From the 'BFF' files:
Make no mistake about it, Oracle's upcoming OpenWorld event is an Oracle event. That doesn't mean though that other vendors won't be there to take the center stage.
One of those other vendors will be networking giant Cisco, with a keynote delivered by CEO John Chambers on Wednesday October 5th. While I don't know exactly what Chambers will say, I've got a pretty good idea based on his track record.
Chambers will stress that an architectural play is the only way to solve big IT challenges. It's how Cisco sells its networking gear from edge to core, with all the security, policy and management stuff baked in-between. It's a message that will resonate with Oracle too, since their engineered systems approach is a similar kind of play by being a sole-source provider of hardware and software.
For the most part, Oracle and Cisco don't compete.
Oracle does not have a networking division persay and they don't build switches or routers. Oracle does have servers though and that's where the intersection and competition with Cisco comes. Cisco's UCS kinda/sorta can be competitive, though Cisco has never really positioned the UCS as a database or Java specific box the way that Oracle has positioned Exadata and Exalogic.
Oracle and Cisco are also similar in that both companies tend to acquire a lot of other companies. During Cisco's recent earnings call, Chambers specifically called out Oracle for being the only company, aside from Cisco that was able to do acquisitions well.
It will be interesting to see how well Cisco and Oracle are able to partner now and going forward and what the partnership message that Chambers will deliver at OpenWorld will stress. These are two tech titans that partner more than they compete and that's a scenario that I suspect will continue for the future.
Oracle OpenWorld 2011 runs from October 2 – 6 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco
During Oracle's first quarter fiscal 2012 earnings call this week, CEO Larry Ellison provided some tantalizing details about upcoming OpenWorld news.
"We're going to come up with 4 new-engineered systems, one of which is SPARC Supercluster, and we're also going to have a big data engineered system that we're going to introduce at Oracle OpenWorld,"Ellison said
From what I understand, the 4 new engineered systems are likely to debut next week in a pre-OpenWorld press conference.
Oracle had a similar pre-OpenWorld event this where they officially launched the Oracle Database appliance which is kinda/sort what the early speculation had been pointing towards. The Database Appliance is a new mid-market version of Exadata, powered by up to 24 cores running on Oracle Linux.
The big data engineered system that Ellison hinted at for OpenWorld is clearly Hadoop related, which is also something that I speculated about last week. Ellison's message during the earnings call is the clearest yet the an Oracle Hadoop play is coming, and soon.
One thing that Ellison did not mention during the call was Solaris. I expect Solaris 11 to officially launch at OpenWorld, but that's not something that anyone on Oracle's executive team even hinted at during their earnings call. The only other hint about new product announcements came from Oracle President Safra Catz who said:
"We have the products in the market that customers want to buy. And OpenWorld, which starts next month, will only make this even more obvious.
In any event, all the speculation can finally end in two weeks when OracleWorld actually kicks off.
Oracle OpenWorld 2011 runs from October 2 – 6 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco
From the 'Who Will Oracle Buy Next...' files:
Oracle has a lot of cash on its books. Oracle is also a company that has a demonstrated strategy of acquiring other companies to grow.
Last week during Cisco's Financial Analyst meeting, Cisco CEO John Chambers gave Oracle a compliment saying that, Oracle is likely the only other technology company (aside from Cisco) that does acquisitions well.
Put all those factors together, and there is good reason why there is lots of speculation about who (or what) Oracle will acquire next.
At the top of many speculative lists of who Oracle will acquire next is none other than HP.
HP's networking and server business in many ways can be complementary to Oracle's current business. With the current HP plan to split out the PC division, HP is likely even more of an attractive target. Add to that, the fact that Oracle president Mark Hurd is the former CEO of HP and hey it all makes sense.
Well, except for the fact that it won't happen anytime soon.
HP is simply going through too much transition now to make it worthwhile for Oracle. Six months to a year from now, it might be another story.
At the upcoming Oracle OpenWorld event, I fully expect Mark Hurd and his boss Larry Ellison to belittle HP during either the keynote or in response to questions. Remember of course that Oracle is helping to drive the final stake into the heart of HP's Itanium servers. Oracle is also competitive against HP AppServer strategy as well as some elements of the database market too.
I have no doubt Oracle will acquire at least one (if not three) more companies before the end of 2011. Whether or not those acquisitions will be big (as in HP) or smaller tuck-ins (maybe Zend, the PHP company?)remains to be seen. It'll be interesting to see if any of those acquisitions come before or during OpenWorld.
Oracle OpenWorld 2011 runs from October 2 – 6 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco
It seems very likely (for a number of reasons) that Oracle is set to soon announce some new server hardware at the upcoming OpenWorld conference.
One reason why it's likely is the simple fact that Oracle has done this before. At the OpenWorld 2010 conference Oracle announced the Exalogic Elastic Cloud which is a cloud in a box technology. The Exalogic itself is a key piece of Oracle's integrated hardware strategy delivering a highly optimized device for application delivery.
There is also already some early speculation, fueled by a new analyst note from Piper Jaffray analyst Mark Murphy, that new Exadata database machines are set to debut at OpenWorld 2011.
According to a research note from Murphy, the new Exadata box will be mid-market database appliance. Currently Exadata is a high end full rack device. Murphy also estimates that that the new mid-range Exadata will sell for between $100,000 to $200,000. In contrast, the current generation of big box Exadata machines runs from $500,000 to $2.5 million.
From my perspective it's also a move that makes sense from a competitive perspective. Earlier this year HP announced its AppSystem approach which includes database solutions. During the AppSystem launch, HP took specific aim at the Exadata approach for going after big databases with a big machine.
"In crude terms, Oracle has built Exadata as a hammer for all nails, whatever your problem is the answer is Exadata," Martin Whittaker, vice president, Systems and Solutions Engineering, Enterprise Servers, Storage and Networking at HP, told me."A hammer works well on nails, but it doesn't work well on screws."
I suspect that with the likely new Exadata hardware launch, Oracle is adding a few more nails to its toolbox to hammer.
As for the timing, while Murphy expects the launch to come at OpenWorld, Oracle has this interesting trend of announcing things before OpenWorld too (they currently have at least two major press launch events scheduled for prior to OpenWorld at this point).
In any event we'll know for sure come October when OpenWorld kicks off.
Oracle OpenWorld 2011 runs from October 2 – 6 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco
For many technology vendors, a big conference is typically the place where major news is announced.
In the case of the upcoming OracleWorld event that's also likely to be the case. It's also the case the Oracle just has so much news that they want to get out, that they're announcing some of it ahead of OracleWorld.
Oracle just put out a media advisory for a webcast event that is set to occur September 21st. During the event, the advisory notes that Oracle will be talking about a new database product.
"Oracle executives Mark Hurd, Andrew Mendelsohn, and Judson Althoff will share plans for a new product that will offer customers and partners a faster path to get the most of the world’s #1 database," the advisory states.
Hmm.. I wonder..is it Hadoop related? I sure think so.
Oracle CEO Larry Ellison has kinda/sorta hinted at some kind of Big Data news for months. It's an area that is definitely real and growing. It's also an area that Oracle really needs to be in.
Hadoop is also an Apache project, which is an open source organization that Oracle has had a mixed relationship with. On one hand, Apache has pulled out of the Executive Committee of the Java Community Process. On the other, Oracle has donated the OpenOffice.org code to Apache.
EMC jumped into the Hadoop space earlier this year, so why not Oracle? Oracle has the hardware with Exadata/Exalogic to build one heck of a monster Hadoop machine.
I could also be wrong and this might not be the Hadoop product (maybe that news will actually come at OpenWorld). This announcement could just be some kind of data accelerator product, maybe an enhanced Coherence in-memory database thing.
I guess we'll all just have to wait until next week to find out for sure. Whatever doesn't get announced next week though, is likely to be a good candidate for news during OpenWorld.
Oracle OpenWorld 2011 runs from October 2 – 6 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco
Just a few short years ago, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison wasn't all that keen on the cloud.
At multiple events, including an OpenWorld event, Ellison belittled the term 'cloud'
Back in 2009 Ellison said:
Ellison and Oracle have changed their tune now. At OpenWorld 2010, Oracle launched a new Exalogic Elastic Cloud , which is a cloud in a box solution.
For OpenWorld 2011, I counted no less than 181 sessions that use the term 'cloud' somewhere in their description. So from water vapor to key conference theme in less than two years.
Cloud is going to be a big topic at OpenWorld this year, just like it is everywhere else.
Yes, Ellison does have a point, people were kinda/sorta doing cloud before in some respects. For those cloud services where the term 'cloud' is just a synonym for managed hosting or Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) cloud isn't new.
However when it comes to workload mobility across datacenters and on demand scalability, that is something the 'cloud' does that old school managed hosting never did successfully.
The emerging concepts of Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) are also differentiated from the legacy model of IT thanks to virtualization.
While Ellison might still harbor some reservations about the use of the word 'cloud' I doubt very much that he doesn't believe that it is a real trend in 2011. It's a trend that I suspect he and his team will be talking a lot a whole lot next month at OpenWorld.
Oracle OpenWorld 2011 runs from October 2 – 6 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.
From the 'Define:open' files:
Oracle's OpenWorld event is coming next month, which makes me wonder about using the words 'open' and Oracle in the same sentence. Is Oracle 'open'? and what is 'open'?
When I hear the word 'open' in a technology context, I tend to cringe. It's a word that is thrown around by all kinds of vendors with varying definitions.
There is of course open source, which is defined by the open source definition with licenses that are approved as open source via the Open Source Initiative (OSI). So starting with Open Source as a good way to define 'open' , let's take a look at how open Oracle is.
For starters, Oracle acquired Sun last year and Sun is a company with a mixed history around open source. In its' final years, Sun fully embraced open source with a move towards open source for many (if not most) of its products, including Java and Solaris.
Oracle's history with Sun's open source projects is one that did not start out well. The openSolaris project was killed off, Apache has left the executive committee of the Java Community Process and multiple projects have been forked including OpenOffice (with LibreOffice), Hudson (with Jenkins) and MySQL (with MariaDB). Oracle has also launched legal action against Google over Java in Android.
On the other side of the coin there are the positive things.
Oracle is not faultless when it comes to its dealing with the open source community, but then again who is?
That said, Oracle is not an open source company. They will likely never be as open as a Red Hat, which bases its entire business on open source. Oracle is a company that uses and contributes to open source as part of their overall offerings. When Oracle says 'Open' –they're not always talking about source either.
While Linux is key platform for Oracle, so too is Solaris 11 which is open for development but not necessarily in terms of source. Oracle's namesake database will likely never be open source and neither will most of Oracle's CRM and ERP related software either.
Oracle's upcoming OpenWorld event is not an open source conference and no one should mistake it for one. It's about being open with technology as an enabler and as a tool for business productivity and growth. No doubt, there will be some 'open' discussion on open source topics too, and I for one will be looking for them.
Oracle OpenWorld 2011 runs from October 2 – 6 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.
With VMworld and Dreamforce now behind us, the eyes of the tech world are focused on the next big event, Oracle's OpenWorld.
It's an event that I'll be busy blogging about here on Datamation as we gear up for OpenWorld in October.
In any given year, OpenWorld is the forum where Oracle CEO Larry Ellison likes to make bold moves (just think of Exalogic and Oracle Linux in years past) and I don't think 2011 will be any exception. As an early prediction, I think this might be the event where Solaris 11 is finally officially launched.
Oracle has had Solaris 11 available as a preview of sorts with the Solaris 11 Express edition. Oracle released Solaris 11 Express back in November of 2010 so by the time OpenWorld 2011 comes around in October, that's nearly a full year of testing in the field.
The whole point of Solaris 11 is to be the high-end mission critical operating system for Oracle's platforms and with a year of hardening and stability work, I think OpenWorld is as good a place as any for it to officially be released.
Solaris 11 will be the first big Unix operating system release ever from Oracle and there is a lot riding on it. Solaris is one of the final pieces of the Sun business that Oracle needs to turn around. It its final days, Sun continued to push Solaris against Linux and still was pushing x86 and SPARC versions. Oracle is not taking the same route, since Oracle, unlike Sun, is actually a Linux vendor.
Oracle has a large Linux business and has publicly said at multiple points in the past that it runs much of its business on Linux. Oracle is not giving up its Linux business in favor of Solaris.
That said, Oracle's database for many years has been widely deployed with great success on Solaris. There is a large base of customers that run mission critical Oracle applications on Solaris and it's a market that is worth Oracle's investment.
That's where the balancing act for Ellison will come when (if as I expect) he formally announces Solaris 11 at OpenWorld. It's an act he knows well, having balanced co-petition with companies like IBM and HP for years. He's also balanced it with having both Siebel and Peoplesoft and more recently Oracle Database and MySQL. It's the act of balancing two sides of a business that are competitive with each other.
Linux can and has supplanted Solaris in many high-end mission critical deployments over the years. Ellison and Oracle's task now moving forward will be to reclaim some lost ground for Solaris while not cannibalizing their profitable Linux efforts in the process.
Oracle OpenWorld 2011 runs from October 2 – 6 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.
by Ernie von Simson
My two prior blogs discussed the difficulty and importance of continuous reinvention of any business but especially in the IT sector, where change is constant and so ferocious in its outcome.
What leadership traits are needed to achieve these ends at the three top management levels: chief executives, top management, and the board of directors?
In CEO leadership, the most critical prerequisite is steadfastness; the ability to hold to the chosen direction even when pundits, customers, and especially the CEO’s direct reports say he’s wrong.
IBM’s Tom Watson Jr. introduced tape storage over the objections of top sales executives, who feared it would displace the hugely profitable punched card business. And he next bet the company on System/360, the largest gamble on a new computer generation ever, even though IBM’s own rental base of older equipment would likely be displaced.
The result?
Watson sank or sidelined most of the traditional competition. An Wang drove his company’s transitional leap from calculators to computers over the disagreement of his top sales executive.
Scott McNealy overrode the clamor of his sales executives to start selling the Microsoft/Intel product line. Instead Sun continued to develop the Sparc hardware and Solaris software base that would become “the dot in dotcom.” And Lou Gerstner ignored innumerable press articles advising him to break up the company and jettison the mainframe – which, by the way, provides 25 percent of the company’s profits to this day.
Top managers chosen by the CEO are the platform that can validate or compromise steadfastness. Collegiality can become a two-edged sword regardless of how much it’s emphasized by headhunters and personality tests.
Articulately espousing a more confrontational executive committee, serial risk-taker Tom Watson Jr. wrote: “I managed IBM with 15 or 20 senior executives. Some of these people were my friends but I never hesitated to promote people I didn’t like ... I was always looking for sharp, scratchy, harsh, almost unpleasant guys who could see and tell me about things as they really were.”
"Sharp" and "harsh" describe the cleverly analytic yet testosteronic memos supporting both Watson and his capable successor, Frank Cary (memos unearthed in the Telex trial).
Corporate boards must manage CEO succession. It's their duty to fire a failing chief executive and to recruit a successor who can lead the company through a successful transition. That’s often proved problematic, especially when the leader is also a company founder: witness the CEOs of Digital Equipment and Wang, who lingered too long during the tumultuous 1990s.
But equally damaging, some boards have initiated a steady drizzle of CEO successions, each one leading to the creation of a new strategy and the destruction of the previous leader’s organization and business assets. The zigging and zagging has been remarkably damaging to the company’s ultimate success.
Want to understand the prospects of a company on which you’re dependent? Consider the CEO’s steadfastness, the directness of his direct reports and the Board’s blend of legitimacy and perspective.
Ernie von Simson is the senior partner in the CIO Strategy Exchange and the author of The Limits of Strategy an inside analysis of the success and failure of IT companies over the past 30 years.
by Anthony Orr
When hand-held calculators became widely used in schools, many people were concerned that students would no longer have to learn how to “do the math” themselves. They were afraid that technology would simply do their thinking for the students.
However, when it comes to employing the thinking skills needed to figure out how to set up a problem and apply the math principles needed to work it out, there is no substitute for know-how. It is the student’s math reasoning ability that brings order to the information presented in a complex problem. Calculators help students make the most of their time so they can go deeper in their exploration and use of math principles.
So what does this have to do with ITIL and the cloud, you ask?
Well, today, some people in IT claim that “the cloud” has replaced the need for the Information Technology Information Library (ITIL) and IT service management. In their thinking, “ITIL is dead.” Others have tried ITIL but have found it lacking. I have visited multiple customers who have said, “Please don’t talk about ITIL around here. ITIL just does not work for us.”
Yet many organizations still consider ITIL to be important. They understand that the basic principles found in ITIL are the firm foundation, the indispensible “know-how,” upon which exceptional IT organizations are built. While ITIL may not lead to IT service management nirvana, it provides a framework and a path for creating order from chaos.
In our most recent ITSM pulse survey, only 20 percent of companies had not planned to implement any version of ITIL. Translation: 80 percent do plan to implement some or all of what ITIL has to offer. That's a lot of companies.
It's apparent that some IT organizations are disillusioned with ITIL while others are beginning to see the light -- recognizing how ITIL is changing the organization for the better. The difference in these two outcomes is the ability to execute based on capabilities and resources -- both internally and externally.
The organizations that think ITIL is dead or has no value need to take a look around them and assess whether incident management, problem management, change management, and so on, are important in their enterprise. They also need to determine whether the organization’s focus is on delivery or support of services or products in ways that are efficient, effective, and economical and that meet overall business goals.
Though technology continues to evolve rapidly, there is still no substitute for “know-how” among your IT staff. Whether ITIL is fully implemented, knowledge of the core principles of ITIL and IT service management can take your organization to the next level.
Anthony Orr is director of Service Management in the Office of the CTO at BMC Software. He has more than 30 years of experience in managerial, consulting, marketing, and technical positions for IT service management strategies and implementations. Anthony is currently working on the ITIL v3 publication update project as an author. He is also a senior examiner for APMG with responsibilities for the ITIL v3 exams and scheme. Anthony is a frequent speaker on best practices at industry events and BMC customer forums.
