What I am up to now

With the completed acquisition of BEA by Oracle at the end of April I was left with some choices on what to do next. The question I get first from everyone I speak with, email with, etc is “so, are you staying at Oracle?” (which the answer is no) and the second question is “so, what are you doing next? While staying on with Oracle could have brought some interesting opportunities and challenges I decided after almost 8 years at BEA this was a good time to take some time off and figure out what would get me excited about going to work every day.

My last day at BEA was May 16th as I stayed on to deliver one of the keynotes at the BEA Participate.08 event (sorry, but the site is now password protected so I can not point you to my session overview, materials, etc). It was nice to get one last chance to spend time with a lot of our portal, collaboration and bpm customers before heading out the door. Also, we had a lot of fun running the event with a set of social computing applications built out on the AquaLogic Interaction, Pathways, Ensemble and Pages products. I’ll do a write up on this in a future post as the results were beyond our expectations when we decided several months ago to give every attendee an iPod Touch, build the social apps out, and run important aspects of the event like session Q&A on the device.

Ok, so what to do next? It comes down to a few different paths

• Go work at one of the other really large software companies (SAP, Microsoft, IBM, Salesforce, etc)
• Find a smaller software company that is interesting
• Start my own software company
• Just do something different

I will be dedicating a regular post on this blog to how this process works out. Right now I am most interested in looking at starting my own company and I am spending a lot of time talking to people and networking as I consider options.

So, stay tuned for some pondering on various topics and feel free to ping me to talk about industry trends or just grab a coffee.