I have semi-recovered from the 8th Annual Borland Conference that took place in Nashville
July 12th through 16th. My thanks go out to the many attendees who found their way to
the Opryland Hotel and Convention Center. I've received many nice messages from attendees
and also a few questions. More importantly, I've received several great suggestions for next
year's conference to make it even better.
Conference Summary
Attendees arrived in Nashville for Sunday night's opening keynote. During the keynote
Del Yocam, Rick LeFaivre and Zack Urlocker rolled out our information networks
strategy for accessing and analyzing information and applications across the enterprise
and beyond. The transcript for
Del's opening keynote remarks is available on Borland Online.
Conference attendees had the opportunity to meet
Borland's management team as well as meet with featured speakers, industry experts and our many
industry partners. At the conference we announced
Borland JBuilder, previewed Visual dBASE 7, and
an announcement of a joint Java development effort with IBM on the
San Francisco Project.
Product addresses for our products took place on Monday morning followed by more than 200
technical and management sessions given by 105 excellent speakers. Attendees also had fun
during evening events, birds-of-a-feather sessions, at the computer lab and around Nashville. Our keynote speaker
on Monday was Dr. Eric Schmidt Chairman and CEO of Novell (he was also a keynote speaker last year when he was
the CTO of Sun Microsystems). Eric talked about the Internet, distributed computing, and Java. Late in the afternoon
attendees went to the exhibit hall for a reception and visit with over forty exhibitors. Monday evening was filled
with "lighter side" sessions. First up were the "Meet the Teams" sessions where attendees could see members of the
management and development teams, ask questions and gain further insights into the products. Monday evening ended with
even more technical sessions (until 10:15pm) and late night hacking in the computer lab.
Tuesday was IBM day. Our keynote speaker was Bill Zeitler General Manager of IBM's AS/400 Division. On Tuesday there
were a flurry of Borland and IBM press announcements
covering AS/400 partnerships and programs as well as Entera's support for IBM MVS/Open Edition. Tuesday night all of us went
across the street to the Opryland USA theme park for thrill rides, water soaking rides, entertainment and a dinner sponsored
by IBM. This was most attendees only chance to be outside in the heat and humidity.
On Wednesday we were treated to a keynote address by Lawrence Ellison the Founder,
Chairman and CEO of Oracle Corporation who talked about the Network Computer(NC) and Oracle's use of JBuilder as the tool for
building NC applications and applets. After Larry's keynote, we ended the conference with a technical presentation by Borland's Chief
Technology Officer Rick LeFaivre (previewing some future Borland developments for JBuilder, Delphi support for SAP,
and a Distributed Application Management system), Del gave a few closing comments and thanks to all
our customers, we gave away some great prizes donated by our ISV partners, and showed the traditional conference
summary video.
Based on early results and onsite feedback, this was our biggest and best Borland Conference ever. We still have conference
and speaker evaluations to tabulate, email to respond to, numbers to crunch, products to ship and a post conference CDROM to send out.
Another measure of the success of the conference is what our customers and press had to say. A few
video testimonials taken
at the conference are available on Borland Online. The
press also had some nice things to say.
Post-Conference FAQ
I have received several questions via email messages both during and after the conference. Here are a few
of the frequently asked questions and answers.
Q: When will I receive the product I ordered as part of my conference registration?
A: Products requested by BorCon97 attendees were sent out last week (except for JBuilder
and Visual dBase 7 which have not been released to manufacturing yet, they will be
sent out when they are available -- JBuilder Pro this quarter, VdB7 next quarter).
If you don't receive your product in the next 2 weeks (International orders may
take a little longer to get to you) contact Za Bonomo via email at
zbonomo@corp.borland.com
Q: When will the post conference CDROM be available?
A: We are giving the conference speakers a few weeks during August to send in any updates
to the papers for their sessions. We expect to send the post conference CDROM out to all
attendees before the end of September.
Q: Where will next year's conference be held?
A: Next year's conference will be held somewhere near the west coast next summer. Stay tuned
to this column and the Borland Online web site for the exact location and dates.
Q: How can I be selected as a speaker for next year's conference?
A: We will place a call-for-papers web application on Borland Online as soon as the location and
dates are announced for next year's conference. You will be asked to fill out an HTML form with the
talk title, speaker information and an abstract and outline for the talk(s) you'd like to propose.
Each speaker must either give two talks or be selected to repeat a single session.
Q: How can I be a part of the conference advisory board and help guide the conference?
A: Anyone who wants to be considered to become part of our conference advisory board should
send an email message to Christine Ellis with
a letter describing your background and discussion about how you will help make BorCon98
an even bigger success.
Q: Where are the updates to papers presented during the technical sessions?
A: The conference CDROM main page contains a link to the update papers for conference sessions.
Bring up your favorite browser and open the CDROM main page and select the conference
updates live link.
Thank You !
I want to thank all those who helped in the planning and execution of the conference. I
want to thank the speakers and the advisory board members for a great technical conference.
And most of all I want to thank our customers for coming to the conference and following
the news via the world wide web. I thank you for your business and support. I hope we
will continue to deserve your support in the future.
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