It's almost time for our live Web TV program, Valley View, October 24 at 11 am PT, and we've got an amazing show planned. You can tune into Valley View here, and if you'd like to add this to your calendar and be eligible to win a brand-new Amazon Kindle Fire HD tablet or an Apple TV, register for Valley View here.

Here's our lineup: Cisco CEO John Chambers, with CRN's Chad Berndtson; Oracle's Mark Hurd (and some customers) with yours truly; an exploration of the technology industry's spending (and results) of the Obama administration's stimulus money with CRN's Steve Burke; and our Elevator Pitch segment, featuring Alteryx (cloud-based, big data analytics), Taptera (enterprise mobile apps,) and Hearsay Social (social enterprise tools.)

We'll be asking Chambers about some of the more recent threats to his business--a question that he thinks about quite a bit. We'll also ask him about Cisco's "premium" pricing, which has come up as a customer concern in our most recent survey with IT leaders on Cisco.

Meanwhile, Oracle is in a dog fight--which some would say is the best kind of fight for Oracle to win. That fight is not only with traditional rival SAP, but also a host of software-as-a-service companies. In fact, these days, who doesn't Oracle battle? To that end, Oracle's Open World Conference featured a few challenges thrown down by CEO Larry Ellison, mostly in the cloud. Ultimately, though, Oracle wants to dominate the entire technology stack. We'll ask Hurd, and a couple of his customers about that, and we'll discuss plenty of Oracle's competitive challenges.

I can't wait to talk with Steve Burke, a long-time colleague at our sister publication CRN, the leading site for VARs and technology integrators. Steve has embarked on an investigation of technology companies and individuals that benefited from stimulus money and asked, simply: Where did the money go? Did it create the jobs the Obama administration promised? What he uncovered was pretty interesting--you can only find the full articles on CRN's Tech News App, which is available in the Apple Store for $1.99. Short summaries online include Top Five Tech Companies That Milked The Stimulus and Top Five One Percenters That Milked The Stimulus. And there's more.

This episode of Valley View will surely get your dander up, one way or another.

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