GoldenGate 2008 User Conference Podcasts and Daily Blog

Conference Podcasts, courtesy of Business Intelligence Network
Hear interviews done by B-EYE Network editor Sean Rogers at the event with customers and partners, including Retail Decisions, VocaLink, U.S. Bank, HP's NonStop Enterprise Division, Overstock.com, Park Nicollet Health Systems and more!

Check out the podcasts at: http://www.b-eye-network.com/goldengate

Day Three - June 11, 2008

Last night's event at Foreign Cinema was a blast! Great food, drink, music and conversation were had by all, as conference attendees swarmed the restaurant's outdoor courtyard. Whether posing for pictures in the photo booth or chatting with Marilyn Monroe or Charlie Chaplin, everyone seemed to leave the event full of stories to tell! In fact, it seemed the dancing was getting better, and the mimes were getting more entertaining (or just less scary) as the night wore on.

This morning, attendees packed in to the Great Ballroom once again to kick off the day, which started with a general session panel moderated by Alok Pareek, GoldenGate's VP of technology. The industry panel topic was "Technology Driving Business Innovation" and featured Ian Koenig, former chief architect of Thomson Financial, Chris Uriarte, chief architect at Retail Decisions, and Michael Franklin, co-founder and CTO of Truviso, who discussed how the innovative use of real-time technology is driving business innovation across all industries.

Today's Business Track featured Hishem Laroussi of UCI/BACA Vienna and Osman Ozdemir of ITD who discussed how Turkish bank Yapi Kredi successfully implemented GoldenGate Live Reporting in order to move away from batch processing. Next up was Harrison Lewis for Haggen, a leading northeastern US grocer chain. Harrison presented on the business drivers and challenges that drove Haggen to select GoldenGate for accurate reporting and analytics on sales, check stand performance, inventory, and customer buying patterns, as well as future uses for customer satisfaction and loyalty. He left everyone wanting to be a guest at one of Haggen's grocery stores! Last to be featured in the business track, was consultant Krish Krishnan who gave a detailed outline on the requirements necessary to implement event driven BI and data warehousing, along with the challenges, results and implementation processes.

In today's Technical Track, David Marshall did a great job of explaining how his global hospitality SaaS provider TravelCLICK utilizes GoldenGate to create a real-time consolidated view across business channels in the constantly changing travel booking market. John Harris, of Cerner, who is a GoldenGate partner in the healthcare industry sector, gave his audience an inside view of Adventist Health, the largest not-for-profit health system in the US. Cerner and Adventist have made great strides in their implementation of a real-time reporting system that meets the demands of their various end-users across the hospital. Lastly, Richard Gorman explained how the UK company VocaLink has been leveraging GoldenGate solutions for nearly 10 years to serve their fast-growing ATM network, which processes more than 80 million transactions per day. Additionally, VocaLink has just rolled out the new UK Faster Payments services platform which GoldenGate is keeping highly available.

In the Best Practices Track, Boston Consulting Group's Paul Hervieux highlighted their interesting drivers for selecting GoldenGate -- simplifying their data integration architecture and moving away from custom-built processes. He shared his vision for future areas where he sees GoldenGate adding enhanced value -- by streamlining how they replicate data across their global IT systems located in various data centers. In fact, the use of GoldenGate's real-time capabilities to reduce infrastructure complexities and costs was a common theme throughout this year's event!

From sitting in these sessions, it is clear that GoldenGate customers are extremely impressed by GoldenGate products, and nearly all speakers commented about their plans or hopes to extend their use of GoldenGate into additional solution areas.

After the closing session and raffle prizes were distributed, people grabbed their last coffee and sodas before saying their goodbyes and exchanging their last business cards before heading out. It was a conference themed on creating value by bringing information and innovation together, and we look forward to hearing more soon about all the great solutions these customers will be deploying between now and the next user conference event.

That about wraps up the real-time reports from GoldenGate Real-Time 2008. Be sure to check out the conference podcasts on the GoldenGate and B-Eye Network websites and we'll see you in 2009!

Day Two - June 10, 2008

Greetings from day two of the GoldenGate user conference! The day did not disappoint, as it was jam-packed with sessions from customers, partners, analysts, and the GoldenGate team.

According to Ali, GoldenGate has seen 50% growth in staff over the last year, and is now over 500 customers, with 4000 deployments on five continents. The theme "where information meets innovation" is no accident, as this year's presenters were specifically selected because of their new and innovative deployments using GoldenGate's technology. Next up was Donald Feinberg, VP and distinguished analyst with Gartner, who spoke about the changing demands on operational and BI enterprise systems.

Following Donald's keynote was a presentation by Senior Director of Product Management Chris McAllister. Chris shared the product roadmap for 2008, detailing what engineering is currently working on and new feature-rich functionality coming before the end of 2009.

After lunch, the conference broke out into the four track sessions. In the Business Track, Andrew Lanthier of PayPal gave an overview of how PayPal dramatically reduced load and contention on its critical production databases in advance of the holiday season by using GoldenGate technology. Also featured in the business track was Jim Hope of Orbitz, and then Ron Swift of Teradata who gave an overview on how many leading organizations are deriving strong business value by using GoldenGate's real-time data integration capabilities with the Teradata Data Warehouse.

In the Technical Track, OSF Healthcare's Randy Gallion shared how GoldenGate is used to improve overall application availability in addition to feeing the data warehouse. He told the story as an industry veteran with 20 years at OSF operating under the motto "Data is your friend." Bob Parry at Dell didn't specify data as his friend, but the unique ways he'd used GoldenGate and made data work for him. Bob detailed seven unique uses for GoldenGate that had the audience sitting up and paying attention, no doubt thinking what else might be possible in their own environments.

The Best Practices Track featured new customer SinglePoint, which has a platform that manages text-in voting for popular U.S. television shows like American Idol, Deal or No Deal, and Project Runway. Curt Miller described how their use of GoldenGate now allows their media customers use real-time data to influence live television broadcasts, and he even demonstrated the speed of the system with a live demo in the session! Another new speaker in this year's conference lineup was NetJets, a company offering fractional aircraft ownership, giving a greater number access to private business jets (unfortunately this doesn't appear to be one of the conference prizes tomorrow). Together with Lyman Lundquist, an always colorful, engaging speaker from the IBM Global Services team and Migration Factory, Srikath Sopirala, database team lead for NetJets, detailed their Oracle 9i migration which was completed ahead of schedule in just three and a half months using GoldenGate Software.

The day's program closed with Roundtables -- which were very well-attended and featured lively conversation. Three were topic-based, with Real-Time Data Integration, High Availability and Advanced Technology, and the other roundtables were each dedicated to an industry group: Healthcare, Banking, and Telecommunications.

Tonight's event at Foreign Cinema will allow the attendees to relax and network among fellow GoldenGate users -- the weather forecast looks wonderful, and the open-air patio will no doubt be the popular spot. Much like last night's cocktail reception, there will be no shortage of live entertainment and great cuisine at this event themed "Capture the Moment: Partying in Reel Time."

Off now to freshen up, and then to hop on the shuttle taking us to the event, but check back tomorrow for a roundup of day three at the conference!

Day One - June 9, 2008

GoldenGate's annual Real-Time user conference is off to a great start this year! Not a speck of fog clouded the San Francisco skies today, as temperatures hit a comfortable (and surprising) 76 degrees. A landmark hotel, the Westin St. Francis proved to be the perfect backdrop, as we welcomed customers and partners from around the world to GoldenGate's hometown.

Over 200 attendees turned out to this year's conference themed "Where Information Meets Innovation" to discuss and focus on how the world's leading organizations are driving business innovation by providingcontinuous access to real-time information across their enterprise. The conference kicked-off with the semi-annual Customer Advisory Board (CAB) meeting, moderated by Brian Kilcourse, formerly the SVP and CIO of Longs Drug Stores. The CAB meeting serves as an opportunity for representatives from companies such as SHAZAM, Haggen, Retail Decisions, Bank of America, DIRECTV and Overstock.com to meet with GoldenGate executives and product management to brainstorm new ideas and provide input and feedback for product direction.

Concurrently, the new pre-conference course for Preparing for the GoldenGate Certified Associate Exam was held during the day, and several customers even stayed after the training to take the exam while at the event.

In early evening, the opening cocktail reception welcomed all conference attendees -- the reception was sponsored by long-time GoldenGate partner HP and provided a showcase for the conference's sponsoring partners Teradata, Fujitsu, MicroStrategy, Postilion, FSS, Amdocs, and IBM. The event was also a great opportunity for customers networking -- and the GoldenGate product demo stations were busy all night, featuring Veridata, Director/Monitor, and Non-Database Integration offerings. Customers were giving great feedback and ideas, and many offering to be considered for future beta product programs.

Stay tuned for tomorrow's report on day two of the conference!