I got into the conference early today, being a Monday I was banking on the Metro to be a little slow and it take over an hour to get in. Much to my surprise, they were right on time. Which was good because it gave me some time to go over my presentations and catch up on client stuff before the day began. As I was taking advantage of the free Wifi at the conference (I love that all of them have it now) I ran into Mark Rittman in person finally. I’ve traded emails and blog comments with Mark for a while now and it was good to finally meet him in person. We had nodded to each other in the BI Customer Advisory Council, but I never got a chance to go over and talk to him. I also ran into one of my TUSC colleagues Shaun O’Brien and had a good chat catching up with him on what he was doing at a client and trying to bring him back to work on a project with me. As I sat with Shaun I also got a change to see Aydin Gencler again, one of the BI product managers who I haven’t seen since Oracle World in 04 and got to catch up with him and some of the things coming from the Oracle BI world.
After lunch, I went to Dan Vlamis’ talk on Real World BI Case Studies, I was hoping for some more indepth from the trenches type talks, but the rest of the room was looking for a much higher level. Dan being the great presenter he is catered to the majority and threw in some real world at the end. It gave me some good time to try and work out some of the details on a new site I’m hoping to have up soon and get some of the integration done.
After that I did some booth duty and talked to a lot of people working on some cool projects out there. Thats one of the things I like about ODTUG over the other conferences, it seems to be more of the geeks in the trenches that want to talk about what they are doing. Rather than CIOs and managers that roam the halls of Oracle World, I think we need some more of these type of conferences. I’m thinking about putting one together kindfa like O’Reilly’s Foocamp or Barcamp out in the Valley if anyone’s interested let me know, I’m definitely serious about doing this.
I ended the day with dinner and drinks with some of the other TUSC people out here this week, had some good conversations about where the company is going and how we are going to get there. I’m definitely happy to be with these guys and happy to be part of the team driving us to the next level.