Just returned from COLLABORATE in Orlando where I had a sit-down interview with IOUG President, Ian Abramson and Carol McGury of Smith Bucklin, the management company for the IOUG (Smith Bucklin manages a number of user groups in the IT market including IDUG, Encompass and SHARE). This year, for the first time, the IOUG ran a companion “virtual event” in conjunction with COLLABORATE, offering 40 virtual sessions to members unable to attend the conference. Companies sending at least one member of their team to the live event in Orlando were granted a license enabling an unlimited number of their IT teams the opportunity to attend the virtual event. Virtual event members were able to attend these sessions “live” and were able to interact with questions/comments with a representative of the virtual attendees present at each session.

Shortly after returning from COLLABORATE, we received word that the upcoming SAPPHIRE conference (the big SAP user conference), also in Orlando this week, was offering a limited virtual event as well. The revenue model did not accompany the news we received, but given that the event is SAP-sponsored, I would guess that the capture of registrant data and the added reach driven by the virtual event is enough of a payback for what appears to be a limited test program at this time.

Several weeks back, Embarcadero Technologies launched a three day all-virtual event named “Datarage” which basically played the role of an online user conference. This was the first year the company produced this event and they reported outstanding attendance. We saw quite a bit of interest in the event among our readers of the Five Minute Briefing: Data Integration newsletter and opt-into-third party email subscribers from Database Trends and Applications magazine who received invitations to attend. For smaller and mid-sized companies that may not be able to generate the critical mass of attendance required to produce a live user conference, we found this approach and its success intriguing.

Just recently I spoke with Michael Doyle, a former associate and research customer of ours at VirtualEdge.org. Michael is a veteran of the conference business in IT, having worked with Interex (the old HP user group) and the conference Online Market World. Virtual Edge.org is putting on a live event at the Santa Clara Convention Center later this month (May 28-29) named “Virtual Edge 2009”. While the scope of the conference and exhibit embraces commonly used marketing techniques like webcasts, it also embraces virtual trade shows, web conferences and virtual marketing. You can find more information at their web site, http://www.virtualedge.org/ For those of us unable to attend, we wish there was a virtual component to this one, but if you are located in the Bay area and have a potential application or need for a virtual event, this is a live event you may want to check out. And just recently, I had a lengthy conversation with an old colleague from CMP, Eric Biener, who has developed virtual events for the big business publisher, Neilsen Media, which has mainstream, non-IT franchises in a wide range of important markets. Check out the American Business Media’s interview with Eric on the topic of virtual events here on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKCID9X6_Wo

With the economy showing signs of bottoming out and live event providers still hoping to find light at the end of the long downward trend in trade show attendance, there may be the temptation for some providers to wait just a little longer before recalibrating their conference or user group strategy. That is a mistake. Now is the time to jump in, test the virtual event concept and plan for a future of virtual events or co-located virtual/live events. If you don’t, the competition certainly will.

One of the bedrock notions we have lived with since the mid-1990’s has been the concept of “data explosion” in the enterprise. The widely-propagated theme is that enterprise data is roughly “doubling annually”. But if the recent Unisphere Research survey among information management professionals subscribing to our publication “Database Trends and Applications” is accurate, not only are we well past the era of “exponential data growth” but apparently, we are now past the era of “data doubling annually” as well. In fact, in our study, completed in December and named “Today’s Top Data Management Challenges”, we found that two-thirds of DBTA readers reported data increasing from 0-24% in their organizations last year, with 60% forecasting that level of growth this year.

This doesn’t imply that organizations aren’t dealing with the proverbial “fire hoses of data” because data has been growing rapidly over the past ten years. And there certainly are high growth organizations as well as merged organizations that are dealing with a new flood of information.  But a slower economy and other factors seem to have put us on the down side of the curve when it comes to data growth….and that is new information that has come to light.

The study was sponsored by GoldenGate Software and conducted for us by my former business partner and friend, Dr. Elliot King. Let me know if you would like a copy of the Executive Summary.

Beyond the public positioning about the importance of Java, there is an interesting open source angle to the purchase of Sun by Oracle, particularly from the database perspective. Several years back, through a market study of IOUG members, Unisphere was able to document and quantify the adoption and experimentation with MySQL among Oracle customers – over one-third had installed MySQL, the open source database, somewhere in their organization. Within three months of the release of that study in mid-2006, Oracle announced the bundling of Red Hat with database shipments, as well as a service offer. At the time, that looked like a smart tactical move by offering a less pricy alternative to Oracle-on-Solaris.  During the same general timeframe, both Oracle and Microsoft released their free “Express” editions of their databases – a move that substantially darkened MySQL’s prospects for broader enterprise acceptance.

In mid-2007, we revisited the same topic via IOUG through the study “Open Source in the Enterprise”. This time the study was actually sponsored by MySQL. From where we sit, the most compelling statistic to come out of that study was the virtual standstill in new installations of MySQL over the previous year. The rapidity of the MySQL ramp-up in market penetration through 2006 was reminiscent of the Windows NT eviction of Netware from the enterprise networking OS market. It was a wildfire. Of course, nobody was evicting commercial databases, but the implications were serious. By mid-2007, though, it had come to a virtual standstill. Shortly after the release of the study, MySQL was acquired by Sun, and the news was that Sun would provide the kind of enterprise support and service for open source software the market was demanding – and which was identified in the IOUG “Open Source in the Enterprise” study sponsored by MySQL, oddly enough. But from here, the purchase of MySQL by Sun (reportedly at $1 billion) looked to be about a year-and-a-half late.

Now Oracle is acquiring Sun. From my perspective, the open source angle is compelling and largely under the radar, other than to MySQL users. This acquisition only increases our already-healthy respect for Oracle’s management of the open source phenomenon. Personally, I cannot recall a defter, more subtle or more committed blunting of a potentially disruptive technology over the past ten years by an enterprise software vendor. Is MySQL soon to become nothing more than an Oracle “loss-leader”? Or does Oracle have something more interesting in mind?

Perhaps someone more academically-inclined will author the chapter on this series of maneuvers by Oracle in dealing with the challenge of open source software, because it’s a masterful, anticipatory and creative strategy that deserves to be recognized – and with the evolution of open source applications, its an approach that may be directional for each of the “MISO” vendors in the not-too-distant future.