[UPDATE: 9/24, 4.30p PT - The curtain has lifted on "X" - and the answer is, Oracle's now in the hardware business, along with HP and Intel. See the Twitter-feed here, and Lauren's drafting her news story on it as we speak.]

Another new kind of blogpost for us, with a h/t to @ccarfi for inspiring its format: a Twitter-feed repost, but with the occasional annotation that 140-character tweets made tough to include.

#oow08 #X I’m eager to find out if this “X” announcement (4.15pPT, following #Ellison closing keynote) can possibly match the hype.

#oow08 #X One thing’s for sure: The cordoned-off area in Moscone North’s lobby can’t possibly handle the crowds that will try to be there.

#oow08 #X The “Extreme Performance” banner at the east side of closed-down Howard St. might be a major clue;that’s a major ad spot for ORCL.
[Its counterpart, at the western end of the Moscone Center’s Howard St—a street, btw, that Oracle takes control of each OpenWorld, much to the anger and dismay of local San Franciscans—is a massive series of LED (?) screens arranged in a manner reminiscent of NYC’s Bento-box-like New Museum. I’ll try to find images of each. UPDATE 9/25, 5.30p PT: Here they are:

#oow08 #X re: “Extreme Performance”: RT @mgareth RT @chiheacho Andy Mendelsohn drops a tiny hint on mystery news “X” http://snurl.com/Xhint

#oow08 #X In clip,Mendelsohn says, “We’re calling it ‘X’ for ‘extreme performance.’ ” Can it play into cloud computing+collaboration themes?
[Those have been the two recurring memes here at OOW’08; the other words that Oracle has pushed—complete, open, secure, integrated—all play in, I suppose, but those two have gotten the heat.]

#oow08 #X RT @mgareth Anticipation builds around the X announcement. read about it @alexgorbachev’s blog: http://snurl.com/Xpythian
[I have to admit the folks there are clearly more well-versed than I am when it comes to database matters. (Anyone who knows me can tell you that's a very low threshold to surpass.) Someday I'll submit to a remedial course in the underpinnings of the data world—unless this X announcement is a sign that I may not ever have to? (What's that saying about "if wishes had wings..."?) At any rate, the point here is that these guys, who really know databases, and who have made clear that they expect Ellison will veer from his typical "One FusionApp to rule them all" style of closing keynote, have amassed a lot of anecdotal evidence to support the notion that it's a data-use performance announcement.]

#oow08 #X And Ellison told analysts in June of “a major database innovation that we will announce in September.”

#oow08 #X Thx 2 @alexgorbachev, we have a pulled-but-cached blogpost by Oracle’s Kevin Closson: http://snurl.com/xclosson

#oow08 #X & given the musings of Forrester’s Jim Kobielus http://snurl.com/Xjk I’m ready2believe the news is “storage and data in the cloud”

#oow08 #X #Ellison is coming on after HP’s Mark Hurd, so it’s valid to expect some kind of connection there.

#oow08 #X P.S. I also think Hurd experience at Teradata lets him add more background to intro Ellison’s announcement.

So I guess we’ll have to wait and see; check back after 3.30pPT to see what’s happened, or follow my Twitter feed during The Larry Show to get up-to-the-minute snippets as they happen.

This is an interesting development, in terms of branding.

Let’s leave aside for the moment my perpetually exploding aneurysm about Oracle’s use (and misuse) of the Siebel brand around CRM. (We covered some of that here. And here. And here.)

It’s possible no one cares about this but me — wouldn’t be the first time I got caught tilting at windmills, and almost certainly not the last — but I really do believe there’s a value in consistent marketing messages, and I’m not sure Oracle has really wrapped its head around this when it comes to the “Siebel” name. The most recent policy, as I understand it, is that “Siebel” is the on-premises CRM brand, and “Oracle CRM On Demand” is, well, the on-demand side.

So why were some demos here at OOW occasionally showing “Siebel CRM On Demand”? Beats me. Like I said, let’s leave that aside for now.

There are several folks at Oracle who seem to really get the value of social networking — I tweeted all about Anthony Lye’s wonderful perspective, and I’ll try a blogpost or news story about it before I blow town. But the introduction of a feedback function on Oracle’s Web site — it’s being called Participate now — is a sure sign the company is really making an effort to engage. But part of being transparent means letting customers and the world see the sausage get made, even when you’re not sure what to call the sausage yet.

That current Participate URL looks like this: http://www.oracle.com/participate.html

But it can also be found here: http://www.oracle.com/learnmore.html

And it’s not clear whether there’s a difference, or whether submissions at the two locations end up in the same hands.

Worse still, the concept was actually introduced earlier this month, according to this Oracle blogpost, and at the time is was branded as “Oracle Listens.” The company prebriefed a few analysts, including Charlene Li (who was one of our Influential Leaders this year), and the name seemed to take root — perhaps because, as that Oracle blogpost noted, the Oracle Marketing team has been taking the reins over the wonderful Oracle Mix social community.

So how did we get from Oracle Listens to Oracle Participate? I’m not sure, but I’m hoping someone from Oracle will comment below to let us know.

[UPDATE, 9/24, 9.24a PT (love the synchronicity there!) -- a reply tweet from Oracle's Justin Kestelyn:
@oracletechnet @kitson Same thing; "Participate" is the official name (more descriptive). ]

Whatever the answer, it’s a wonderful change — in fact, in a podcast I just did with Paul Greenberg (that is, a podcast he recorded for his site; we’re multimedia-challenged here, for the time being), I pontificated for a bit about how the shift from “listening” (passive, noncommital, an uncertain outcome) to “participation” (active, engaged, forward-moving) is an excellent metaphor for the transition being made in CRM overall, and I think it’s a sign that the people at Oracle are aware of the difference and that at least the marketing folks know the difference between a mere product name and a true branding opportunity.

Now….who wants to be definitive about this “Oracle/Siebel CRM” thing?  Anyone?

Social CRM has invaded the conference scene. I can’t seem to get away from the topic — And I don’t want to. It’s fascinating and frankly, quite exciting. Last week at Gartner Web Innovation and Web Portals, Content, and Collaboration, enterprise 2.0 worked itself into quite a number of sessions. It comes as no surprise that Oracle OpenWorld is giving a shout-out to Social CRM, too. 

Oracle’s Anthony Lye gave an “unplugged” session with the press this morning, reviewing the vendors social CRM standpoint. More on Oracle’s social apps to come. (I smell a destinationCRM.com story in the works). Oracle seems to have its eye on the prize when it comes to integrating enterprise data with social networking applications. 

Throughout my travels, I have had some pretty interesting conversations revolving around the social Web and what social networking means for business. Most conference attendees I have come across seem to be very in tune with what’s going on. However, I did have lunch with some people last week who went on and on about the evils of Facebook. Both were IT workers for fairly large companies and both had blocked Facebook, MySpace and Flickr from employees. I nearly gasped when I heard this. “You’ve got it all wrong!” I wanted to shout. 

Blocking Facebook will inevitably drive your employees to another social site because let’s face it, there’s no way to avoid Enterprise 2.0. If you block Facebook, shouldn’t you also block WordPress and Blogger? Those are both social Web sites. What about Amazon or Digg? My point is, there’s no clear distinction when it comes to social networking. While Facebook might not be as relevant of a marketing tool for a financial firm as it is for say, an entertainment business, it’s still possible to gain business benefits from it. Take, for example, another conversation I had last night with a PR exec. He said he can barely deal with email anymore. His inbox gets so bogged down, if people really want to reach him, write on his Facebook wall.  

According to an Avanade white paper, which is an IT consultancy based on Microsoft technologies, with research provided by Coleman Parkes, 58 percent of companies agree that senior managers do not understand the potential that social networking offers both for employees and customers. This disconnect is a real problem, but with software vendors diving into social networking, hopefully the value will come to light for disbelievers. 

**Bonus points for anyone who can tell me in what movie the phrase “get socialized” is referenced.

**Speaking of social apps, if you haven’t checked out Josh Weinberger’s tweeting from OpenWorld, you must do so. The man doesn’t eat. He doesn’t sleep. He tweets.

Yeah, fine—a cheeky title for a blogpost, but appropriate: I started drafting it at 35,000 feet, aboard my first-ever Virgin America flight, en route to San Francisco for the weeklong marathon known as Oracle OpenWorld. (And, yes, it’s been sitting here in the drafts folder ever since. Have I mentioned I’m still grappling with the immediacy of blogging?)

The other staffers on this blog have a very different kind of fodder for their posts—dispatches from the road, backstories to their daily news pieces, interesting asides they come across while researching their pieces for the print magazine. But I tend to edit more than write these days—every word you read in CRM magazine each month or on destinationCRM.com every day passes under my bleary eyes, to the tune of about 50,000 words monthly. (Yes, we really are that prolific here.)

So my posts may touch on their writing from time to time, but I think I’m more likely to expound on subjects a bit more far afield—while hopefully maintaining a CRM-specific bent. I have the multitasking tendencies of an ADD-afflicted juggler, an insatiable appetite for information both relevant and random, and the blessing/curse of insomnia. (Depending on whom you ask, that combo’s either a creative cornucopia or a recipe for disaster. And, yes, it can be both.)

As it turns out, I’ve been on the road quite a bit more than usual lately, first at Shop.org in Las Vegas last week—my coverage is here, and here—and now OpenWorld. People tend to fall into one of two camps on this topic, and I happen to be among those (the minority?) who love tradeshows and conferences—I think they’re great opportunities to test theories and gauge the pulse of the industry. If my schedule permitted it, I’d hit a show at least every couple of weeks. (On the other hand, about 60 seconds after I register for a show, I begin getting pummeled by PR pitches from well-intentioned folks who’ve glommed my name off the event’s press list. *That* I could do without—not least because I have a serious email addiction coupled with an inability to do email quickly. Do the math.)

All of which brings me back to my current deflowering on Virgin America. And we’ll finally get to the point, after the break… Read on… »

And here I was thinking rampant — not to mention pretty obvious — product placement was only in television and movies. As consumers continue to ignore blatant advertisements, companies are increasingly looking toward product integration — heck, Sex and the City the movie was criticized for being one giant high-end commercial. NBC’s 30 Rock (season premiere Oct 30th) did a parody about product placement with their bit about GE & Snapple in episode 1.5.

Still, careful to avoid being too in-your-face, Apple takes it to another level.

I was in Brussels, reading about the buying, the selling, the crashing, the crumbling of the financial market, when I came across this Mac campaign that rather softened my horror:

I admit, I was pretty annoyed when the New York Times started requiring you to view advertisements before you could get to their content — forcing you to either sit through it or, if you’re a well-trained consumer, to hit the “Skip This Ad” button. This Mac ad, however, took over about a third of the screen, not including Justin Long up top there, but it fit right in (though, if you look closely — the fonts don’t quite match, but now I’m just being picky). It also most certainly maintains the attitude and persona of the Mac and PC characters we all know and love. Anyway, I thought it was pretty genius. Read the full campaign/article after the break.

Read on… »