Open World Mumbi 2004 - Vignettes

The last Open World held in Mumbi was in November 2004. This is the link to the 2004 Open World site, and you can download presentations from the conference here (link to presentations download page).
Sudip Majumder and I had two presentations on BI in 2004.

• Abhinav Agarwal - Mangement Dashboards for Business Intelligence (link to PDF file)
• Sudip Majumder - Oracle 10g Integrated Business Intelligence Solutions (link to PDF file)

This year's OOW in Mumbai is being held at the same venue - the NCPA in Nariman Point. If you visit the NCPA's web site (link to web site) this is how it describes itself:
"... stands on the southern tip of Mumbai’s Marine Drive promenade, The National Centre for the Performing Arts, is India’s premier socio-cultural centre and perhaps the only one of its kind in Asia. "

I shall post photos of NCPA next week, but in the meantime here are some photos from the 2004 Open World, Mumbai.

The BI demo pod, seen above, was kept very busy by customers who were interested in the new features in Discoverer 10.1.2 and wanted to upgrade from 9.0.4, 9.0.2, 4i, or even earlier versions. What they saw they liked. There were many others who were not aware of what Oracle offered by way of BI products and went back impressed. One person took a brief look at the drag and drop interface of Discoverer Plus with its query wizards, crosstab support, graphs, and said, 'this is so much better than what Microsoft offers' and went on to have a lengthy conversation with a sales consultant on the spot.
This is the main auditorium at the NCPA, where the keynotes and some presentations were held. The auditorium can seat close to a thousand people.
Sudip's BI presentation was very well attended. As you can see from the photo above, the room could seat about 150 people, all seats were taken, about a couple of dozen people were standing at the back, and an equal number could be seen waiting outside to get in.
This is a photo of Bombay's Marine Drive, also known as the 'Queen's Necklace'. On the left side you have the Arabian Sea, while on the right side you have some of the most expensive real estate in India (well in excess of 20,000 rupees per square foot... that would be more than US$400/sq ft). The floodlights you see in the background are of the Wankhede cricket stadium. I believe the fourth test between Australia and India was on at that time. India won the match, but lost the series 2-1 :-(.
The tall building in the foreground is the Hilton Towers. Till a few years back it used to be called Oberoi Towers. More than 30 years old, the hotel is a landmark, and with the Air India building lends a very distinctive look to Nariman Point.