There are quite a few blogs out there about what happened or what’s new from this week’s ODTUG conference in New Orleans. So rather than restate what many others are reporting, I thought I’d try a slightly different approach – to instead report more on what was noticeably absent or different this year. J
 

The Oracle Developers’ Tools User Conference (i.e. ODTUG) is, in my opinion, the premier annual event for Oracle database application developers. It’s not entirely a “marketing event” as Oracle Open World can sometimes feel. The technical sessions are specific and useful to the attendees – and the attending vendors generally have a very direct appeal to the developer oriented audience.
 

But there were some fairly notably absent Oracle tools vendors again this year – BMC, CA, IKAN, Confio, Embarcadero and Allround Automations to name a few. These vendors generally have wares of interest to the developer oriented ODTUG audience – but they’ve seemingly written off the show. ODTUG may only get about 500-600 attendees, but these are the people in the trenches who use such tools. Quest has always gone to ODTUG – even though 80+% of the attendees are already Toad customers.  Attendance is not about generating new leads. We recognize the value of this conference and its attendees – so we’re there every year. If nothing else, it’s lets us rub shoulders with our key constituency. J