OOW2K6: If it's Wednesady this must be SF

Jonathan Schwartz was the first keynote I attended this conference and it was very impressive. He wore a sharp suit with a well-chosen tie, designer specs and a neat pony tail. His delivery was smooth and business-like, with the occasional wry aside. In short very much not Scott McNealy. The other difference was that Scwartz seems more interested in the process of IT than in the servers as such.

In his analysis Moore's Law means that selling servers to shops and small businesses is a shrinking market. Eventually those people will ditch their servers altogether and just use networked services to run their business. So Sun are going to focus on the segment of the market whose needs are going to grow - that is, anybody with a data centre. The highlight of his presentation was the unveiling of Project Blackbox. The maximum size for a data centre ought to be the biggest thing you can move, which is a shipping container. And that is precisely what Project Blackbox is: a data centre in a shipping container. Have a lorry deliver it to your site and just plumb it in. If you need to move your data centre unplumb the box and put it on another lorry (or train or cargo ship). Now that's commodity IT.

I've already blogged about Larry's keynote but I should have confirmed that, yes, they did have live penguins on stage. Weird. Afterwards I was talking with Todd Trichler . A couple of months back I had been joshing him about an Oracle distro and he had told me not to believe everything I read. Now I know what he meant.

Before Larry's keynote there was a ceremony to recognise the twentieth anniversary of Oracle's listing on NASDAQ. Apparently this is a big deal over here but I found the whole thing slightly bizarre. Still, the crowd in Hall D seemed to enjoy it. Maybe it was one of those things where you really had to be there.

In the evening I met up with my other LogicaCMG colleagues. There were eight from the Netherlands, seven from the Scandanavian countries (from our recent acquistion of WMData) and one other Brit besides me, which is a good presence here. The evening was great. Everybody had shamingly good English. I drank beer and wine and I do not have a hangover. This is a bad sign so it's just as well that I'm flying back to the UK this afternoon.