OpSource SaaS Summit (Verdict: Great event)
OpSource's SaaS Summit was full of useful information and was a lot of fun. Kudos to them for the effort.
While I was strolling through the SaaS Summit yesterday someone made the comment that the OpSource guys "could always become an events company if things went south with their core business" which I agree with. The event yesterday (and today) was great. Very well done and very professional.
I was on the Integration panel in the afternoon and I think I avoided doing too much damage to my fellow panelists who seemed intent on being living commercials for their companies.
A few interesting things I gleaned:
-Taleo is a very cool, fairly large public company that I had never heard of
-In contrast to open source conferences (minus OSBC) where I feel very old, this was a much more gray audience
-Few people have figured out how to build effective SaaS businesses but more pieces are falling into place
I went to the MySQL booth and marvelled that they were giving away mints AND jelly beans, made some joke about telling Zack they were giving too much away and the guys at the booth were jerk-offs to me. I guess they don't have to bother being nice now that the Sun acquisition is complete.
UPDATED: I told Zack I wouldn't call his people jerks (or other names) without telling him first. I was seriously pissed when I initially wrote this. Maybe they were having a bad day. Or maybe they hate me. Who cares!