Eddie and the Consultants
A System 9 Musical
58 minutes of musical theater about budgeting software, staged at the last Hyperion Solutions Conference before Oracle bought Hyperion and ended it. It started as a prank abstract written entirely in 50s and 60s rock parodies (nobody submits an abstract like that expecting a yes, which should tell you how much thought went into it), and then the reviewers accepted it, which meant somebody had to go find a cast, write the songs, talk an actual film school graduate into directing the thing, and make it exist in front of a room full of people who had flown in for a software conference.
The company
Two of the names are gone and I would like them back. If you were in that room, or in that cast, Edward@Roske.AI.
Why this page exists
The musical ran twice: Las Vegas in 2006, where they broke down the airwall to the next room and it still wasn't big enough, and Orlando in 2007. interRel recorded it, pressed CDs and DVDs, mailed them to anyone who wrote in and asked, and for a while gave the entire news section of the company home page over to the cover art and an email address. Every one of those discs is gone now, at least the ones I had.
In 2020 somebody at interRel (I still don't know who) put the recording on the company YouTube channel, where it sat at 45 views until I went looking for it in 2026. I don't control that channel anymore, so I put a copy here, on a site I actually pay for.
Songs include CFO, which is Duke of Earl with new words, and the Summer of System 9, which is exactly the Bryan Adams song you are already hearing in your head. There is an Aquaman in it. (Edward, you wrote a jukebox musical about enterprise software while sick in bed, put a superhero in it, and then got on stage in Orlando and performed it for your own customers. Nobody asked you to do any of this.) I wrote the thing and I still can't tell you why.
The catch
The recording doesn't explain this part. Danielle was pregnant with her second child when we did Orlando, and the show ends with Penny leaping into Eddie's arms, and Eddie is me. She was genuinely worried I'd drop her, and by extension her daughter, and that was a completely fair thing to worry about. (Edward, you wrote the part, you cast yourself in the part, you flew everybody in for the rehearsals, and the one physical requirement in the entire show was catching a pregnant woman. At no point did it occur to you to write that out.) I caught her.
The other thing you can't unsee once you've seen it is that Penny spends the whole show looking for a guy while Danielle was visibly pregnant, and we went ahead and staged it exactly like that, in front of a full room, in Orlando.
Danielle is still in the EPM world. 18 years in Oracle EPM, now at Donyati, and elected Secretary of the ODTUG Executive Committee for FY26, which as far as I know makes her the only officer on that committee ever thrown at me in front of a full ballroom. I interviewed her at Kscope25 and we were both perfectly professional about it.
If you were in either of those rooms, I'd love to hear what you remember, and if you know who directed it, even better. Edward@Roske.AI. Somebody out there knows!