This will be a loosely structured combination of live commentary plus pulling in what I and others post on Twitter. This is my first Oracle OpenWorld so wanted to prioritize getting to one keynote at least.

Starting out as many keynotes do with a DJ onstage – the hall is moderate sized. Definitely not small but not ginormous.

Starting a bit late but Mark Hurd now on stage.

Several minute discussion around growth and GDP – focus on China, slow GDP growth, and how consumer IT is growing way faster.

Focus on squeezing out increasing profits albeit with little revenue growth.

This is crazy but feels so true – half of Fortune 500 has disappeared in the last 20 years. Pace of Fortune 500 shifts is only accelerating.

Now into Corporate Fundamentals – timeless focus on revenue, spending and cash flow. The new item here is a focus on Managing Risk – matters so much more when industry is moving faster and faster.

Increasing pressure on companies as a whole and especially CEO’s. It’s really hard to be strategic when CEO length keeps going down.

Big new outlier + latest pressure point is security – patching is hard, security strategy is had as well as implementing it.

Mark Hurd was in a meeting with the CEO of one of the biggest banks in the world – spent half the meeting talking about patching. That’s crazy – amazing the CEO knows about patching and crazy he’s focused on it.

Now discussing simplicity and how in many ways Silicon Valley tends to kill it…sad.

So what about the cloud? Question is not If, but When. Even if it just costs less that’s worthwhile given the previously discussed macroeconomic trends.

Oracle’s strategy is to focus on the appps – build the apps, platform, and infrastructure to enable shift to/or start in the cloud.

Oracle has introduced a TON of things at OpenWorld over the last 5 years – video to illustrate that which is pretty overwhelming + amazing. Almost all of these are business focused products.

So what will 2025 look like?

Mark is walking through the various predictions – he got a good bit of flack for them online. Most of his predictions now have support from IDC, Cisco, various public surveys, etc.

Now into customers on stage – first is FedEx VP Chris Wood. I won’t type much here as the most important thing is his willingness to be on stage and lend his credibility.

I’m going to wind this down – Mark has additional guests on Stage from Bloom Energy and Gap. While these are always interesting at a personal level, from a notes perspective they tend to be somewhat similar discussions and reflect the previous overarching themes.

That’s a wrap!