Techwave 2008 - It's all good baby!!
You know it's a good sign when the food starts tasting much better :) That is how I compare year after year. For some reason, I personally felt a lot of energy and optimism from attendees and had great traffic at my booth. More than that, there were many great questions from the folks attending the conference, which is always good.
I managed to stay reasonably busy in the SUP booth with good traffic although there was a lack of chairs. We were positioned next to the various techathlon events that were being held and I managed to show off my non-existent footie skills.
I'm excited getting closer to release date for SUP. It's been an excellent group effort to get it out considering we had teams in Paris, Pune, Singapore, Shanghai, Xian, Dublin, London, etc. Hardest was coordinating conference calls within the teams. Techwave gave me a chance to start putting the message out with real demos and there were some good questions about the product that we've also been thinking about and it validated some of our future direction. The developer tools message was well received by the audience and they felt that would simplify their development efforts a lot.
And I did have some fun too. WHIVSIV :)
Opening day at Techwave 2008 - Vegas
Yesterday was the opening day at Techwave in Vegas. I attended the keynote by John Chen and captured some keypoints; overall he sounded very optimistic regarding the direction in which we are headed. He also had a plug in for Sybase Unwired Platform demo that I had done to him last week and that was cool :) If you are interested in looking at the demo he was "raving" about, come over to the expo hall and I'll be there in the SUP booth. I also have a flash of an application build by a partner (iTask) based out of South Africa and they are around if you are interested in finding out how they have leveraged SUP for their mobile application framework.
You can also view the keynotes online here.
Some of the key points I captured from his keynote:
* Growth in the database revenue..
* State of the business
o IP
* 30 product releases
* 14 patents
* 15% spent on R&D
o Customer momentum
* Over 1200 new customers
* 800 mobile enterprises
* 200 new IQ customers
* 164 new messaging customers
* 800m new mobile subscribers
o People
* 9 best places to work awards
o Market leadership
* Gartner magic quadrants, forester waves
o Revenue Performance
* 16% revenue growth
* Shareholder return consistently returning more than major indices and peers
* Unwired Enterprise – Market Trends
o Growth in devices and smart phones
o 3.5b mobile subscribers
o 35% growth in world wide broadband adoption
o Data volume and velocity growth.
* What has been Sybase working on
o Mbanking and MMS 365
o RAP- The trading edition
o ASE Cluster edition
o Sybase Unwired Platform
o SQL Anywhere 11
o Afaria 6.0
o PowerBuilder 11.5
* Growth – where is it
o 32% CAGR for IQ
o 111% CAGR for Mobility
o 72% for mobile subscribers reached.
