Cloud in a Box

Oracle Open World 2010 at San Francisco, over September 19-23 was as spectatular as it was touted to be, this time seeing a record number of 40,000 plus attendees.

Some interesting facts, pointed out by Judy Sim, Oracles chief marketing officer at the opening of the show, added to the excitement: the event generates over $100 mn for the Bay Area economy; sells out every downtown hotel, plus hotels on the Peninsula; attendees from 113 countries, representing 59% of the world; over 2,500 speakers; more than 2,400 different sessions for attendees; over 450 partner exhibits in 300,000 square feet of space; over 1,000 network switches; 290 VoIP phones.

Of course there was the Show Your Badge Program which had over 100 establishments offering special discounts/offers to OpenWorld attendees simply by showing their badge.

Reflecting Oracles acquisition of Sun, this year, along with the Oracle Open World and Oracle Develop, there was also Java One, targeted at the Java developer community.

Keynotes

Day 1 HPs executive VP, Ann Livermore, was the first keynote speaker. Her appearance a bit surprising because of teh recent ill-will between the two companies post ex-CEO Mark Hurds unglamorous ouster on charges of sexual abuse and fudging of company funds; and his immediate appointment by Oracle as the companys co-president.

But she was there, and talked about the large number of customers Oracle and HP share. Safra Catz, Oracles co-president, came in next and announced the winners of the CIO of the Year awards, and thanked the loyal partners and customers of Oracle.

Next was a video-clip of the winning yachtUSA 17, and the preparing for and winning of the 33rd America Cup won by BMW Oracle Racing, owned by Larry Ellison. Ellison then took the stage, introduced the winning team (all seated there) and talked about his joy on winning the Cup this year. Another attraction this year were the four Iron Man 2 suits from the movie on display, the movie which saw Larry Ellison in a cameo role. Some say Ellison might even have influenced the portrayal of Stark, the movies lead...of course Oracles technology and brand got a lot of visibility in the film, and the company was a sponser.

Ellison started with defining Cloud Computing, or at least Oracles definition What is Cloud Computing? He talked about the two most talked about definitions of cloudAmazons EC2 and salesforce.com. He pointed out that they are actually very different: where Amazons is a paltform upon which you build applications (and you only pay for what you use), salesforce is an application on the Net and it is not virtualized. Hundreds and thousands of customers data is co-mingled in the same database, he said, which can lead to weak security. Oracles definition is more in line with Amazon, though the focus is more on private rather than a public cloud.

Then came the announcement of the eveningOracles Exalogic Elastic Cloud platforma combination of hardware and software. Or, cloud in a box. Ellison stressed on the single patch for the Exalogic system and the enterprise manager automates patch and upgrades procedure which means that its much simpler to maintain and when one customeer finds a problem and it is fixedall customers benefit from that.

Shortly after this was the presentation by Salesforces CEO and chairman, Mark Benioff, at a different venuewhere the audience enjoyed Benioff getting back at Ellison, his ex-boss: Cloud in a box?, I thought the whole idea was openness!

This may have added to the excitemnt of Ellisons final kenotewhich saw people lining up from 4 hours before to ensure a seat....there was Ellison, expectedly provoked, commenting on the 1,500 Dell servers that salesforce.com runs on...which are nothing but boxes.

Day 2 saw Mark Hurd, who came in to introduce the first keynote of the day, Noriyuki Toyoki, SVP at Fujitsu Corp. Hurd came in again and talked about Oracles big Q1, and the $4 bn that the company plans to invest in R&D in FY11 (compared to the $1.5 bn five years back). He then called in Oracles executive VP of systems, John Fowler and chief corporate architect, Edward Screven. Fowler talked about the future of the data center, and the need for brutal efficiency. And said, Oracle and Sun have a tremendous history of inventing individual technologies that change the architecture of what you deployed, and that the two are collaborating to build systems for the future data center. Fowler also announced Solaris 11, faster and easier to deploy and maintain, he added.

Oracle is delivering Solaris 11 now as part of its storage product and will include it in its ExaLogic and ExaData products later this year. Next year, it will deliver Solaris 11 for the x86 and Sparc platforms.

Screven talked about the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel. He emphasised that Oracle will continue to offer Red Hat compatibility because cutomers want it but will also push its unbreakable enterprise kernel which is 75% faster.

Hardware and Software Enginered to work together is Oracles new tagline. Insisting that the basis of Oracle is an open platform and that the hardware, software integration does not lock-in the customerthe customer can choose the level of integration he or she wants.

Day 3 saw a very interesting presentation by Thomas Kurien, executive vice president of development at Oracle. He talked about how Oracles cloud solutions covered all layers including infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and software as a service (Saas), and how Oracle products enable cloud computing. He elaborated on the reasons why a company of any size can benefit from cloud. How large companies are looking at their own private cloud.

Day 4 had a keynote presentation by Dell CEO, Michael Dell. The network is the computer; with virtualization now the computer is the network, he said adding that innovative Oracle products are increasing storage, and Dell takes care of the challenges that go with it.

The evening saw a presentation by Infosys CEO, Kris Gopalakrishnan, introduced by Mark Hurd as Oracles Diamond-level partner. Gopalakrishnan discussed his companys ability to build tomorrows enterprise and deliver cloud-based services and platforms to clients. He also announced the intelligent power strip which can sense motion, temperature, and humidity and save 35,000 MW of power each year in the US. He also announced the new Infosys-Oracle Innovation Center at Oracles headquarters in Redwood Shores, California.

The evening ended with Larry Ellisons final keynote; and the much awaited (and 5 years delayed) launch of fusion apps. Its the largest engineering project in Oracles history, he said. Its next-generation ERP, next-generation CRM...weve got over 100 separate products available in Q4, and general availability in Q1 of next year...the core of this system is intelligence, he added.

Atreyee Ganguly

The author was hosted by Oracle at San Francisco, CA