Apparently, The VAR Guy isn’t in the audience at Oracle OpenWorld. Or is he? Either way, the first day of Oracle OpenWorld 2010 included plenty of SaaS, cloud and competitive surprises. Can’t keep pace with all the news? Here are seven highlights from day one of Oracle OpenWorld, plus the potential implications for channel partners.
7. Keep An Open Mind, Part I: Oracle unveiled an Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel for Oracle Linux, and the company claims the kernel delivers a 75 percent performance gain over Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The VAR Guy is taking a closer look at the claims now.
6. Keep An Open Mind, Part II: When Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems, some skeptics wondered if Oracle would bury Sun’s MySQL open source database. But during OpenWorld, Chief Architect Edward Screven announced a MySQL 5.5 release candidate plus some other Oracle enhancements to MySQL. The VAR Guy will share more thoughts on the MySQL moves later today.
5. SaaS-Ready Applications: Oracle announced its Oracle Fusion Applications. Take a closer look and the company claims the applications are “SaaS-ready.” You may recall that Oracle offers service provider licensing (i.e., pay-as-you-go options) for VARs that want to run Oracle applications and databases in the cloud.
4. Stealing A Little Bit of Thunder?: Despite their feud over former HP CEO Mark Hurd joining Oracle, both HP and Oracle downplayed the competitive battle on Sunday. However, HP’s board may be trying to steal a little bit of Oracle OpenWorld’s thunder. One example: HP apparently is nearing the end of its CEO search, and the search apparently favors internal HP candidates, according to The Wall Street Journal.
3. Hiding the Hatchet: No, HP and Oracle haven’t buried the hatchet. But during her OpenWorld keynote, HP Executive VP Ann Livermore described mutual Oracle and HP interests — 140,000 customers and 12,000 HP services people focused on Oracle. Still, Livermore and Oracle CEO Ellison did describe competing product views.
2. Welcome to the (Cloud) Machine: Ellison sidestepped the feud with HP and unveiled the Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud, an integrated hardware and software system “engineered, tested and tuned by Oracle to run Java and non-Java applications with extreme performance.” Oracle claims the machine provides “a complete cloud application infrastructure.”
1. Let’s Go to the Video Tape: If you missed Oracle Channel Chief Judson Althoff and the OPN Forum Live conference on Sunday, you can watch the replay here. During the event, Oracle announced a Diamond tier to the OPN Specialized partner program. Plus, Oracle announced roughly 22 Titan Award winners, which recognizes Oracle’s top North American partners. Also, the Oracle PartnerNetwork Specialized Global Awards were presented. The VAR Guy is trying to track down a list of honorees.
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It seems that Oracle is doing exactly what I expected them to do, which is leverage the oracle database to and I use the term loosely “Encourage” their customers to use only Oracle everything. Storage, Linux, and etc….
“The Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel is now the only Linux kernel Oracle recommends for use with Oracle software.”
Is it me or is Oracle openly promoting vendor lock-in via their database. Its essentially like their products will not gain market share on their own merit but via it’s customers running the database.
I like Oracle, however it is indeed making itself a island in many of the same ways that SUN did, and I know Larry openly said he likes the approach Apple has taken owning the entire stack.
However I have to wonder in the enterprise arena if this will hold up, Cisco UCS is great in theory, however IT professionals, like my self have to be weary of returning to the days of placing all their chips in one basket.
I love my mac, however it is something that I can replace with a paycheck, I am not willing to bet my companies viability on hoping that another company will always be ethical and fair in the pricing, and support matrix.
I have a lot more, but I will pause and see what The Var Guy thinks.
milles21: The VAR Guy appreciates your comment. The total-stack strategy isn’t Oracle-centric. IBM has tried to rally folks around IBM hardware, DB2 and IBM middleware. Microsoft has tried to rally folks around Windows Server, SQL Server, Exchange, etc.
But you raise a key question: Is this a return to the days of lock-in. The VAR Guy thinks the potential lock-in occurs at the application level rather than the database level. For example:
1. Not so hard to switch from one database to the next, is it?
2. More difficult to change from one ERP system to the next? Sure seems so.
Either way, it sure seems like the market is organizing itself around fewer stack providers (MSFT, Oracle, SAP, etc.), and even fewer that do both hardware and software (IBM, Oracle and to some extent HP)?
Thoughts?
-TVG
“Unbreakable Linux Kernel” is based on Linux 2.6.32, and Larry is benchmarking it against RHEL5 kernel which is 2.6.18-ish. He off course forgets to mention that RHEL6 is in Beta and that is ships with 2.6.32-ish kernel in a month or two. It is same tactics that he did last year against IBM: setting up benchmarks so that can compete his new product against competitor’s old one. Last year it was then new Exadata against old IBM Power6 box. He got slapped then by regulators for that. Hope he gets slapped again for this. But that will not stop him from trying again, as soon he gets a chance.
“Not so hard to switch from one database to the next, is it?”
Hmm… it is very hard if database is Oracle DB and if app is PL/SQL dependent.
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