Oracle: Open Standards, Open Cloud, OpenWorld

Oracle OpenWorld kickstarted on Sunday the 19th of September 2010. Oracle has not been too vocal on what they really plan out after their acquisition of Sun Microsystems, however, Openworld 2010 is all about “Hardware and Software - Oracle - Engineered To Work Together.”

Elastic Cloud

Cloud Computing, is in fact one of the biggest themes of the conference. With all the buzz around Cloud Computing, Larry Ellison, continued to voice his opinion on the true meaning of Cloud Computing, " A pool of massively scalable resources, shared between a set of applications." Adding further clarity to this definition, Larry Ellison was also quick to clear out the ‘Cloud’ when it came to so called cloud services providers such as Amazon Elastic Cloud (EC2), and Salesforce.com, dubbing them as proprietary, locked in clouds, which allow you to build custom applications which unfortunately are restricted to these non-standard environments.

Now, there has been a lot of talk on the new Oracle Sun Exadata machines, which were released for sale, today. These machines are part of Oracle’s vision to power the Elastic Cloud, in the truest of senses. The machine is especially equipped to intelligently process VMs and will power the new generation of cloud architecture. Larry briefly spoke about his vision for the Elastic Cloud and the underlying technology (Exadata) that will fuel the compute economy of the very near future**.**

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Heard About ‘Hurd’

Now, we’ve all heard about Michael Hurd, and the controversies that surround him. Although he was unavailable for comments (2 weeks on the job) he did talk about Exadata and what we can expect from it. A brief excerpt from his talk has been posted below:

“Data Warehouses have 4 fundamental technical issues - Lots of data, Lots of users who want access to this data, Lots of users who ask hard questions about the Lots of data that people have, and they actually want answers to these questions really fast. Now, when these 4 things come together systems fall apart. Conventionally, data is spread across numerous disks and when you send out a query, the data first has to be found, which is why queries can take so long sometimes to process. Exadata has changed the game, and has put intelligence into storage. Thanks to the addition of disk microcontrollers you don’t end up spending time looking for data, and what you get in return, is never seen before performance.”

Standards

Standards - Something that Oracle has been very bullish about from the very beginning - are once again the key to Oracle’s redefined strategy. The Sun acquisition, also brought with it ownership of the Java platform.

Now here’s the interesting thing. Everyone needs Java. Times are changing and Java is the platform of choice. In fact, Java has become one of the norms when it comes to effective web applications. So what we’re looking at now, is a more standard computing environment, in addition to which you also have a massive pool of talent that is equipped with the knowledge to harness the power of Java. Another, interesting fact, one of Oracle’s biggest competitors, SAP, is also now moving a lot of its applications to the Java platform, in place of its proprietary ABAP language.

“The issue with most vendors who’re trying to sell you cloud based solutions, like Salesforce, Amazon, SAP BusinessByDesign; are all proprietary platforms. We need to bring in standards, and level out the playing field. Java is the answer, Java is the future,” mentioned Larry Ellison.

Larry also touched upon Fusion Applications, (Note: 5 long years in the making), which was finally unveiled this year. Now the last few years have seen Oracle making some question-worthy decisions with their string of acquisitions to mention the least. All this has not been in vain, considering Oracle now has a massive customer base in the enterprise computing market (roughly about 3,00,000) using a variety of acquired products. This is a massive opportunity that has been created by Larry, and should lead to an upward surge in sales. However, only actual implementations will determine the future of this extensive set of middleware.

Customers around the world will now have access to a standardised platform where they can mix and match a variety of applications, which again, are hosted on a standard platform which basically means that we’re going to see fewer licensing issues and generally better deals on Oracle’s wide range of products.

Now, although Oracle does support a heterogeneous computing environment, Oracle products do work better together. They talk to each better, and thus improve operational efficiency. However, the question today is, how many enterprises today come without compute history? Legacy applications will always be around, and the real challenge for Oracle will be in getting these customers to transition to an Oracle friendly environment.