September, 2008

Brought to you by Microsoft: More bad ads

How is it possible that a company as successful as Microsoft can continue to put out such really, really bad ads?

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Not buying it

Several times over the past few weeks,  Oracle execs have stressed that the company is not unduly exposed to the various earthquakes afflicting financial institutions worldwide.

That’s hard to swallow.

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Oracle takes on storage partners

Forrester Research’s Andrew Reichman has a good take on Larry Ellison’s latest competitive foray. During his Oracle OpenWorld Keynote, Ellison did, in fact, position the HP Oracle Database Machine (or Exadata) as an alternative to Teradata and Netezza. And that is true,  as far as it goes. And yet, as Reichman points out, Oracle’s other hardware and storage partners–some of whom were big OracleWorld sponsors, must be irked. Because this box is also taking aim at them.

Coopetition is a grand ol’ tradition in tech. Several years ago, while talking up his company’s desire to suck up more revenue from its own storage management, analytics and other offerings, Ellison warned applications, storage management and BI rivals that mined the Oracle’s installed base, to get out of his backyard.  Two of the companies he was shaking his fist at were Siebel Systems and BEA. And guess where they are now.

And so, with HP, Oracle is taking on Sun (which has its own data warehouse appliance work going on with Green Plum), NetApp and others even as those companies helped pay the Oracle OpenWorld bills.

Oracle throws hardware at disk bandwidth problem

Oracle, the biggest enterprise software company in the universe, is putting hardware to work to eliminate disk bandwidth problems.

The database giant has pressed Hewlett-Packard, apparently now its number one hardware ally, into service building the high-end box. Yes: X = The HP Oracle Database Machine.

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Ten lessons from Oracle OpenWorld

1: Trade shows aren’t dead. (Sorry Rivka.) The crowds at Moscone Center —ALL of Moscone Center — are bigger than remembered. Of course it’s been two years since I covered the event and in that time, Oracle’s bought about a gagillion companies, as IDC’s Carl Olofson pointed out. Oracle’s sales force alone has grown from 8,000 to 17,000 in five years, mostly due to acquisitions. So maybe Oracle stacked the deck.

2: This SaaS thing has legs! Who knew? Oracle CRM On Demand sales grew 80% last year and in the next four quarters the company expects its sales to surpass those of on-premise CRM, according to David Bonnette, group vice president.

3: There’s no more boat at the bottom of the escalators.

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Microsoft makes SBS 2008 bits available to (some) subscribers

The RTM version of Microsoft Small Business Server 2008 is posted to Microsoft’s TechNet and MSDN for subscribers. Some subscribers that is. A few subsets of that population still cannot access the software — all they get is greyed-out links. That’s a buzz kill. Word has it that Microsoft is working on the issue.

Also, Action Pack subscribers, who got access to the premium edition of SBS 2003, will now only get the Standard Edition. The differentiator between standard and premium editions is the presence of SQL Server 2008 in the latter. And since Action Pack people already can get the database, why the shutout?

Registered partners can subscribe to Action Pack for $300 a year to get lots of not-for-resale software and other perks.

IT decision makers split on impact of impending election

I don’t usually get pulled into politics in my blogs, but I couldn’t resist a recent survey released by CDW with some data pertaining to how the upcoming election may or may not affect IT spending. The research is part of the solution provider’s bimonthly CDW IT Monitor.

The survey conducted in July among roughly 1,060 IT decision makers revealed that 28 percent of them trust Barack Obama more when it comes to handling issues of concern for IT professionals. Continued »

Oracle X

nbsp;SearchOracle.com’s Barney Beal pointed out the big ‘X Is Coming’ signs that have sprouted up in and around Moscone Center at Oracle OpenWorld today.

In this case, X must equal the game-changing, revolutionary, paradigm-shifting, barn-burning, kill-SQL-Server-or-MySQL-in-their-crib database innovation that Larry Ellison et al have been hinting about for more than six months.

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So, what’s the killer Oracle feature?

Speculation at Oracle OpenWorld continued to swirl around what Larry Ellison will say Wednesday. In the past two earnings calls, the Oracle CEO has hinted (not very subtly) about a new killer capability in the database that will preserve and build on its marketshare lead.  Some partners say their Oracle reps have continued to feed the rumor mill, promising technology that will bring “extreme performance” to the fore.

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Up, up and away: Oracle heads for the clouds

It looks like Oracle is embracing “the cloud.”

At Oracle OpenWorld on Monday, the two Chucks — Oracle president Charles Phillips and executive vice president Chuck Rozwat–said Oracle is making its full Fusion middleware toolset, and its database, available to run on Amazon.com’s  cloud infrastructure.

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