Commuters driving into this city would discover major downtown thoroughfares closed. More than 129,000 square feet of tents would have sprouted around the city’s convention centre, where 4.25 miles of power cables, 300 miles of phone and internet wires and enough beer trucks to sate 45,000 people are in place.
This is not for a political convention or even this week’s introduction of the new iPhone.
All this is for Oracle, a company that sells database management software. In a city of this size — 805,000 people — Oracle’s OpenWorld convention really takes over. The production, which runs through Thursday, requires a quarter-million cups of coffee and 14,700 hotel rooms, filling the city’s supply and spilling down the San Francisco peninsula past Redwood Shores, Oracle’s headquarters. “We have had bigger events in San Francisco — the World Series, the All-Star Game — but that is about it,” said Sgt. Michael Andraychak, a spokesman for the city’s police department.
With flagship products, including Database 11g, Oracle is understandably not a household name. Its technology for storing and managing data, however, is at the heart of the modern business world, bringing Oracle $35.6 billion in annual revenue and the skills to stage a sales event before a crowd equal to the population of Hackensack, New Jersey.
Oracle’s annual gathering is also a snapshot of one of the few bright spots in the nation’s economy. Tech continues to prosper, while the people working — or not working — in other sectors struggle.
Oracle used to hold smaller events in America and Asia, but it found more people would come, travelling thousands more miles, when it turned the San Francisco fete into a monster tech party. Besides Oracle, nearly 500 other computer makers, consultants and industry hangers-on have bought booth space on a half-million-square-foot show floor. A free concert on Wednesday features Sting, Tom Petty and the English Beat, as well as a Ferris wheel.
Oracle’s so-called engineered systems make sense of mountains of data, for needs as diverse as internal management and internet commerce. The computer systems using it can cost millions of dollars, too, so they are not the sort of thing people buy over the phone.
The owners of the trendy One Market restaurant in downtown San Francisco opened their doors on Sunday — normally a day off — for two private parties. The private rooms are sold out for the entire convention, and new private spaces have been partitioned, like luxurious cubicles, in the main room. “They have their expense accounts,” said Larry Bouchard, general manager, “so their tastes buds are elevated.”
The W Hotel near the Moscone Center, the epicentre of the immense convention, recently spent $5 million to remodel its lobby and restaurant, which will reopen just in time for the show. Kristiann Galati, the W’s director for sales and marketing, said its rooms, costing $300 to $500 a night, have been sold out for months, as most nearby hotels have. A few bunks remain at the Orange Village Hostel, in the dodgy but nearby Tenderloin district, for $35 a night. The manager, Edward Kim, said these would most likely be gone by the time the show began on Sunday.
Peter Zernik expects to get his share of the $100 million that Oracle users will spend in this town.
“A businessman can close a deal here, and have a good time later,” said Zernik, the VIP host at the Gold Club, a strip club a block from the convention centre. “The city looks forward to it and so do I. I make my living on commissions.”
©2011 The New York Times News Service
