related partners. I will include a running commentary via Twitter and Facebook with video and pictures, and daily blogs on my experience at the show which will hopefully give you a good understanding of Oracle's plans around Agile PLM and a snapshot of some of the partners in the exhibition hall that support the product. Hopefully, it won't be all work and you can get a good feel for the magnitude of the event and the amount of resource Oracle puts into this amazing gathering.

The first thing you have to deal with when it comes to Oracle OpenWorld is to understand the scope of this event. You get a feel for this when you try and find a hotel room within ten miles of the Moscone [Convention] Center. Good Luck! I spent several hours a few weeks ago trying to secure lodging close in because driving and more importantly parking in San Francisco can be pretty challenging. When previously attending the event we made the mistake of renting cars and driving them into the city from the airport. We quickly learned you were better off walking and taking the cities vaunted mass transit options to get around, so basically the car stayed in the hotel parking garage at $40 a night. To try and put the vastness of Oracle OpenWorld in perspective, when we attended SolidWorks World earlier this year in Los Angeles they were thrilled to have 5000 attendees. PTC's numbers I was told were in the 2-3k range. Oracle by contrast reports over 40,000 attendees with 1800 sessions and 400 exhibiting partners. In fact, there were more attendees at the Sunday Oracle Partner Network presentation than there were at the entire PTC/User Meeting last year. This event is on par with Macworld and COMDEX in scale. I realize that PLM is a small segment for Oracle and that the majority of attendees will be there for other reasons, but I still think it is pretty impressive for a single company to hold an event of this magnitude.

One of the keys for me with this event is how much PLM-centric information is available. In my review of the Oracle Web Site, titled "Journey to the Center of the Web-PLM Vendor Websites" I talked about how Oracle's breadth of product obscures PLM on their site. I recently read a great article by Jos Voskuil in his blog, "Which PLM".  In the article he talks about vendor messaging for PLM and how he struggled to find messaging around PLM on the Oracle site. This mirrors my experience working with Oracle as well. They have so many products and are growing at such a fast rate it is difficult for their own internal employees to keep up with all the technologies they are assimilating. I am hopeful that Agile PLM is starting to establish an identity within Oracle and is staking out their place in Oracle's technology stack. I have gone in and built out my itinerary and am heartened to see at least 3 sessions per day on PLM which is a significant improvement from previous years, by my recollection. On Monday I will be attending the "Oracle Value Chain Solutions Power Innovation in the New Economy", "Agile Enterprise PLM: Overview of What's new in Release 9.3 and What's Planned" and "Manufacturing Best practices: MCAD, ECAD and Software Configuration Management". I am most interested in the third topic given our recent announcement about a product study on Mechatronics. I was hoping there would be more topics around engineering collaboration, especially given the fact that Oracle recently introduced a new connector for Pro/Engineer and Catia but I guess that topic was a little to niche for this venue.

As I mentioned above, I will be providing the play by play throughout the week using my twitter account and Zero Wait-State's Facebook page, so follow either and remember, I will be publishing a daily blog offering more in depth analysis on the sessions and the event's overall implications for PLM users. As I have mentioned in previous blogs, Zero Wait-State is a Gold partner for Oracle and we do offer services and products around Agile PLM. We also work with other PLM vendors and technologies and we adhere to an agnostic approach when it comes to PLM and try to call things as we see them. This is evidenced by our rollout of our PLMState website which allows users to review PLM solutions and partners. We have also recently added a PLM resource section to the site which features other bloggers like Jos and Oleg Shilovitsky and content aggregation sites for PLM as well as certain vendor site areas that are useful.

I guess it's time to hop on the yellow brick road and see if the Wizard of Redwood City has the brain, heart and courage Agile PLM needs to be a serious contender in the PLM market space. I will faithfully document my experience here at Oracle OpenWorld and I wish I could promise to minimize the Wizard of Oz clichés, but they are just too much fun. I am still trying to figure out how to work in the flying monkeys.