JavaOne 2008, from a Product Marketing Perspective
I’m just back from the big JavaOne conference, which took place May 5-9 in San Francisco, California. For those of us on the ILOG JViews product team (both the techies and the marketing guys, like me), this is the single most important conference of the year. In addition to learning about the latest technologies that are being promoted by Sun and Co., we get a lot of other valuable “soft” data as well. Here are the things that a product marketing guy like me looks for and picks up on… outside of the conference sessions…
First up: the health of the show
We product marketing guys can use the JavaOne show as a quickie litmus test to gauge the general health of the Java marketplace. How is the show going, compared to last year and the year before? Is JavaOne still, after 10+ years, an important event? Are there lots of attendees and other vendors? Is Java itself still important? After all, if there is a big 
downturn or upswing, we may use this to help us determine the resources we dedicate to our Java product line.
Diagnosis: Steady, with just a slight decline in the number of sessions, events, people, and general buzz.
Next up: How is the exhibit booth?
This is something that many conference attendees never pay attention to: they are there to soak up knowledge and couldn’t care less about commercial vendors and their exhibit booths. But, of course, we vendors care very much about things like booth traffic (are we on the main drag, or in no-man’s land?), booth placement (do we have noisy neighbors with annoyingly amplified sales pitches?), booth messaging (will the guy walking by understand what we do quickly or is our signage too obscure?), booth giveaways (is that guy who is collecting the free goodies–a.k.a. a “trick or treater”–really a possible customer?), etc. Which of our competitors are there at JavaOne this year? What are they pushing that’s new? And, more intriguing, which competitors are not there? It all has a sort of (upscale) “carnival midway” feeling about it…
Diagnosis: Very healthy (for us, at least). Those who worked in the ILOG booth were quite pleased with the large number of conference attendees they chatted with.
Finally: What’s the buzz?
As a product manager, I look around the show floor to see if I’m missing any trends that might effect the products I work on. Likewise, it’s interesting to see what “buzz” Sun is putting out there, to show that they understand the trends and are, of course, leading the way. (wink!)
This year, in the Java circles that we run in (user interfaces, of course), the hands-down hot topic was RIA (Rich Internet Applications). Last year, Sun announced JavaFX and this year they seemed to re-announce it. JavaFX is their answer to Adobe’s Flex and AIR, and to Microsoft’s Silverlight (both of whom were also at the conference, interestingly enough). Most of the people I spoke with said they have a “wait and see” attidtude about JavaFX, though.
JavaFX, Flex, and Silverlight are all trying to do the same thing: give the world a RIA experience that is far better than Ajax. Ajax and its programming frameworks are a beast, developers tell me, and the end result of all that hard work is, of course, quite cool–but it’s not as interactive or as glitzy as JavaFX, Flex, or Silverlight.
Diagnosis: For RIA, the fight for the developer mind is still on. For us at ILOG, we are actively following Flex/AIR (see our ILOG Elixir product) and are experimenting with Silverlight. Of course, Ajax has been a big part of all of ILOG Java products for some time now, and will continue to be a major emphasis for us. So, for us, the buzz at this show was all about RIA and we were smack dab in the middle of it.
A final note: A big thank you to all of the ILOG customers who came by the ILOG booth to chat with us. It’s nice to hear about your successes. And we heard you about some of the Ajax interoperability issues you might face soon, and have started burning the midnight oil…
